Cakes and Cakes!

Baking phases come and go in waves. Inspired by my decorating session with Kristen and Jill, and by the ever-rolling tide of birthdays that fill the spring and summer months in my families, I've been making a lot of cake.

I've also been thinking more about cake, in the sense of giving more thought to the creation of unusual or special taste/texture combinations, rather than just following someone else's recipe. It's easy to over-reach in this vein--most people are happiest with pound cake and whipped cream, or devil's food with fudge. While I'm more than happy to whip up whatever makes the birthday person happiest (my preferred birthday cake is, I'll remind you, biscuits with whipped cream and ample berries), a birthday is a good excuse to work up a new speciality, or a surprise.

When planning a cake, I usually begin with a few pointers from the intended recipient or their spokespeople (i.e. 'Joe loves everything chocolate, but hates nuts.' 'Jane was really excited about some custard she had last year in Italy.') Sometimes, though, people give me too much freedom, and my imagination takes some bold leaps. This year, I was asked to make a birthday cake for my cousin Sophie, to be served at a family reunion. When I asked about her preferences, I was informed that she was a 'good eater,' and liked everything, and that I shouldn't consult her since it could then be a surprise. While the phrase 'good eater' is more associated in my mind with two-year-olds and meat animals than with my lovely 25-year-old cousin, I took the point. The options were endless.

My first idea was a riff on this ever-popular birthday cake, stolen from Smitten Kitchen and wildly popular among my friends (requested for 3 separate birthdays in 2012, if you're counting). Instead of chocolate cake with peanut butter cream cheese frosting and peanut butter chocolate ganache, I would alternate layers of chocolate and banana cake, and top it with the peanut butter cream cheese frosting. For the cake layers, I used Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipes for 'Miette's Tomboy' and banana cake, from Rose's Heavenly Cakes. For sanity's sake, I made six-inch cakes. The result (above) was great but a little on the tooth-achingly sweet side (my co-workers disagreed).

Using the remaining layers from the first cake, I made another. Same cakes, different buttercream. To add a little more austerity (heh) I made a caramel silk meringue buttercream. Not austere at all, actually, but the burnt sugar does cut the richness a bit.

This was an easier cake to work with, and more stable at warm temperatures than the cream cheese, but I did get some comments noting that the buttercream was overkill, and that a thin chocolate glaze might be more appropriate. However, this comment did come from someone who has frequently suggested that strawberry ice cream and/or pie would be better with chocolate, so the grain of salt was firmly in place.

It is true, though, that buttercream can be very very rich, and maybe it was all just shaping up to be a bit too much. I considered all-banana, with mango buttercream, but got some late-breaking news that banana might not be the birthday girl's favorite.

After toying with this for the better part of two weeks, I ultimately decided to simplify. For cake, I went all chocolate (double recipe of Miette's tomboy, baked in 8" pans, split into four layers). Late at night, I made the final choice: orange or strawberry buttercream? For a five year old's birthday party (or mine), I would have gone with strawberry, but I was assured by several sources that orange would be more elegant and more generally preferred. The final cake, pictured below after 25 puncture wounds, was chocolate with orange mousseline buttercream, orange curd, and pistachio cream (from a jar that has been taking up cupboard space--more on cleaning out the cupboard shortly).

Birthdays are one thing, but I also make cakes for no reason at all when I get in this mood, as witnesseth the following masterpiece--Almond Shamah Chiffon (also from Rose's Heavenly Cakes) cake with an apricot mousseline. This is a slightly moister chiffon cake made with almond flour. I think people were a little bit frightened by the lipstick redness of the buttercream, but the cake layers, moistened with a light soaking syrup, were perfectly textured.

Lessons with Kristen II: Petit Fours

Petit Fours (© Jill Frutkin)

 Some of my loyal followers (is anyone still reading this blog? hello? hello?) may be under the entirely mistaken impression that I'm a baking master. After all, I make a lot of cake. And it looks pretty nice on this blog.

