Inspiration in Cake Form

We got together later than usual on Tuesday. Usually we bake in the morning, about 9 am or so (Usually, I seem to be running late at that point, but I do make a stop at Dunkin' Donuts.) Today we started at 1:45 or 2.

So it began for me, harried, late and frazzeling (ok, I have no idea how to spell that word). It started out, for Janet a bit on the rough side, too. The leader of the Tour de France's last section was kicked out for doping. And it was a rest day so there wasn't much being said about it on our news. I just noticed that it was in the headlines on my homepage, so it's news here too.

You could say we both got up on the wrong side of the oven. Given these bumps and the fact that last week's cake was very, very good, it's safe to say that we both expected today's cake to be ok, alright, not great, plodding.

We made the Golden Luxury Butter Cake (pg 48) I know, it's another butter cake -- but we are only 4 away from the end of the butter cake chapter! This cake goes together like most of her butter cakes, sift dry ingredients, aerate, add butter and wet ingredients in 3 batches, only for 20 seconds after each batch....This one came together with no problems. We did notice a bit of bubbling on the tops when the layers were cooked, so we probably over mixed, but it wasn't a problem overall.

RLB suggests that we make a Lemon Buttercream for the cake, but we had done that with our Buttermilk Country Cake
(Mar.30.07) And since we want to cook as many things as possible without making duplicates, we made the Mousseline Buttercream (pg 244) We do realize that we made it the last time (Ju.17.07). This time we made the Orange version,

For a fruit Mouselline RLB suggest using puree or curd. Due to my tardiness and Janet's feelings of stir craziness she made Orange Curd (pg 342) before I came. Following the directions as written it came up a bit pasty, floury without the almost silky, slightly opaque quality of curds.

"This really frosted me!" Janet said grumbling under breath. I burst out laughing, cause, near as we can tell, the reason would be we used frozen eggs yolks -- remember the 4.5 egg whites from the last cake? We assume that being frozen changed the proteins and made them coagulate in tighter balls. At this point Janet said, "Ok Alton." I grinned and said I don't know if I'm channeling Alton Brown or Shirley Corriher. (Mr. Brown is the host of Good Eats, probably one of my favorite all time cooking shows. Ms. Corriher wrote a wonderful food science book _Cookwise_ that would be the entire text of my food class.)

At this point, we're both thinking, "Rats, this is going to be a big let down." It's followed by a comma when the feeling's not as strong -- can anyone tell us where that's from?

Then, the cakes came out of the oven. They were lightly golden brown, the edges were that crisp, crepe like edge that we both like. They turned out easily -- well it was easy for Janet, mine got a bit of a crack in the top.

Both of us looked at it like them like they were the Holy Grail. They smelled righteous.

The Mousseline turned into its fine self. And Janet and I got the idea that we'd place the curd between the layers. A great idea until it started to slide. Domed cake tops will do that! So I sliced off the dome of one and they fit together much more nicely. As I said, "There are no accidents here, only snacks." We placed the domed parts in a bowl and continued to eat them up. With a fine crumb and a dense texture, it was a pound cake without the weight. Kathy, who got a drive by caking last night, said to me on the train, "That cake was so good. It's texture...great."

What is beauty? To me along with a good long dinner with friends, it's a cake that inspires you. Janet and I were so happy with the outcome of this cake that we both started to spout out ideas of what would work as an addition to the frosting.

We said nuts finely chopped, almonds, walnuts, pecans, placed between the cake layers would be good. So, Janet turned around and pulled out a bag of each. "You're so like me, only prepared." Strangely enough it's true. We do work well together.

In the taste test: Untoasted almonds were quite bland. Walnuts caused such a reaction on my face that Janet said, "If it did that, I have to try it." Way too bitter for the cake frosting combo. Pecans were quite a nice addition with their texture and their sweetness. Janet still holds out for toasted almonds.

This led to a discussion about what herb would we use. I suggested Basil. Orange and basil often work well together. Alas, we had no basil to test.

With the orange, we did decide that blackberries would be wonderfull added to the plate. Then we found blueberries in the fridge. Adding a splash of orange flower water, a bit of sugar and muddling that with the blueberries was a wonderfully refreshing, perfumy addition to the cake. Try it. It was a bit like sex.

