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| Photo used with permission from dimplesanddelights.blogspot.com |
Karen Pullen owns a bed & breakfast in Pittsboro, a
small historic North Carolina town. She’s won a Derringer for short story
writing, and earned an MFA in Popular Fiction from Stonecoast, the University
of Southern Maine. Cold Feet is her
debut mystery novel. Learn more
about Karen at her website. -- AP
I never deliberately meant for my mystery novel Cold Feet to have so many food
references. But fourteen times in
292 pages, someone is eating. That’s once every eleven pages. And not sandwiches or salads or
anything generic. At a wedding reception people eat shrimp, crab claws, and
oysters; spring rolls and beef medallions. My main character Stella Lavender fixes lentil soup,
scrambled eggs and grits for her grandmother. Stella’s partner in her undercover drug operations is a
gourmand, fond of grilled mahi mahi, mocha lattes, and cooking six course
meals. As Stella investigates a
murder, she stops by a chocolate shop where she must taste Chocolate High cake, and when, on page 136, she visits
Magnolia Manor, one of two B&Bs in Cold
Feet, she’s offered a piece of blackberry jam cake.
Melting
in my mouth, the cake was moist and tender with hints of cinnamon and
chocolate. I had to hold myself back from inhaling it in three quick bites. “What
is that flavor?”
“The
secret ingredient is blackberry jam,” [Camilla] said.
Camilla’s Blackberry Jam Cake is a combination of spice and
pound cake, with nuts and raisins. It’s not real sweet, so you could even serve
it for breakfast.
Ingredients
For the cake:
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter –
important that the butter be almost room
temperature. Your thumb will make a slight indent.
2 cups sugar
5 large eggs, beaten
3 cups plus 1 TBS all-purpose
flour
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
2 TBS cocoa
¼ tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup chopped raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup blackberry preserves (not
jelly)
For the glaze:
½ cup of blackberry preserves
½ tsp fresh lemon juice
1 ½ cups of powdered sugar.
Grease or spray a 12-cup bundt pan. Pre-heat the oven to
325.
In a large bowl, with an electric mixer cream together the butter and sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the eggs and beat well.
In another bowl, combine 3 cups flour, spices, cocoa, salt, and baking soda. Alternately add batches of the flour mixture and the
buttermilk to the egg-sugar-butter mixture, beating well with each addition.
In a small bowl toss the raisins and walnuts
together with the TBS of flour.
Stir into the batter. Add the jam
and mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake in the middle
of the oven for about 50 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 20 minutes, then invert onto a rack
and let it cool completely before glazing.
Heat the blackberry
preserves in a small sauce pan (or the microwave) until it thins a bit,
then whisk in the powdered sugar and
lemon juice till thick and smooth.
Pour over cake.
I often take Blackberry Jam Cake to my book readings and
serve a piece to everyone. Including myself, naturally.
You can probably connect the dots to guess some of what Cold Feet is about: an undercover drug
agent goes to a wedding on her day off.
But instead of a ceremony, there’s a murder, and Stella is pulled into
the investigation. Combine wedding
and family drama with a drug dealer, a fake Scotsman, religious scammers, a
stalkerish ex-girlfriend, a litigious couple, and Stella’s cheating fiancé –
and you have the ingredients for Cold Feet.
