Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Raspberry Trifle Goes to the Park

This weekend was a banner weekend. I had not one, but two days off. It was heaven.

On Sunday, I puttered about all day, spoke to no one, and made two cakes. One was a wedding cake prototype for Jessica and Christopher. More on this later. The other was this trifle. I made half the recipe, and tucked it into a convenient vase for transport.

I made a few changes in the various components, based on the contents of the refrigerator. The final product was composed of Moist Chocolate Genoise, apricot preserves, creme anglaise made with cream, milk, coconut milk and the dregs of the milk chocolate ganache syrup left over from the wedding cake prototyping (it was in the glass measuring cup I used, hence the brownish flavor), and raspberries. I was going to make the raspberry whipped cream topping, but ran out of room in the container.

After I made the trifle, I felt ambivalent about taking it to a picnic in the park on a hot day, and put a daisy cake (visible behind) into the oven. However, when I emailed my concern to Stacey, her response was, and I quote, "Are you f*ING kidding me? I have been dreaming about trifle all day and night. Put it in a tub, I am bringing my spoon!!!!!" I brought the trifle. Avi took pictures of it with his new camera. All went well.

In the end, it was good that we had two cakes, because all of the lunch that we brought along was disgustingly healthy, including this salad from Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Every Day that has been obsessing me, quinoa cakes, egg salad, and roasted asparagus. On the way to the park, I realized how lame it was that we didn't even have a single bag of potato chips or something. Next time, barbeque sauce.

3 comments:

evil cake lady said...

that salad looks amazing, no wonder you are obsessed with it! i love how adventurous you got with the custard and it looks like it turned out great. what a perfect picnic food, yum!

Jenn said...

Funny post Katya. Funny that the picnic has all healthy food - isn't picnic an excuse to "binge" on bbq meats and stuff?

I thought it's awesome that you use up all the ingredients. How brave you are! And they work well together!

The salad looks amazing - is that cookbook good?

Katya said...

Jenn, the cookbook is good--it seemed a little underwhelming at first but it's been an inspirational push back to the kind of cooking I grew up with (straight Moosewood), and more importantly, everything I've made from it has been a cut above.