Welcome back to Crush Cakes. When you sit around breathlessly swooning over your crushes nonstop like me, well…we are worldly people here, you know what happens next. I make cakes expressing my feelings for them, and then sit back and wait for my destiny to be fulfilled. It all makes perfect sense.
Let us gently drift back to the year 2004. I was 18, I got my first pair of Chuck Taylors (bright red, low tops), I was obsessed with Pink Floyd, and a TV show called The OC was the hottest ticket on a Friday night in the dorm of the Anglican girls’ boarding school where I lived. Most people were in love with buff bad boy Ryan; there was a significantly vocal minority in love with the witty nerd Seth; and, secretly, one person was in love with Sandy Cohen. That person was me.
Mine was a hidden, verboten love, as it was hard to explain to my fellow teens why this floppy-haired, abundantly eyebrowed dad-man was my crush of choice over the more nubile youngsters on the show.
Years passed and I didn’t give it too much thought until a month or so ago, when I decided to rewatch The OC in its entirety. Oh my god. Not since 2004 had I known such plummeting highs and soaring lows of emotion, such intense bonds with characters, or such AGGRESSIVE REKINDLING OF MY LOVE OF SANDY COHEN.
These days I am more just attracted to the idea of him as opposed to wanting to nail him, but either way I am honestly floored by the things he does to my heart. Did you know Sandy Cohen is just so good? He is in fact the goodest boy, which is a phrase I usually use exclusively for describing friendly dogs. Speaking of dogs, what I particularly love about him is his amazing ability to stick up for the underdog, and if he sees no underdog to stick up for he bloody well goes out and finds one. You could be a complete stranger and punch his mother in the face and he’d be like “kid, I’ll be your lawyer.” You could run Sandy Cohen over with a truck that you stole from a homeless nun, and he’d invite you over for dinner and let you stay the night. You could impregnate his wife during a salacious tryst and he’d raise the damn baby and teach them how to surf. You could create literally any hyperbolic situation you like and Sandy Cohen would insist on not only sticking up for you, but also providing you with a roof over your head and a schmear on your bagel.
It’s this legendary love of bagels that spurred on this crush cake: I took the dough that would normally go into an entire batch of bagels and made it into one giant bagel, a leavened bread the size of Sandy Cohen’s heart.
A Giant Bagel for Sandy Cohen
4 cups strong bread flour
1 sachet instant dried yeast
1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons malt syrup, golden syrup, or honey
sesame seeds
Mix the yeast and water together in a small bowl and allow to sit for five minutes.
In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, and sugar. Pour in the water and your syrup of choice, and use a wooden spoon to mix together. Either in the bowl or on a floured surface, knead the dough by using the heel of your palm to push it down and away from you before pulling it back towards you, repeating until it’s a fairly springy ball. The dough should be a little dry and floury, and it will be very dense and thick. Allow the dough to rise in the fridge overnight in the bowl, covered in plastic cling film.
As soon as you possibly can the next day, take the dough out of the fridge so it can come to room temperature, or as close to it as possible. Shape it into a giant bagel shape – I roll it into a ball and then squash it slightly into a puffy circle, then prod a good-sized hole in the middle. Cover with a damp tea towel and allow to rise for at least half an hour to an hour.
Bring a wide pan of water to the boil, and carefully lower the puffy bagel into it. Allow it to boil merrily for a few minutes on each side – it’s a mission to turn it over, but with some tongs and a spatula this is fairly doable. Then sprinkle with sesame seeds and bake at 220 C/440 F for around 20 minutes. Let it sit on a rack for about half an hour before you tuck into it.
It gets better! Peter Gallagher, the actor behind the role, hosts an annual Sandy Cohen Award ceremony where he gives a Berkeley law student who wants to become a public defender a scholarship. Sandy Cohen is creating more Sandy Cohens! Like a Russian nesting doll of abounding pure goodness and eyebrow fecundity! I mean, I’m pretty sure that having the eyebrows isn’t an integral part of being a good public defender, but I also can’t be entirely sure that it’s not. Either way, I’m flailing.
This bagel is a simple token of my love for him, but don’t feel stuck with the concept of having a giant one – you can of course use this batch of dough and divide it into smaller balls to make regular-sized bagels. A giant bagel is surprisingly practical, though – slice it acrossways for the most chewy, hauntingly sweet toast ever; or simply eat the entire thing while watching The OC. I’ll have you know that it was at 3am after finishing a long shift at work when I watched the very last episode of the series, and it seemed only right to nourish both my soul and my actual hunger with a toasted bagel. Did you know that bagels are good at absorbing tears? Yes, it happened to me: I cried into a bagel.
Let us all try to be more like Sandy Cohen – there is a simple truth to him, and even if none of us can be quite as inherently good as he is, at least we can share his love of the unbroken circle that is the bagel. Safe in the knowledge that every bite brings us closer to his eyebrows, and therefore heaven.
I have recently discovered the joy of the homemade bagel, and I am Never going back. Never.
Oh, me too. I have an awesome recipe that actually takes not much time at all and the result is FABULOUS!!
I’m pretty sure that all of the love for Ryan and Seth was actually just misdirected love for Sandy. Because you can’t love them without also loving Sandy, right? They wouldn’t even BE them without Sandy!
My love for Seth was misdirected love for Dave Rygalski (and also some teenage stupidity).
I’m pretty sure they were actually the same person. Dave/Seth just left Stars Hollow and moved in with the Cohens.
That’s offensive to Dave Rygalski! Now that I am grown up and don’t have my celeb crush goggles on I can see that Seth is insufferable. Whereas Dave is lovely and sweet and responsible and polite!