I'll admit it, I have some skills, including making things that taste fabulous, and other things that obey the laws of chemistry, but there's one area that I haven't come close to mastering. This area, arguably the most important in pastry, is aesthetics. I make bundt cakes. I make pies, and my three layer cakes aren't a complete disaster, but when it comes to inspired and masterful presentation, most of the baking population of the world leaves me in the dust. Marzipan flowers and shining ribbons? Fondant animals? Elegant composition? Cakes that resemble anything other than cake? This is another world altogether.

The truth is that I'm not that aesthetically gifted in any area of my life. Framed pictures would lean against the wall forever if I were left to my own devices when I move. I can dress myself, but am baffled by daily fashion. I never plate anything.

The upside to this general visual vagueness on my part, though, is that I'm quick to appreciate and admire the efforts of others, to marvel at their superpowers, and, at least in pastry, to be happy to learn from them with minimal ego, and go about squishing out buttercream roses and marzipan flowers with abandon.

Of my many aesthetically gifted friends, there are one or two who share my particular brand of dorkiness*, and some of the most beautiful cakes I've seen in the last few years have come from the hands of Kristen. Like me, Kristen is more or less self-taught, although she decorated cakes professionally for a few years. She's a talented and in-demand actress, but in the quieter parts of her schedule has managed to become an exceptional baker and decorator. (Really, buy her cakes.)  Kristen's work goes beyond rote skill--she's imaginative (my downfall as a baker), and visually inspired by a wide range of beautiful things.  Still, because she's a perfectionist, she isn't satisfied with what she knows, she wants to make her cakes better and better. After talking cake at parties for a few years, we decided it was time to take our combined talents into the kitchen. Modestly, she called it a skillshare (I teach texture and taste, she teaches making stuff pretty), but I think I'm getting the best of the deal. Watching Kristen bake is a revelation--her fingers and her mind move so quickly.

A lovely evening: Ladies Bake  (© Jill Frutkin)

Also she's beautiful and funny and interested in stupid chemistry and makes killer grilled cheese.
Our first meeting went straight to the basics--buttercream roses and yellow cake. For our second, Kristen suggested petit fours. For flower painting and other general prettifying, we brought in Jill, who loves to mess with things and get sticky.

The evening was a much-needed respite from a long week, with Chambord Royale, glittery dust everywhere, and much weepy watching of NBC as a friend's block became the epicenter of a citywide manhunt (no more on this for now, if there's one thing I learned from the news media this week, it's that there's no shame in waiting a goddamned minute to share how you feel and what you know (or don't) about a complex and painful event. I did not learn this by example). In the process, we made some quite lovely little cakes.

Traditional petit fours seem to be some sort of genoise, cut into small squares, sometimes filled with jam or soaked in syrup, and then covered in some kind of frosting--marzipan, fondant, poured fondant. Kristen was interested in trying poured fondant, made from sugar, corn syrup, and water. This kind of icing is easy to make but somewhat difficult to work with, as it hardens VERY fast. For the base, we used this almond cake from Dorie Greenspan's Paris Sweets.

I was rushed and a little scattered in making the cake, so it probably came out a bit more dense than it could have, with a few tunnels, but anything that is mostly almond paste will never be bad. The real work of decorating was concentrated in the marzipan flower making. Using marzipan, food coloring, and some nifty little flower-punchers, we made little flowers, and then Jill painstakingly painted each flower with gold dust and popped dragees in for the centers. I learned how to pronounce dragee. 

The layout.  (© Jill Frutkin)

The finished products were a little haphazard, as we'd all had a bit of cava by that point, but perfectly lovely, no thanks to me. But now I know more things, and I can't wait to see what our next project will be. Meanwhile, my mother was on an entirely different edible art quest--details to come. I'll just say that it involved Shackleton, celery, gummi penguins, and, of course, Jell-O.