"Don't get me wrong, I like sex...a lot. But it's never going to replace cake." Stephanie Plum. Thank you Kristing in West Lafayette for the quote. Read Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum Series, they are a hoot!

Bake through....

Robb

One Cake, Many Recipes

Well, it's been a long time. Between work and family visits for the 4th of July and a hellishly hot day (about 95 with about 95% humidity) it took us awhile to get back to the Cake Bible, but today we did.....

Today we made the White Velvet Butter Cake (pg 46). This is the one used to make the White Lilac Nostalgia cake (pg 167) that requires 1/2 recipe of the Raspberry Mousseline (pg 245) and 1 full recipe of the Creme Ivoire Deluxe (pg 246). You are supposed to use crystallized lilacs (pg 326) but we didn't.

Ok, honestly, I grumble and complain about baking day. I'm that way about anything that I "have" to do. So imagine just how much grumbling I can do when it takes 4 separate and completely different recipes to create a cake. Well let me tell you, it's a lot. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get my head around all the parts of this cake.

The interesting thing is that it's no longer the actual cake part that makes me slightly nervous. I now understand what her process is for putting together a butter cake -- one would hope I could do it after what, 17 cakes!

The cake portion is a wonder to behold. It's light in color, almost crepe like in its crispy edge (hope it's supposed to be like that, 'cause it was tasty) and blonde almost white interior with a really fine crumb.

One learning of ours -- our butter has been consistently too soft -- runny butter isn't room temp butter, now is it?

This cake batter came together like none of the others. And baked in the alloted time. Seriously, I think this is my new favorite white cake. It reminded me of a cross between a white butter cake and an angelfood cake. Janet said it was very much like her Granny Martin's white cake. High praise indeed.

The raspberry mousseline was fabulously rich and wonderful. It did require a bit of orchestration and I did make the raspberry puree/sauce (pg 337) the night before. Trust me this sauce was worth every single bowl and strainer in my kitchen being raspberry-ified. The secret is in boiling down the raspberry juice from 1 cup to 1/4 cup. It's tart and sweet and has a depth of flavor. I gave Michael a taste of the sauce and he said, it's like the berry just explodes in your mouth. Truly it was perfection.

You add this sauce to the Mousseline buttercream. That was a bit of a bother, but honestly well worth it. It's similar to the Silk Meringue Buttercream we did back in mid June. The difference is that you add butter to the beaten whites and firm ball sugar syrup. We did it this time with a hand mixer so that we could do a steady steam of sugar into the egg whites. This offered a seemingly smoother version, but since we didn't do a side by side with the stand mixer, we don't know for sure.

There is a liqueur option and we choose to use it, but instead of the Grand Marnier she suggests, we thought Chambourd with its dark, cherry taste would be better suited to the raspberry sauce -- raspberry Stoli was dismissed outright, but got us thinking.

Raspberry Sauce/Puree Recipes: (You only need 3/4 cup of it, so you will have left overs):
Add a bit of the sauce to your lemonade or your favorite lemon lime soda. For an adult version, add it to Raspberry Stoli and ice.

There is a moment in the middle of the mousseline when you may feel that it's all over. It's not, don't stop, bake through. It is devine decadence in a non chocolate form.

The real bother and part that made us scratch our head more than once was the Creme Ivoire Deluxe (pg 246). Basically you melt all the ingredients white chocolate, cocoa butter (which is very, very expensive), clarified butter, a flavorless oil (we used canola).

Once melted, you cool and whip into a buttercream. This wasn't the case for us. By hand it never seemed to whisk to cool, although it did have the whisk marks on top, right away. We put it in the stand mixer and put the pan of iced water under it, like we did a couple cakes ago when we realize that over 90 degrees in Janet's house isn't good cake baking weather. We did add 4 tablespoons of butter at room temp. This helped, but it took a very, very long time. (I consulted my mother about this recipe and she said "That's insane!" and agreed with us that we followed the recipe, and that it does seem a stretch to make a glaze and then through magical whisking somehow it will turn into buttercream. -JM)


We spread the Mousseline between the layers (they were cut in half horizontally, thus making the four layers you see). Then, we crumb coated -- see our learnings from before. Then we put it in the freezer to cool. Then frosted it, but the frosting was warming up and getting strange so we put it in the freezer again. (See we can learn from previous mistakes.)