My older sister and I became fascinated with Peter Gallagher after watching While You Were Sleeping because we found his eyebrows so outrageous. In fact, we referred to him as “Caterpillar Eyebrows.” But when The OC came on we became bonafide fans and discovered that on his website you could request a headshot, which we of course took advantage of because we were young and had no scruples about giving out our address to random websites.
So somewhere in my apartment, probably buried in a box full of yearbooks and old report cards or something, I have a lovingly autographed photo of Sandy Cohen, and also an ad for his blues album “7 Days in Memphis” that was later sent to my address because nothing in this world is free.
I once identified a young Peter Gallagher in an older, semi-obscure movie solely by his eyebrows. I’ve never been prouder.
Caterpillar Eyebrows is a most apt nickname.
He will always and forever be Eyebrow Guy to me because of that movie, which I’ve never actually seen all the way through.
I am HERE FOR THIS. Love him and his surfing and saving kids from Chino. I never even considered Ryan and his vests. Your eye nakeup is anazing by the way!
thank you! your username is amazing!
GIANT BAGEL
GIANT BAGEL
so, my father is a public defender of juvenile delinquents, and I’m pretty sure he started watching The OC just because of the utter ridiculousness of the pilot’s premise- that a lawyer could just invite his client to live with him/become part of his family, without any (professional) repercussions.
but my dad has a habit of getting utterly sucked in by teen drama shows, so I’m pretty sure he ended up watching the OC much more faithfully than me, his 14 year old daughter.
ETA: so of course yes, I totally approve of Sandy Cohen, and also scholarships to future public defenders!
My dad did the same thing with teen shows! He is to this day the staunchest fan of My So Called Life that I know.
yeah! saaaame, that’s another one my dad watched, religiously enough that my mom still jokingly complains about it- and I was 4 then, so it was definitely his interest driving that bus.
That show was about a sophomore in high school and came out the year I myself was a sophomore in high school. I was utterly obsessed. I saw every episode multiple times. My very first time on the internet I found a text-only (not even html!) fan page via webcrawler.
(I keep wondering what the average age is of The Toast commentariat. ‘Cause I know there are people older than me here, but some of y’all make me feel OLD.)
I watched the first couple seasons of Smallville with my dad when I was in high school. I come home from college to visit some 3 years later to find he’s STILL watching it, on his own, long since it had become terrible. Dads!
One of my Dad’s favourite shows is/was Gilmore Girls.
This year, he asked me to tell him how to stream shows off of a network’s website in case he missed an episode of Supergirl.
I had forgotten about the bagels on that show. And that amazing bagel cutter they had, which was very fancy technology to me at the time.
oh and I absolutely want that giant bagel, it looks incredible
oh good I get to be the first person to mention Peter Gallagher in the Broadway revival of Guys & Dolls. most of you were probably not born yet, but I listened to it many MANY times.
The PBS “making of the cast recording” documentary was My Thing for years! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RKhzWW9Uyk
they did the whole making of the cast album thing for The Producers as well — and I heard there’s gonna be a “Making of Hamilton” on Great Performances sometime in the future?
What a great album! I listened to it constantly as a kid, but there was definitely a few year window where I hadn’t seen the film in a long time and I couldn’t remember the plot so I had no idea what any of it meant? “An awful lot of lettuce”? “Craps”? “Union dues”? There were dozens of mysterious concepts and slang words that just washed over me. I thought “Take Back Your Mink” somehow fit into the storyline!
Anyway, I had a chance to see Peter Gallagher on stage last year, and it wasn’t my favorite show but it was such a treat to see SKY MASTERSON on stage.
(The first actual Sky Masterson I ever saw on stage, actually, was Ewan McGregor — theoretically crushworthy, but oh my GOD the fake New Yawk accents in this West End production! Tragic.)
I have never watched this show, but dang, this is fun to read. And now I’m craving a bagel and have no way to acquire one while at work.
I’m often loathe to recommend 80s or 90s indie flicks, as they very infrequently hold up on the re-view. However, I am fairly certain that Sex, Lies, and Videotape will hold up, if only for the Peter Gallagher-James Spader-Laura San Giacamo factors.
It is Soderbergh weird but also darkly moving. It was one of the first “mature’ indie films I ever saw, so it may be my sentimental favorite, but I suspect it stands up to the test of time. Gallagher, incidentally, plays a smug, cheating jackass. Spader, of course, is the heart of the movie. I won’t speak of Andie McDowell, as I think she is a terrible actress with an elegant beauty, but she is perfectly cast in the movie.
One of my all-time favorite films, and Spader is at peak hotness, I think.
I loved it when I saw it around when it came out – I had a secret crush on Laura San Giacomo, but I haven’t seen it in years.
Remember when Peter Gallagher showed up on Homicide, Life on the Street as a gay restaurant owner and asked (the formerly repressed and homophobic) Bayliss out on a date, and Bayliss went out with him because no one can resist The Eyebrows, and this led directly to Bayliss coming out as bi and thus becoming the first and only canonical bisexual male lead on a network show? The good Peter Gallagher does is incalculable, is what I am saying.
Peter Gallagher was also in Tuft’s Beelzebubs, which is the all-male a cappella group that inspired the article on which Pitch Perfect is based. Love him!!!
Nobody knows my Peter Gallagher / Noises Off fangirling. I thought I was the only one.
I'm so happy to find someone who shares my opinion of Andie McDowell.
I loved it when I saw it around when it came out – I had a secret crush on Laura San Giacomo, but I haven't seen it in years.
Yogalatis? Yogalatis!