Cake #8 Cranberry Maple Pudding - Cambridge Edition

Also written on 11/27 and just joined with pictures today: Cranberry Maple Pudding Cake:

I think we were both really excited to make this for Thanksgiving this year. Considering I used the Maple Syrup from our trip to Parker's Maple Barn and the cranberries almost from our trip to the AD Makepeace cranberry bog this year, it had to be good. Sure looks purdy.

Eh, not so much. This cake was exactly what I thought the cherry cornmeal cake was going to be, kind of like cobbler with cornbread on top. I was not looking forward to that cake and it totally wowed us. This one, I was pulling for to be better than it was. Given that we were cooking Thanksgiving dinner and this cake is to be served warm, I prepped all the ingredients to this stage so I could whip it all together (not literally) as I breezed to the table with the turkey en platter.

It was 1 of 4 desserts on Thanksgiving for 5 adults and 3 kids. And, we agreed on its own it would have been fine. In light of the other options, nobody wanted to touch it. It did not make it to the Thanksgiving recipe binder for the future - but I was happy eating the leftovers today.

Well, at least there were lots of leftovers. And, they were good the next day - which we found out only after the chocolate pie and pumpkin pie was gone.

Cake #5? What Number was the Lemon Loaf?

This was written on 11/27, but I just retrieved the pictures today. Mindy & I are gearing up for more cakes over the holiday "break", so I needed to catch up. Here are:

The Lemon Loaves. Now that is a lot of lemon. Good thing Kassi juiced all our lemons for the Toddlers and Toddies party and we had some left over. What I remember about making this cake: I was going to have it in the oven by 7:30 to have it out by 8:30. Didn't get it in until about 8:10. Many distractions lead me to this.

I love lemon! This was very very good, but IMHO, not as good as the effort. I have a better sour cream lemon bunt cake I would make instead. It was nice to have on hand when my parents were in town visiting and I even had some left over to bring to work.

You can see that I too only have 1 loaf pan, therefore the improvised casserole dish second loaf.

Cake #7: Oops I made a Cake! Orange Angel Food

Orange Angel Food Cake with Caramel and Tropical Fruit Compote. Now that is a mouthful. I am behind a cake now too. Mindy made the lemon loaves for a brunch. I needed this cake for a kiddie cocktail party. Cocktail hour. Easy Nibbles. Make it in advance. Z can't have chocolate. K can't have peanuts. Nobody wants to load their kid up on frosting and take them home to bed. Enter the Angel Food cake. No frosting mess. Low cal (ish), and with the fruit compote, down right healthy.

There are a few things I liked about making this cake. #1 - NO BUTTER! Don't get me wrong. I love butter. But the last couple of cakes were kind of over the top. When I have to tear into the second package of butter, or the third for 1 recipe, even that is a bit much for me. #2 - NO greasing/flouring/parchmenting the pan! Wow, am I growing to hate that task. Fortunately, Elliot is getting old enough to take it on for me. #3 - I used our hand blender instead of the counter-top Kitchen Aid. I did not have to dig it out of the cabinet or clean & put it away, and it helped me get a feel for the fluffiness of the batter. And finally, #4 - Learning to make caramel from scratch at home. This could prove to be deadly. It did take me 3 tries to get it edible, but with so few ingredients and relatively little effort to make it, wow! why buy it at the store anymore? Hello new found calories!

There are a couple things I did not like about this cake: okay, just 1: Cardamom. Did not have this spice in my drawer. Knew we were in trouble when Ben called from the store to see if we "really" needed it. If he thinks something is expensive, we are in deep. The recipe calls for 3/4 of a teaspoon.

Holy guacamole - it cost $11.99. And, the best part, it smells like powdered Nyquil. I used the recommended 3/4 teaspoon in my first batch of caramel and I thought it was over powering.

But, you will see, there were other issues with my first batch of caramel.

My second batch of caramel, I learned my lesson. The color it is when you take the sugar water off to add the cream is the color your caramel will be. It won't change after that. The recipe said the boiling would only take 5 minutes or so. After 12 minutes, my batch 1 still looked like snot ( gross, I know, but I can't think of the name of that glue with the little brush on the lid) and I thought I would somehow ruin it. My second batch, I got to the color and then went maybe 30-60 seconds too long. I only used 1/4 tsp of cardamom in this one and it was still overpowering, added with the burned taste, it was also gross (to me).

I made a 3rd batch of caramel right before the party and it was perfect. No cardamom, and took it off in time. mmm mmm trouble.