I can't say I'll ever be a perfectionist, but I am lucky to share the world people who care passionately, and make good art.

*Can't stop baking.

Making Things Up

I've been making a lot of cake. There is buttercream in my dreams. After three little chocolate cakes in a row, it all started to tasted like Ho-Hos to me. I started to yearn for something white and fluffy, something with jam and creaminess. In a fit of perversity, I thought up the cake below--honey buttercream, rhubarb curd, crabapple jam, and buttery cake. 

All the recipes are based on Rose Levy Beranbaum's, though many are a bit adapted. The honey buttercream, from The Cake Bible, was good but I found it overwhelmingly buttery, and not strong enough on the honey, even after I beat in about a quarter of a cup of extra honey.

I decided that as long as I had all this soft buttercream and not enough sleep, the time was ripe to learn some flower piping techniques. I tried for sweet peas and roses, and...well, got some fluffy piles. Maybe next time I'll go with some stiffer frosting.

Pretty in pink.

Oh, by the way, this week's heavenly cake was the Swedish Pear and Almond Cream bundt, which I made a while ago.

Happy Birthday, Christina's Dad

It's been a while since I featured a guest post, but it was worth the wait. This one is a sweet doozy (yes, more cake) from an old friend and one of my most faithful readers and troubleshooters, Christina.

Hello Second Dinner readers!  Katya lived across the hall from me way back during our freshman year of college . . . and I have lots of fond memories of Katya that involve food.  She baked cookies in the grimy dorm lounge, hosted latke parties every Hanukkah, and spent lots of time talking with me about Vidalia onions and pomegranates.  So I’ve been following her adventures here with interest.

I just entered a period of "funemployment" after three years of long hours at work, and so I’m making up for lost time in the kitchen.  Now, I’m a pretty good cook and an okay amateur baker.  But even though my cakes always taste fine, they look like they were beaten with the ugly stick.  Uneven layers, cracks, crumbs in the frosting – can you say "hot mess"?

Imagine my surprise when I was able to produce the following for my dad’s birthday.

For the first time ever, I managed to bake a cake with a lovely shiny coat of frosting and no messy crumbs poking through!  I was so ecstatic that I had to share my good news with Katya, who kindly offered to display my efforts here. 

I followed the chocolate layer cake recipe featured at Smitten Kitchen (using the adaptations for 9-inch cake pans) and it baked up like a dream.  The layers were nice and even, and super-moist.  I made sure to thunk the pans on the counter a few times before baking as per the tips over at SK.

Things always go awry for me once it comes time to frost, probably due to my lack of patience.  I’m bad at crumb coats and always have trouble spreading buttercream without ripping off layers of crumbs and getting them scattered all over the place.  So, this time, I made sure to bake the cake the day before my dad’s birthday in hopes that the layers would be easier to work with at frosting time.  I cooled the layers completely before wrapping them in plastic wrap and then left them in the fridge for 24 hours.  I also decided to try a chocolate sour cream frosting (again featured at Smitten Kitchen) in hopes that I would find it more amenable to spreading. Well, it worked like a charm.  Frosting this cake was practically effortless since the frosting was so light and easy to work with.  Nary a crumb peeked through AND it was absolutely delicious.

My dad loved the cake and thought it tasted even better on day two than on the day it was cut.  I think the taste of the sour cream kind of mellowed out a little and melded better with the cake layers.  But the best thing about this cake is that it has magical properties.  We were able to keep this cake under a dome in the fridge for TWO weeks with no signs of it going bad or getting a stale taste.  (My mom can’t eat chocolate and I am limiting my consumption of sweets, so there was a lot of cake left for my dad to tackle.)  This is the everlasting gobstopper of birthday cakes!

Many thanks to Katya for letting me guest blog and share my cake-baking excitement.  At her urging, and with some trepidation, I will attempt pane genzanese next!

Cake Withdrawal

It's been nearly a month since I made a cake.

