Alpha Bakers -- ChocolaTea Cake

Chocolate cake, chocolate frosting. Perfect for drop off in the office of your choice. I still make an effort to gift baked goods to my former officemates from time to time, and they are appreciative.

Confirmed. Delicious. Also got an email saying it was one of the best another colleague had had. Simple and delicious wins every time. I didn't have the powdered tea, but I achieved a similar effect with a touch of citric acid in the ganache.  

Alpha Bakers -- Flo-Ro Elegance Cake

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Alpha Bakers: Double Damage Oblivion

This world is full of some very serious chocolate lovers. I am not one. I love chocolate as much as some of the next guys, but there are guys out there for whom a dessert without chocolate might as well be a flip flop. When offered soup, a friend of mine has the habit of answering, 'No, thank you, I don't need a beverage.' I have many friends who react in the same way when offered pie--pie being all very well, but utterly beside the point. This cake is for those people.



You know, those people. The ones who need a flourless cake sandwiched between two layers of light, fudgy cocoa cake lined with ganache to be happy. The ones who'd like some cake with their cake, please. This cake is for them (although it could be improved by a layer of chocolate mousse, maybe).

So, what you see here is what you get--a thin, eggy, flourless cake layer inside of Rose's Deep Chocolate Passion, a light oil and cocoa confection that has served as the base everything from wedding cakes to cupcakes. The flourless cake, the Chocolate Oblivion, is very rich and bitter (at least with the chocolate I used), and the Chocolate Passion is essentially an improved Hostess product. Light and simple. I can't speak to the ganache because I followed the variation and used heated and strained raspberry preserves, rounded out with a little pear jelly, to glue the whole confection together, and, there you have it.

Done and done. The workplace did not complain. I am going downstairs now to investigate the leftovers, and there will probably be some, as it was very intense, but nobody quarrels with chocolate around here.

Alpha Bakers -- Chocolate Pavarotti with Wicked Good Ganache

The wind is howling outside, the radiator is gurgling, and it's good to be inside. It seems like the ideal time for oatmeal, or cocoa. Instead, I bought two kinds of ice cream yesterday and made chocolate cake. I might be the only person in the world who likes oatmeal and cocoa more than chocolate cake, though not more than strawberry ice cream. Strawberry ice cream is fantastic. Why would anybody ever eat any kind of ice cream other than strawberry?

My deviant predilections aside, the Chocolate Pavarotti (so-called because it 'sings in the mouth') is a very nice cake. 

If you detected a bit of damning with faint praise there, your detector is working. The Pavarotti is a smooth, almost dense single layer, made with the addition of melted white chocolate (I used Trader Joe's chips). Perfectly delicious, a bit forgettable. More like my response to opera than Rose's. I always want to love opera more than I do. It's such spectacle, such grand location, such mystique and heavy wigs and wild feats of vocal daring, but ultimately, I find it slow. I want more choreography. I want the story to move more quickly. I was raised on the American musical, not the opera, and there's very little help for it now. 

As for the 'Wicked Good' ganache, it is indeed very good ganache. I find this unsurprising, because the name indicates that it is clearly from Massachusetts, and all things from Massachusetts are excellent, including yours truly. While I continue to refuse to make ganache in the food processor if it is not a special occasion, I followed all of the other meticulous steps to make this one carefully. Corn syrup makes it shiny, cream makes it rich. In this case the cream was not dairy but coconut cream, lightened with a bit of coconut milk. I've found that for most things coconut will make a good substitute--it's fatty and coconut oil hardens up nicely at a cool room temperature. The substitution wasn't a matter of avoiding dairy, just a matter of realizing that there was no cream in the house and I wasn't going out for groceries again.

We ate the cake as part of an impromptu Valentine's Day celebration that included a feverish and cranky baby, sauteed greens and macaroni and cheese, and highlights from High Fidelity ('it. was. called. James') and X-Men: Days of Future Past. I can't talk about High Fidelity right now, that would take most of seven more posts and some sobbing. X-Men, on the other hand, is great fun, but apparently impossible to follow if you have never seen or read anything about it before. Days of Future Past spends an absurd amount of time on expositing its own absurd plot, but expects you to know exactly who its characters are and what they're up to already. I do, but a certain friend who shall not be named Miriam was unable to master even the basics of their names and relationships. "They all have three names and two ages," she very reasonably complained, and "also Katya WHY is it called a Pavarotti?" 

A little recourse to the book and I was able to answer that question (see above), but I couldn't convince her not to call Magneto 'Cogneto' (actually a very decent amalgam of Professor X and Magneto) or Incognito. Everyone liked the cake, at least. One person said that its dense texture and very sweet filling (I added some raspberry cream cheese frosting) made it taste 'like a candy bar.' So there you have it. Opera plus comics plus indie geekery = chocolate cake that tastes like candy bars. Don't say you weren't warned.

Alpha Bakers -- Chocolate Cuddle Cake

Drifting into 2015...
In my storytimes at the library, I talk. A lot. Most of it goes over the heads of the kids, but at my best moments I like to think that I'm embellishing their worlds with rich language. In the winter, I find myself using words that fall in the 'hibernation' spectrum: snuggle, huddle, wiggle, shelter, and cuddle. I like to imagine us as a pile of soft sleepy baby bears under a pile of leaves, warm and safe for winter.

In that kind of mindset, the Chocolate Cuddle Cake from The Baking Bible couldn't be better named. What can I say? I come from a family that has a tendency to lie in a heap, frequently while watching A League of Their Own. Since some of my heap-mates recently had a baby bear of their own, I was on my own for this baking, and while I can't say I hit a home run, I made it around the bases (mixed metaphor alert! don't care!).

The Chocolate Cuddle is a pillowy soft cocoa chiffon, baked in a parchement-lined springform (see above). Aside from some lazy egg-white mixing (see white spot in photo below), mine came out perfectly. I did not measure how tall it was, because, as our bake-through leader would say 'there's nothing I can do about it now'. I did trim the sides a bit to ensure an even rise, as it sagged a bit like a turban or a decorative squash.
The lovely squashy cake was then frosted with a quick ganache--I followed Rose's recipe but made mine on the stovetop instead of the food processor. I notice a slight difference in texture but it's not enough to make me get out my food processor. All extra ganache becomes truffles, by royal decree.

Things were going so well and then I tried to make the caramel whipped cream, which sounds like a good idea, and probably is, except that I screwed it up royally. Royally as in epically, not as in by royal decree. I am not, in fact, royalty.

Ideally, the caramel whipped cream goes like this:
1. Make caramel.
2. Soften gelatin.
3. Whip cream.
4. Whip in the caramel and the gelatin.
5. Oooh, ahh, frost.

Instead, the whole thing seized miserably and looked like vomit.

Note to self, be more careful of temperatures. I made some half-hearted attempts at rescue, but in the end I just whipped up a little extra cream, added a bit of the lumpy mixture to it, and frosted away. Next time.

It was very pretty all the same--a light and easy cake to carry, make, and eat. One co-worker commented that its spongey nature made it a bit difficult to cut, but everyone seemed to manage all right in the end. There you have it.

Please do forgive any whiff of brimstone or verbal loopiness in this post--I'm high as an off-brand DayQuil kite can be, and most of my internal monologue looks like this.

"I'm Leslie Monster, and this is Nightline."