Batch 1 and Batch 2. Night and Day.

I also made my first major cake making error from not reading the recipe carefully. You are supposed to fold the flour into the batter without the mixer and I beat the batter to a pulp with half the flour before realizing this. Turned out to be just fine. And the angel cake was great - would definitely make this again.

Cake #6 Mile High Chocolate Cake a la Sher

Basic ingredients. Rough cost outside the pantry ~$12 for the chocolate and sour cream & butter.
I employed the double boiler method of melting the chocolate and butter. Pyrex bowl on top of 2 qt sauce pan with 2 inches of water at the bottom. My bowl was too small to mix it quickly. I had to be careful.
Standing mixer whipping butter & sugar. Sifted dry goods waiting to be added. Melted chocolate is cooling to be added (separate from the melted chocolate from the frosting - good thing I started this at 7:30 am.
The batter in the pan. It was like mousse - though it looks a bit like cow pie when photographed...sorry.
And, disaster # 1 strikes the cakes. Of course this one is for public consumption. I think I cooked a few minutes too long. I also did not take the cakes out of the pans after 10 minutes as instructed, more like 30 (oops, didn't see that direction until too late). And, I was a bit hasty loosening with the knife. Well, yeah they were crumbly. I kept all the parts and planned to frosting-glue them back together.
Taking Mindy's advice, I put the cakes in the fridge to cool/freeze before slicing them in half. I have a wire cake cutter. Why, pray tell, did I not use it? Why did it call for a long serrated knife? Mine did not look long enough, and I expected problems with the crumbly cake. Well, if Alton Brown had ever thought cutting a cake with an ELECTRIC KNIFE was a good idea, I am sure he would have put it on TV already - so why was I thinking I needed to forge a new frontier? Completely uneven. Completely crumbly. Completely hilarious though. Oy vey, and it's not just family coming to dinner either.
I like this contrast of the inner disaster and what can be done to cover it up with a WHOLE LOTTA frosting. We used every lick. Yup 6 sticks of butter.
I also liked Mindy's money shot with the ruler. And the picture below gives a little perspective on how TALL this cake is - looked like a top hat.
Happy Birthday! Finally an interior shot of the cake. Smiling at the layers.

More like 0.00009th of a Mile High Cake. Yes, I did the math. Ben graciously selected one of our 30 cakes for his birthday cake. Good thing he and Chris both like chocolate, since they had the same cakes for their birthdays. This was a very chocolate cake. As Mindy mentioned, it was not too sweet, maybe because it called for unsweetened chocolate and unsweetened cocoa. It almost had a quality of a really dry wine that sucks the moisture from your mouth and begs to be eaten with some vanilla ice cream.

This was not quite a "pantry cake", but was close, just had to have 2 CUPS of sour cream on hand as well as many ounces of "high quality" unsweetened dark chocolate. Ours was the highest quality that Shaw's offers, but that's not really saying too much. And we usually have butter on hand, but this cake called for so much, it wiped out our fridge supply!

I was very happy to have the wisdom of Mindy's lessons learned before attempting this. I had to make it on the day we were eating it. I can usually safeguard against many pitfalls by baking the day before frosting. This cake requires a lot of cooling. For the cake before frosting, and for the frosting itself before combining. Cooling = time. Usually time we do not have. You can't hurry up and cool something.

This cake is funny tall. Taller than it is wide. Too tall for my cake dome. Too tall for the plates we used. Had to carry it on my lap in the car, uncovered, just to get it to the party - had visions of a blog post of me on the ground, my face in the cake atop a pile of leaves on the walkway to the house.

Truthfully, I did not like the cake. Not worth the effort for the payoff. But, Ben LOVED the cake. Both the crumble and the frosting. LOVED the frosting. He wouldn't say that just to be nice. Not to me anyway. Reminded me that everyone has different tastes. His happens to Heart the 0.00009 Mile High Cake.

Cake # 6 - Mile High Chocolate Cake

I have a tummy ache as I type this...all due to a piece of the Mile High Chocolate Cake that I just ate with a cup of coffee. More on that in a bit....

First, do you know how hard it is to find 8" cake pans? After trying a few places without success I remember that Sherie once told me the best cake decorating supplies can be found at craft stores, like Michael's. I just so happened to be near my neighborhood Jo Ann's Fabrics, and lo and behold...8" pans! Huzzah.

