Knees shaking, arms stiffly at my side, I started: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent…” I was in front of my eighth-grade class. It was my turn to recite the entire “Gettysburg Address.” Everyone had to do it. There were no exceptions.

About once a month, our teacher, Dr. Kinney, assigned us a short poem or speech to memorize and then recite. I still remember pieces of some of the works:

That’s the remainder of the first sentence from Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech.

That’s how Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” starts. The last line, “And miles to go before I sleep,” is also one I remember. The lines in between are a bit hazy.

The following is how John McCrae’s famous poem of the First World War starts.

At the time, it seemed like a chore without a purpose. Even though we would discuss what each work meant and its historical significance, they still seemed quite distant. But in the years that followed, each has come to mind at different times for different reasons.

“In Flanders Fields” came to mind often during the Vietnam War. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” would always pop into my mind when I came home from work late at night during four snowy winters in Rochester, New York. The “Gettysburg Address,” or pieces of it, pops into mind at almost random times.

Even though I can’t remember a single line from it, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is the one poem that seems to be with me the most. In this case, it’s the meaning that rattles around my mind. Unfortunately, so does Yogi Berra’s malaprop, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Recently, I was playing in the kitchen, and I came to a proverbial fork in the road. This was a unique intersection because I could simultaneously take both paths, and not just metaphorically.

A market I frequent recently announced its last week of existence. Unfortunately, I had a gift card for the market with about $170 still on it. I had one day to spend it all. Everything in the market was reduced by 30% so my card was really good for almost $250 worth of groceries. That’s more than I spend in two normal months. I filled my shopping cart while at the same time trying to calculate how much room I had in my freezer, refrigerator, and cupboards. One of the items I purchased was a package of cream cheese. Early that morning I had seen a cheesecake recipe that looked interesting and possibly shrinkable for serving as a mignardise. Of course, the original recipe called for 40 ounces of cream cheese, and I only bought eight.

I had located the recipe for “brown sugar cheesecake” on the Plate Magazine website. It’s by Heather Terhune, chef at Atwood Café in Chicago, Illinois. I took the printout of the recipe and modified it for both quantity and simplicity. I forwent the Graham-cracker-crumb crust and butterscotch sauce. I substituted bitter almond extract for the vanilla extract. I left out the extra egg yolk since after reduction there was only eight grams required.

I decided to mix everything by hand so I would introduce less air into the mixture and hope that the batter wouldn’t soufflé. To make the brown sugar easier to dissolve, I ground it to a powder before adding it to the cheese. Everything was going fine until I filled my only silicone mold, one that would result in fifteen little cubes of cheesecake. I discovered that I still had lots of batter left over. So, I grabbed a bag of blanched almond meal and began loading up the batter to give it more structure. The now thicker batter was piped into the cavities of a silicone financier mold.

After baking both and turning out the results, I had two different mignardises from essentially the same recipe. I had traveled down both proverbial forks in the proverbial road, or at least two tines in the same fork.

The two “cheesecakes” were still not quite ready for prime time. The cubes had too strong of an almond flavor. The financiers were not browned enough and their interiors were too moist. With a few tweaks, all was well in the world, and I had two new mignardises.

The first recipe is for the cubes, which have now morphed into square bars. The brown sugar has been replaced by agave syrup to add a little more liquid to the batter. The bitter almond extract has been eliminated from this version, which makes about 12 pieces. They seem to taste best when chilled and then brought close to room temperature when serving.