Then we sat down and had a nice bit of lunch and while I know that we're doing the Cake Bible, Janet came up with a wonderful chicken salad that I thought we should share:

Janet's Chicken Salad

Shredded cabbage & carrots (bag of cole slaw mix)
sour cream & a little teriyaki sauce
grapefruit vinegar
toasted sesame oil
chinese 5 spice powder
leftover jerked and grilled chicken, shredded
celery, sliced
water chestnuts, diced
toasted almonds, chopped
salt & pepper

I don't have amounts (& I hope that's everything that went in it), but think of making cole slaw and taste as you go. It was a recipe that Robb described that prompted me to purchase the slaw mix, but I couldn't remember what was in his aside from the slaw and chicken. This was good served with cantaloupe and cracked pepper. -JM

She served it over thinly sliced cucumbers and it was so good. I hope you don't mind that we included it here. It just needed to be published.

After we finished eating, the cake was a bit too cool. But we finished decorating it. Notice the zinnia, pretty huh?

This cake was the best one we've made, really. We ate the whole piece that we cut to taste. Very rare for us.

Only one cake, but what a cake it was.

Bake Through

Robb

Hiatus is on the horizon...

Our latest effort seen here is the Chocolate Domingo. It is a simple one layer chocolate cake adorned with a dusting of powdered sugar. It is definitely dinner party -worthy, even though it is so simple.

Some of the other chocolate cakes have had a very dark, shiny interior, with uniform tiny bubbles (aside from the tunnels from occasional over mixing), what we have described as being similar to a box cake. We mean nothing negative about that, btw. I think many of the cake mixes out there have totally nailed Devil's food cake. The Domingo however, has a brown, maybe even reddish interior. It's crumb is fine, even though RLB says there will be no crumb.?? It's flavor is complex and pleasing.

We tried a new cocoa this time. I wonder how much of the color and texture change is due to the recipe versus the cocoa. We had been using Hershey's Dutch processed cocoa. This week we used a higher fat alkalized cocoa from Bergenfield. What comes to mind, I'm sure is no surprise: do a side by side comparison! Perhaps I will try that this week on my own.

Robb and I will be taking a breather from baking together for the next two weeks, due to work obligations and guests visiting. For those of you following along in the Bible, we are almost done with the butter cake section. Only a few more weeks, Yippee! We are very excited to get into the next sections. Coming first are the fruit and vegetable cakes. We plan to do a massive test day and try lots of different carrot cake recipes, so please send us yours! Or, if you don't have a recipe per se, you might write and describe the best carrot cake you've had. With pecans? With walnuts? No nuts? Crushed pineapple? No pineapple? Shredded carrot? Pureed carrot? Applesauce? Very spiced? Mildly spiced? Molasses? Coconut? Sheet cake? 3 layers? 2 layers? Cupcakes? etc. etc. etc.

Before we get to that section and testing all kinds of carrot cakes, we will attempt one of the "show case cakes" in our next session. It is the White Lilac Nostalgia cake, p. 167. I'm sure we will be raring to go after our two weeks off.

Until then...
Janet

Don't Judge a Cake By Its Frosting

Janet has been away. So, I have taken the liberty of not writing right away. You can tell as this is Sunday night and we baked last Tuesday. Actually, truth be told, I lost track of time. A couple days this week and today, I lost about an hour -- somehow it was 1 pm and I was supposed to be at my Dog Run Book Club meeting in New York and I was wandering out of the Food Emporium at that same time. What does that say? Lazy summer wanderings I guess.

Ok.

Look at the lovely picture of this cake. It's a striking amalgam of about 15 different ways to make a cake and frosting....Not really, but I get ahead of myself.

For those into the page numbers and such, we are still in Butter Cake land -- the first section of _The Cake Bible_ by Rose Levy Beranbaum (from now on, we're going to use RLB to indicate Ms. Beranbaum, it's just more streamlined.)

The Chestnut Sand cake is found on page 42. We still wait for a chance to cream the butter and sugar. Alas, it was not to be with this cake either -- I wonder if it will come about when we are doing the next couple chapters of "quick bread" type cakes. We'll soon know.

