I Felt Free

Alice Medrich's Bittersweet Teff Brownies

The three amigos on their way to the 6th grade dance.

Our boy Hugo turned 12 years old yesterday. The poor kid’s been home sick all week, but he’s not a huge birthday guy anyway. He had a sleepover with his best buds last weekend to celebrate and was happy to just have a quiet family celebration with us yesterday. Hugo used to pick out his birthday cakes with relish from my cookbooks, but over the past years has grown less interested in the elaborate, multi-layered, frosted stuff. This year, he announced that all he wanted for a birthday cake was a pan of brownies with raspberries baked in them. His favorite gifts were a Star War Lego set, the fourth volume of this series (which he has inhaled over the past few weeks), and this t-shirt from his little brother that we scored at our school’s flea market a few weekends ago.

Hugo’s finishing elementary school in a few short weeks. Our school, which goes from kindergarten to 12th grade, has a glass walkway suspended over part of the school grounds that connects the elementary and high schools; on the last day of 6th grade, the children walk across the walkway, leaving their elementary school rooms and teachers behind, while their parents stand below on the school grounds and wave up at them. Just thinking about it fills me with emotion. Not just about what it means that our boy is growing up, that elementary school is already over (how?!), but also—as I think about the other parents who we’ll be standing with, many of them friends since before our kids started school together—about the fact that we too are older, our hair getting grayer, our bodies thickening. Our children are growing up together; we’re growing older together. In just a few years, we’ll be watching them graduate. Weren’t they just born? Weren’t we just the young kids about to have a baby of our own?

And yet it’s not all bittersweet. I am so proud of this darling child. His sense of humor, his taste in books, what he likes to talk about, the music he sings along to. I always thought I’d dread my children growing up, but it’s so beautiful to see them become themselves and as they grow and change, they become more interesting, more charming, funnier and wiser. I have always felt lucky to be a mother, even in the midst of the insanity and frustration and chaos of the early years, but the older they get, the more I can truly internalize what a privilege it is to have a front-row seat to their lives, to be so close to them as their young days unspool. It turns out that Hugo is a gifted drummer. That he reads with the same hunger that I do. That he is still the quiet observer he always was. He likes to eavesdrop. He likes Korean fried chicken. He likes solitude.

A few months ago, we unscrewed the child seat that had been attached to the back of my bicycle since Hugo was a baby and sold it. Bruno no longer needed it and there aren’t any more children coming to this family. It was, like giving away our stroller, a funny moment in which I thought I was supposed to feel sentimental and conflicted, but instead, I just felt free. For years, when I had biked around Berlin on my own, I knew that the bike seat communicated my role to the outside world without me having to say a word. It made me feel sort of Mary-Poppins-ish, almost like I was wearing a costume, the bike seat a prop. I had mixed feelings about the information it delivered about me. On one hand, I was proud of the status; on the other, I knew it said nothing about my actual experience of motherhood. Today, as I biked home from chaperoning a class trip with Bruno’s first grade class, the bike seat era firmly behind me, I realized it was just me on that bike, nothing and no one else. The thought made me smile. I felt free.

In honor of Hugo’s fondness for brownies, today I’m sharing the brownie recipe that I’ve loved most this year, which is a gluten-free adaptation of the classic brownie recipe I’ve made for over a decade (Alice Medrich is the author of both recipes). These brownies are made with teff flour, a gluten-free flour made from an African grass which is a staple food in Ethiopia and Eritrea; if you’ve had injera, you’ve eaten teff. Teff is supposed to taste particularly delicious with chocolate, but the truth is that the texture is what I love most about these brownies (the cocoa flavor is just as intense as in the original recipe). The teff gives the brownies the most wondrous, velvety crumb, sort of lofty and airy, but still rich and almost fudgy?! I don’t quite understand it, but it’s wonderful.

The recipe is included in Medrich’s wonderful book, Gluten-Free Flavor Flours, which explores the world of gluten-free specialty flours in Medrich’s inimitably rigorous way. From sorghum to corn to teff to buckwheat (as well as oat, rice, coconut and nut), she uses the flours to develop all kinds of delectable treats. On my list to try are the Crunchy Corn Fritters made with glutinous rice flour, corn kernels, and corn flour, a Buckwheat Sponge Cake served with poached apples, and the Coconut Marjolaine, a multi-layered show-stopper. And if you’re a ye olde bloggue reader, you may recognize this banger of a pumpkin bread, which also originated in this book.

Bittersweet Teff Brownies
Adapted from Alice Medrich’s Gluten-Free Flavor Flours
Makes 16 2-inch brownies

185 grams/13 tablespoons unsalted butter
65 grams/3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
235 grams/1 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar
100 grams/3/4 cup teff flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 large eggs, cold
100 grams/1 cup walnut or pecan pieces, optional

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F and line an 8-inch square baking pan with parchment paper. Set aside.

2. Place the butter and cocoa in a small skillet over medium high heat and let the butter melt, whisking to incorporate the cocoa. Pour the mixture into a medium bowl.

3. Whisk in the sugar, teff flour, salt and vanilla until smooth. Then add the eggs and whisk by hand or with an electric mixer for about 2 minutes. If using, fold in the nuts.

4. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 28 to 30 minutes, until the top is dry and just barely starting the crack at the edges. Remove from the oven and let cool on a rack for 10 minutes, then remove the brownies from the pan with the parchment paper and let cool completely.

5. Cut into squares and serve. The brownies will keep for up to 3 days.