Every spring, this editor gets the itch to throw a party to banish the winter blues. And for the first time in nearly a decade, I’m acting on that urge and hosting some good friends tonight in my humble Brooklyn firetrap.

On the modest dinner menu, you will find both meat and vegetarian chili, cornbread, and for dessert (my favorite part of every meal), cupcakes—chocolate w/chocolate buttercream icing, vanilla w/vanilla buttercream icing, and by special request, red velvet w/cream cheese icing. For the first two varieties, I got recipes from my baking genius of a mother, who, alas, doesn’t know diddly about red velvet (she’s a damn Yankee, after all).

For that Southern delicacy, I wanted the best of the best, and the web’s many ardent cupcake bloggers all agree that Sylvia Woods of Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem blows the door off the oven with her concoction. One “Sweet Monkey Cakes” on the Cooks’ Illustrated message board swears by it, but with two minor changes (more cocoa and buttermilk!).

Last night, I tried Sweet Monkey Cake’s take, which is based on Woods’s recipe from Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook (Morrow, 1999), and I’m happy to say I got the most delectable red gems, moist with just the right amount of smoky cocoa taste. Mine aren’t probably going to look as professional as the one pictured below when they’re frosted later today, but they’re going to go down like butter—two sticks, to be exact.

 

Although I am a slave to my gray tuxedo cat (see Mr. Felix below), I usually despise cat mysteries or any other kind of fiction involving felines, canines, or any other creature, great or small (with the exception of the classic and very rabbity Watership Down).

 

But as a former senior scribe of my high school’s Latin Club (also known as the Junior Classical League), I couldn’t resist when British mystery book blog, Euro Crime, posted a story (”All Hail Spartapuss!) about a new children’s series set in an ancient Rome ruled by cats.

  

The publisher Mogzilla say the books are ”based partly on historical events as recorded by the great classical writers Tacitus and Suetonius”. The first book, I am Spartapuss, tells the story of a slave from the Land of the Kitons who becomes a Roman gladiator (or is that cat-iator?). This is followed by Catigula and Die Clawdius. If only I had these in Latin class!

In other feline news, the New York Times reports today that Grand Central Publishing  (the former Warner Books) is paying $1.25 million for the rights to publish the life story of Dewey, a rescued cat who lived for 19 years in the public library in Spencer, Iowa. Wow! That would buy a lot of cat food and kitty litter.

Dewey’s biographer is librarian Vicki Myron who will co-write Dewey, a Small Town, a Library and the World’s Most Beloved Cat with Bret Witter, a former editorial director at Health Communications, the publisher of the “Chicken Soup for the Soulâ€? books.

And in a related NYT story, “Home Cooking for  Pets is Suddenly Not So Odd“, pet owners are starting to prepare home cooked meals for Fido and Fluffy in light of the recent Menu Foods tainted food crisis. As a result, sales of pet cookbooks like Real Food For Dogs and Home-Prepared Dog and Cat Diet are rising. If you have these and other pet culinary titles in your collection, you might do a special display for your  pet-loving patrons. 

 

Continuing on a Southern theme, today is Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), the final day to let the good times roll before the Lenten season brings all celebrations to a halt for 40 days. (As a child in a small Alabama town, my mother was often denied a birthday party because her April 7 birthday usually fell during Lent.) While everyone thinks New Orleans is the birthplace of Mardi Gras, the first celebrations actually took place in the port city of Mobile, Alabama in 1703. N.O. was a johnny-come-lately to the party in 1853.  Mardi Gras means food, lots of delicious food, and if you want to sample some of Mobile’s specialties, check out Bay Tables: A Collection of Recipes from the Junior League of Mobile. Of course, if crayfish dip doesn’t appeal to you, try some of the unusual dishes concocted at the Girl Scouts Tombigbee Council’s Celebrity Chef Cookie Challenge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The key ingredient was a box of Girl Scout cookies. Winning recipes included Girls Night Out Lemon Chicken Casserole with Girl Scouts Lemonade Cookies and Peanut Butter and Jelly Pie. Bon appetit!