The cake seemed to come together with very little problem. We didn't have any doming in the baked cake -- we think it has something to do with our chocolate cakes as they are the ones that have consistently domed. Any bakers out there who may know why, email us. It had a fine crumb and a nice heft when it came out of the oven. Both of us thought it would be a winner of a cake. It just smelled so earthy and good.

We paired this with her complementary adornment suggestion of Chestnut Buttercream. We did the complicated variation of Chestnut Silk Meringue Buttercream. Complicated in that it's really two different things combined with a third thing. You make a Creme Anglaise. If you've ever made a creme brulee and it didn't set up, you've done this. Really it's a custard that didn't quite thicken. It's quite tasty, especially when you use the vanilla bean that she suggests.

The next part of it is an Italian Meringue. This is a meringue that is heated up with sugar, then cooled down in a mixer. It's a fascinating technique where you make stiff peaks of fluffy meringue by drizzling hot sugar syrup into egg whites beaten to soft peaks. Somehow to me, it seemed a bit weird to pour sugar -- roughly 249 degrees F. into egg whites. I half expected them to collapse, but Janet said, they were stiff peaks and they weren't going anywhere. She, as always with baking stuff, was right. (I should mention in writing that i'm no longer able to doubt her -- I did doubt at this time and one other time and, hey, she knows her stuff.)

Once you have the Creme Anglaise cooled, you add it to the Italian Meringue, beat in a pound of butter, and then, viola! it is a buttercream. That's your Silk Meringue Buttercream (page 239).

But wait dear reader, there is more....

Then, for the Chestnut Silk Meringue Buttercream variation (page 243), you cut the Silk Meringue recipe in half and add lightly sweetened Chestnut puree (page 353) flavored with rum. The puree recipe starts with whole chestnuts, but thank God we found the already roasted chestnuts -- we didn't have to worry about them popping if we didn't score them with a cross on the top, etc. The puree had to be pushed through a food mill, so we used the next best thing -- a fine meshed sieve, added milk to get it to the right consistency (what ever that is!), and powdered sugar and a touch of rum completed the puree. We were slightly skeptical about blending 3 cups of puree into half the recipe of silk meringue buttercream, but RLB did not steer us wrong.

Chestnut (Castanea), including the chinkapin, is a genus of eight or nine species of trees and shrubs in the beech family Fagaceae, native to warm temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The name also refers to the edible nuts produced by these trees. (Wikipedia.com)

For people who like _Steel Magnolias_, it is set in Chinkapin Parish (which would be Chestnut County up here in the North.) That came from my random factoid producing mind.

We put all the various things together and came up with a beautiful cake. Look at the pictures like I said.

But, we both ate it and said, "Meh" Not really all that great to us. A bit bland. It tasted, dare I say it, like chestnuts.

Janet and I decided (or realized) that we don't like chestnuts. But, for the record, we did cool the cake, crumb coat the cake and fridge the cake before we finished the cake. These all did work -- have I mentioned that you should look at the pictures. Janet did a bang up job decorating the cake.

Because we liked the presentation of the cake so much, we tried adding chocolate chips in various amounts of cocoa from milk to dark to our forkfuls of cake. The chips that worked the best were the mini dark chocolate chips. The milk chocolate chips were too mild and sorta got lost. The really dark stood out too much. Janet said, "We are trying way too hard to cover up the fact that this cake tastes like chestnuts." She was right. Although chocolate chips might work, why bother if you don't like chestnuts.

I dropped a piece of cake off to my friend Kathy. She took a bit and said, "The cake texture is wonderful. The taste is a bit bland. But, I don't really like chestnuts."

That evening -- what is commonly known as cake night in our house -- Michael said, "This cake is really good."

Weird. I was so expecting him to not like it. He liked it, he really, really liked it.

Janet and I learned a very valuable lesson: We don't really care for chestnuts. Luckily, it's pretty easy to avoid them. Well, that and the fact that a pretty cake doesn't always make for a taste extravaganza.

Bake Through,
Robb

Recipe Request

Janet and I are preparing to make Carrot Cake in the upcoming weeks. The recipe in the Cake Bible is very different from what we are used to so we wanted to ask our readers to email us their favorite carrot cake recipes.