Well, not exactly. There was that honeycake, and that apple-turnip-carrot cake...

Okay, but you know what I mean, a cake cake.


That's kind of like when you like like a boy. There's just a little more frosting and filling and lemons around when it's a cake cake. But after all, it's not like I'm just going to whip up fully frosted layer cakes every week.

Why not, you ask? I am known for unprompted and seemingly superfluous feats of dessert around here.
Even for me, though, a full on layer cake with no excuse whatsoever does seem a little much.


That's a hint, by the way. I'm dying for an excuse. Please, somebody, have a birthday, or a baby, or a wedding, or at least a dinner party. This commission thing is fun, and I'm trying to build myself a portfolio and a reputation. Throw me a bone here.

In the meantime, here are some more pictures of Stacey and Avi's wedding cake to keep your appetite whetted. If you're anything like me, your attention will be immediately diverted from the cake toward the enormous bowl of whipped cream sitting just behind it. Seriously, the caterers were outstanding.

Mother of the Bride Cake

Haven't heard about wedding cake for a little while, have we? Just to get up to date, since we last canvassed the subject, I did a cupcake tasting for Becky, flubbed two batches of Rose Levy Berenbaum's Silk Meringue Buttercream because my candy thermometer was broken (I overcooked the sugar and they wound up with little burned caramel pieces in them--not the worst fate), visited New York Cake and Baking Supply, and waffled back and forth about cake shapes, tiering, flavors and all the rest some more.

Sophie and I found beautiful cupcake wrappers that look a little like white tulips. They may, in fact, just be circles of parchment nicely folded up, and in that case are far too expensive, but they are pretty. (Turns out that they are not so much overpriced in general as overpriced at NY Cake and Baking, here they are for much less, and in bulk) They would hide the icing a bit, but imagine them all lined up on tiered stands, or arranged on one of those weird candelabra stands they make now. I think we may have hit on a way to make a beautiful wedding display that doesn't involve concentric circles of different colored cupcakes.
For Stacey and Avi, once I'd tested a bunch of cakes, I decided to emulate Deb at Smitten Kitchen and make a buttermilk cake, using a filling of lemon curd, lemon buttercream from Sugar Sweet Sunshine (that sweet, crunchy, old-fashioned kind), and Dorie Greenspan's Lemon Cream (kind of a tarter, lighter lemon curd), and fresh sliced strawberries. I couldn't go forward, though, until they'd had some tasting and testing to work out the kinks.

For one reason or another, our grand tasting has kept being postponed. The main problem is that we never seem to be able to all gather in the same place at the same time, so this week, with Stacey's mom coming to town for a flying dress fitting and visit, we circumvented that issue with a well-timed delivery. I made a sample cake at my house, chilled it, and dropped it off with Stacey at work, where she put it in the freezer, took it to a play, and then took it home for a tasting.

Here is the sample cake (6 inch-diameter, two layers cut into four), assembled but unfrosted. Looking at it now, I see that I really need to improve my layer cutting skills, these are seriously cattywampus. The filling between the first and second layers is lemon cream, in the middle is a layer of rhubarb jam (yes homemade!) and buttercream, and the top is lemon cream again. Once it was iced, I practiced my piping skills and made vines and leaves all over it. In slightly more thought out and practiced form, I think this is an excellent decorating motif for the real cake--maybe I'll draw a prototype. And I'm getting better at making leaves and vines.
I probably won't write 'Hi Anne' on the finished product, but you never know. I am pretty good at writing on cake.Initial response, in form of text message, was encouraging:

"Success! Amazing! We are taking photos. Yummy! The cream froze and defrosted beautifully. More tmw."

I'll update soon with more detailed comment and possibly some more photos. It's good to know that the initial efforts are at least moving in the right direction. I do worry, but why worry? It's cake! Everyone loves it no matter what it's like, and I always forget that in my perfectionist haze.