The batter of this cake ended up tasting like the most awesome chocolate pudding you ever had. It was thick, rich, and not too sweet (due in part to all the chocolate in the recipe begin unsweetened). When I was scooping the batter into the pans, I got to thinking about how incredibly liquid the batter for boxed cakes is - this was so very different. Soooo much better. And, really, not that time-consuming at all.

Moist and luscious batter brought to you by:

Butter melted with unsweetened chocolate

An unbelievable TWO cups of sour cream

The result - a super thick batter

The cake came out incredibly moist and rich and wonderful. I baked the cakes a day before I planned to frost them, and I stored them in my fridge. I can't imaging slicing each of the cakes in half if they had not been chilled - I think that they would have fallen apart. That's how wonderful moist they were.

For me, this was the last time the recipe went well. The frosting was a big hot mess. And I'm not using "hot" to just sound like a contestant on Project Runway.

So, to make the icing, you cook milk, flour, cocoa powder etc. on the stove and then add chopped chocolate. The result is a really thick paste - almost like frosting. The recipe says to cool this mix to room temperature and then add it to SIX STICKS OF BUTTER [oof]. My big mistake was not letting the chocolate paste cool enough [I was in a hurry - when will I learn!] before adding it to the butter. The butter immediately started to melt, and suddenly I had a very thin, almost liquidy frosting. Crap. I threw the entire thing into the fridge to firm up.

After chilling for a few hours, I took out the bowl of frosting, let it warm up a bit, and then rewhipped it with my standing mixer. And, all in all, it had great texture. The problem, however, little tiny lumps of butter that I could not get rid of no matter how much I whipped the frosting. Seeing how I was making this cake for a birthday boy who despises butter, this was not a good thing.

Those little pale flecks? Butter. Ewww.

All that being said, the frosting, at room temperature, tasted pretty good. Again with the pudding reference, but that's what it tasted like - rich chocolatey, but not sweet, pudding. But, and this is a very big but, that was at room temperature.

The true test of a cake, in my opinion, is how it tastes the next morning with coffee. The frosting, when cold, is way too buttery. Greasy in the mouth, butter overwhelming the chocolate. Yuck. The cake itself still tastes wonderful, and I'm sure that I'll have it again after I scrape off the frosting. I'll definitely make the cake again, but not the frosting. Even if I hadn't screwed up, that's just too much butter in a frosting for my liking.

Oh, and Mile High? Not quite, but very tall and impressive!

[Hey Chicagoans, if you love really buttery butter cream and
want to come and take away a chunk of cake, let me know!]

Cake #5 - Lemon Lemon Loaf

Three things that I really need to do as we go along on this cake project:

1. Take notes. Seems elementary, but I'm not doing it. Stupid.
2. Write up the cakes quickly. Without the aforementioned notes, the length of time between baking and writing is a real problem.
3. Learn a little something about food styling!

So, Cake Number Five is the Lemon Lemon Loaf. If you're paying attention, you might think, "Hmm...I don't remember Mindy's write-up on Cake Four..." Uh, that's because I haven't baked it yet. I will get to it, I swear.

Back to the Lemon Lemon Loaf! I made it for an Open House that we hosted, and it was a perfect sweet companion to quiche and coffee.

This was last week, so here's what I remember:

1. Whoa. That's a lot of lemon zest! 1/4 cup, to be exact. My lemons might have been on the small side as it took five of them to get 1/4 cup.
2. I was extremely happy for a recipe that used my food processor instead of my standing mixer. Silly thing to be excited about, no? It's just that my standing mixer is.so.very.heavy.
3. This recipe makes two loaves of bread. The recipe says that you can freeze one of them, and if we were not having people over, I definitely would have done that.

Speaking of two loaves...this project really points out the deficiencies in my cookware collection. I only have one 9 x 5 x 3 pan. I prepared two additional smaller pans thinking that I would need both of them, but I ended up using the larger of the two. Remarkably, they required the same amount of a baking time.


The finished loaves - aren't they beautiful?What I don't have pictures of:

1. The loaves after I pricked them and poured on the lemon syrup.
2. The loaves after I doused them with the lemon and powdered sugar glaze.
3. The smiles on the happy faces of my taste-testers.

Most commented on how incredibly moist the cake was (a lot of credit probably goes to the sour cream in the recipe), how intense the lemon flavor was (all goes back to that 1/4 cup zest in addition to the 1/4 fresh lemon juice), and that the cake was sweet, but not cloyingly so. I don't think that these cakes need the glaze, they are plenty sweet and rich on their own.

And, the out of the fridge test? Divine with a cup of tea around 10 a.m.