Please send them to

robbbruce@optonline.net or
jmfisher@bu.edu

This way we can compare and contrast a few recipes that week.

Thanks in advance,

Robb & Janet

Chill Out

It all started with a moment of panic -- not real, OH MY GOD! panic, but panic nonetheless. We hadn't found the chestnuts. I realize, again, in the grand scheme of things, this is not a problem. But, without the chestnuts, we couldn't make the Chestnut Sand cake.

Really, we bouyed and came up with an alternate plan. We'd skip it this week. Really ingenious of us wasn't it?

From that bit of panic, we searched the next few recipes, fore warned is fore armed, right? Then we saw that we're fast approaching the fun times -- named cakes at the back of the book. This time we made one of the "named" cakes near the end. But that's a bit ahead of ourselves.

After the chestnut discussion, we began making the Chocolate Fudge Cake (page 60) with the Milk Chocolate Buttercream (page 250) that we made on May 17. We decided that it was ok to repeat as it's what she suggests for the "Chocolate Spike Cake" (page 198). (You know if you take the page numbers in that paragraph add them together, divide by 7, multiply by 18 and subtract 84, you end up with the exact day the world ends.)

Our second cake was the Golden Grand Marnier Cake. For the adornment, we used powdered sugar.

We baked the Chocolate Fudge cake and honestly, it was the nicest chocolate cake in the mixing bowl. I almost would rather have eaten it with a spoon out of the bowl! Again, we had a bit of difficulty with the doming effect and a bit of tunneling. Janet thinks we over beat it and while it's one of the reasons that those things can happen (see "It is called a Cake Bible" installment in a previous week), I don't really think we did. I think we underbeat it according to the directions that Ms. Beranbaum gives. Well, it ended up being a beautiful "chocolate brown" Nice, rich, almost red with streaks of a darker, dark-chocolate brown. In certain light, it looked like a red velvet cake. I don't know if the picture actually shows it.

When we were looking at the cakes, just before pictures, Janet said, this one just needs a cold glass of milk. During the tasting, we both agreed. Try it out as an afterschool snack or a post work pick me up.

It was so tender, it split when we took it out of the pan. But never fear, we are intrepid and managed to conceal a whole host of things in the frosting. So, why did we try the Chocolate Spike? Because Ms. B suggests it and it was a way to try a new technique.

I have to say that for me all the techniques are new. My usual technique has been to open a tub of frosting and slather it on the cake, praying there would be some left over so I could cover my graham crackers with it. Usually, my tub o' frosting was too cold and I'd end up with a crumby mess. Of course, it still tasted ok.

This particular technique seemed suited for me. Take the icing and "pull it away" from the cake, causing spikes. At first it looked good, but as it sat for just a few minutes, the peaks became a bit bent. (I understand a bit better what a food stylist goes through.) The top has a neat squiggle pattern on top, but because we had a dome (and this is only my second "correctly" frosted cake) it didn't turn out right. Remember, just like bloody marys it may be something simple on paper, but in practice, it's a whole other ball game. In hindsight, we found that we ought to have been a little more patient by waiting until the cake layers were completely not warm anymore, and avoiding the temptation of "well, they're not steaming anymore, maybe it's ok to go ahead?" That, added to getting the frosting nice and tight would have produced a better result... we'll learn.

Golden Grand Marnier Cake, say that with me. Golden Grand Marnier Cake. Can it get any better than Grand Marnier, oranges and almonds? We'd have to say no. This was the easiest cake to put together. One of the prettiest out of the pan -- look at those pictures! And, trust me, the one that just called out for a dusting of powdered sugar. Our only comment was that the Grand Marnier Cake needed a cup of coffee. Try it for an after work snack or a Saturday or Sunday brunch. You brush the hot cake with a yummy syrup of Grand Marnier, orange juice and sugar that smells fantastic. That should help keep the cake very moist, as if there will be any trouble finishing this one before it dries out! The cake has a very nice texture due to the ground nuts and orange zest. For anyone who has had Janet's orange almond biscotti at Christmas time, think of that same flavor but in a buttery cake form.

