Lucy Burdette (aka Roberta Isleib) is the
author of twelve mysteries, including the latest in the Key West series
featuring food critic Hayley Snow. Her books and stories have been short-listed
for Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Learn more about Lucy/Roberta at her
website.
Eating Key
West
As of today, with the release of Murder with Ganache, I'm four books
into writing my Key West food critic mysteries. This series has really tweaked
my interest in food and cooking because I have to think the way that my
character, Hayley Snow, thinks. I have to cook what she might cook and eat
where she might eat. Since Hayley came on the scene, my family and I have
enjoyed her shrimp and grits, key lime cupcakes, strawberry rhubarb coffee
cake, and many more ravishing dishes. There's only one problem. These days, if
I don't photograph dinner before putting it on the table, my husband worries:
Maybe it's not going to meet Hayley's standards.
Along with the home cooking, we've tried
about every restaurant in Key West. (I know, hard life.) But Hayley not only
visits restaurants and writes reviews, she uses food as a way to connect with
people, and to calm herself down, and to seduce the folks she’s trying to get
information from that may solve the mysteries. I think more than I ever did
about what food and cooking might mean to people.
I like what Hayley wrote for the style
magazine, Key Zest, at the end of Death
in Four Courses: “I’d summed up by saying how important it was to remember
that while food did mean life and death in its most elemental form, most often
we in the food writing industry were talking about food as the pleasure of
connections. When we wrote about simmering a stew or a sauce for hours or days,
we were really talking about how much we owed to the folks who came before us
and the importance of cherishing their memory. And how much we yearned to give
to the people in our present who’d be gathered around our table. We were
writing about food as family history, and love, and hope, and sometimes a
little splash of guilt.”
Hayley doesn't believe that food has to be
fancy to be good. She would say that a grandmother’s recipe for chocolate cake
scratched out on a notecard can hold its own with a fancy chef’s menu. We'd
love to share my grandmother's recipe for a simple chocolate cake. But first,
I'll leave you with a bit of conversation from Hayley and her mother in Murder with Ganache:
"Why is it that cooking always makes
things feel a little less hopeless?” my mother mused as the vegetables
softened.
“At least we’re doing something,” I said, as
she whipped the eggs with a splash of water and stirred them into the pan.
“We feel like we’re taking care of people
when there’s really nothing to be done.” I grinned. “That’s what you taught me
anyway.”
Lucy
Burdette's One Bowl Chocolate Cake
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup Hershey's cocoa
1 egg
1/2 cup sour milk (or sweet, with one
TBSP vinegar added)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 and 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup boiling water
Beat softened butter and sugar until well
combined. Then add the other ingredients one at a time, mixing after each.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a bundt pan, add the batter, and bake
for about 30 minutes until cake springs back when touched. Cool for ten minutes
and then invert onto a cake plate. Once it's completely cool, sprinkle with
powdered sugar.
Murder with
Ganache
Hayley Snow, the food
critic for Key Zest magazine, has her plate heaped high
with restaurant reviews, doughnut and sticky bun tastings, and an article on
the Hemingway cats. But this week she’s also in charge of her best friend’s
wedding. And then someone adds a side of murder…
For better or worse,
Hayley has agreed to bake over 200 cupcakes for her friend Connie’s wedding
while still meeting her writing deadlines. The last thing she needs is family
drama. But her parents come barreling down on the island like a category 3
hurricane and on their first night in town her stepbrother, Roby, disappears
into the spring break party scene in Key West.
When
Hayley hears that two teenagers have stolen a jet ski, she sets aside her oven
mitts and goes in search of Rory. She finds him, barely conscious, but his
female companion isn’t so lucky. Now Hayley has to let the cupcakes cool and
assemble the sprinkles of clues to clear her stepbrother’s name—before someone
else gets iced.
Buy Links
6 comments:
The book sounds great and that cake looks way too heavenly! Thanks for info!
Hmm chocolate cake just in time for Valentine's Day and a little bit of a mystery (plus only one dish to clean) you're talking my language. What made you decide to combine cooking reviews and murder mysteries?
chocolate cake and Murder with Ganache would be a perfect Valentines' Day! Linda, I have always loved food and mysteries so when the chance to write a series about a food critic came along, I jumped on it. The series is set in Key West, which is such an interesting, funky island, with lots of good food too!
Thanks for reading and hop you enjoy the cake!
This cake looks delicious! And I love your book cover -- seeing it while in the middle of winter makes me pine for a meal set in the garden. :)
I already read the book and enjoyed it a lot.
thanks Christine--I feel so lucky with the artists who do my covers!
Thanks Lynn, glad you enjoyed the read:)
Post a Comment