But at the final discussion, we realized, if you're going to do something right, do it right. When it comes to baking a cake, it boils down to WAIT. Pause. Halt. Cease. Don't just go barreling through.

Let the cake layers completely cool.
Let the buttercream cool way down.
Crumb coat.
Then, chill.

Really, chilling out is your best friend and isn't that what baking with friends is supposed to be about?

Dare We Talk Discipline?

I have struggled with this blog. Why? You intrepid reader may ask.

Well, it's be so long since we cooked. The last post was May 16 and it's now June 1. That is such a long time. I know we started doing this to hang out but also to bake better. That is one definition of discipline: an "activity, exercise, or a regimen that develops or improves a skill; training: A daily stint at the typewriter is excellent discipline for a writer." (dictionary.com)

I love baking and hanging out with Janet (baking in the evening means we can drink wine -- because drinking wine at 9 am makes for a long, long nap in the middle of the day.)

But after the last couple weeks -- my trip to Connecticut to do an evening event for framesi (the color company I work for), a baby naming at the begining of my vacation and my best friends' father's death the week before really limited baking time. Seymour was a great guy who could identify a song if you said a phrase from it -- he'd sing the whole song. If you had a question about a Yiddish phrase or what it meant -- he was the go to person for that. I thought of him as a human Google.com.

So, with all the precariousness of life, we finally got together on Tuesday (I realize that I'm typing this on Friday -- but vacation takes a lot out of a guy.) I hope that explains the long gap from the last installment and some of my hesitation in writing.

And, honestly, nothing much happened in this session. Well, nothing except we turned out two very good cakes with lovely icings (or is that frosting) and we drank wine (one nice one and one that wasn't so nice).

So, why is it hard to write about? Well good writing needs conflict. A tension, if you will. There wasn't really any tension this time. Perhaps it was the wine or it was the fact that we've become old hats at doing these.

Well, as is usual, we did two cakes: Buttermilk Country Cake (page 41) and the Triple Layer Devil's Food (page 62). Here, don't they look pretty:





Really both of them turned out beautifully.

The Buttermilk Country Cake was made in a springform pan and used a lemon buttercream. It was the variation of the NeoClassic Buttercream, lemon variation (page 234). It was one of the best colors of buttercream that we have created from this book. It's a soft butter color, but not flat. The lemon adds a brightness to the color and a pleasant, sharp tang to the buttercream, which to me can become a bit cloying. Why is it called a buttercream frosting when there isn't a drop of cream to be found. (I assume it's because the butter gets creamed, but I do love asking that question.)

The Devil's Food layers were a bit thin, and slightly domed. We have begun to suspect the oven doesn't like more than two pans at a time. The crumb and structure of the cake was nicer than the previous chocolate cake. It wasn't so aerated. We did honestly count the time for all inclusions. And, there were no cracks, the cakes were quite strong, but still light.

After we did both of them, we realized that when you have completely aerated the cake and developed the structure, you find that it almost ribbons in the stand mixer. You can see a "spirograph" image in the top of the batter. For those of you who remember the Spirograph, it really does look like that!

My favorite frostings so far is the one that we used on the Triple Layer Devil's Food -- Burnt Almond Milk Chocolate Ganache (page 277). You start with a chocolate bar. Yes, a candy bar! You know it's not going to get any better than that, right?
You add a bit of cocoa and heavy cream. It all gets melty and good -- i seriously considered eating it right off the spoon. But, Janet, being the voice of reason, talked me off the ledge (so to speak).

It's sorta weird. You have this melty, crunchy concoction that is way too soupy to be a frosting. Matter of fact, you can pour it like a glaze. Janet had made it earlier in the day and it needed more time to set up than we had, so we used our new favorite technique an ice water bath. In a couple minutes, it was a rich frosting. And, the pictures don't do it justice, it was just amazing.

After I arrived at Janet's I started to complain about the baking, making a cake and doing the whole process. It seemed daunting and unimportant. Half way through cooking the first cake we were both humming along like a well oiled machine -- she did the combining of the dry ingredients. I got the wet ones whisked together. Then we'd alternate who was the sous chef and it flowed.

It was after that happend a couple times that I realized the other defintion of discipline: doing something even though you really don't want to.

So, here's to discipline. Just leave the leather straps at home.