Alpha Bakers -- Cream Cheese Butter Cake

Nothing to see here, really. Cream cheese butter cake is more for eating than looking at. I went simple, frosting it in the pan (but with luscious lemon cream, my favorite), and serving it with forks. This dense, rich, pound-cake style sheet cake got no complaints. Even after sitting in the refrigerator for a few days, it was chosen over the blueberry pie sitting next to it by everyone at the table. That's the power of cake.

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.

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.

Happy Birthday, JB

Photo by Avi Glickstein.

In Julie & Julia, Julie Powell describes her friend Isabel's wedding cake as 'vertiginously sloppy,' a description I think is very apt to this cake (and most cakes I make). JB's birthday cake (and Rob's before hers) was a pretty straight rendition of this cake. It's stupidly easy to make, especially the addictive peanut butter cream cheese frosting, and usually garners hyperbolic response. I highly recommend it.

Photo by Avi Glickstein.

Photo by Avi Glickstein.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Rose Red Velvet

Just a little red velvet cake, chilling out at work.

Most people who know me know that my personal dessert pantheon looks something like PIE! CUSTARD! FRUIT! COOKIES! ... cake. Every now and again, though, I get a strong urge to bake and frost something tall, fluffy, and all-American. Red Velvet cake, while not my favorite, fits the bill perfectly, with the additional perk of being covered in cream cheese frosting, which I prefer over buttercream. I have made Rose's white chocolate cream cheese frosting before, and found it a little grainy and thin. For this batch, I used a recipe from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, a shelf staple at my house.

I made this little fella and took it to work last week, where messy as it was (I undershot the confectioner's sugar quotient needed for the frosting), it was appreciated.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: White Gold Passion Genoise

Strangely, not my favorite of the Heavenly Cakes. For some reason, Rose and I seem to part ways when the frosting involves cream cheese, which doesn't even make sense, as all cream cheese frosting should be delicious. The cake was a bit dense, which was my fault, as I got the mixing instructions backward and mixed all the egg whites into the butter, deflating them quite a bit.

The frosting was ok, and the passion curd, as always, was amazing. I had it all over my breakfast muffins for days, and am definitely trying to worm it into the wedding cake. The flecks in the passion fruit curd are because I made it with the leftover brown butter. The leftover syrup was spectacular in selzer. I think next time I'll skip the whole cake and just make stuff with passion fruit.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Free Choice Carrot Cake

Jill got to pick out this week's free choice cake, and after some thought she selected carrot cake. Rose's version is very sweet, filled with carrots and big fat raisins.

Rose pairs the cake with her Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting, but as I hadn't had much luck with that when I made it for the Banana Refrigerator Cake (and didn't have any white chocolate), I went with Dorie Greenspan's fairly classic recipe for cream cheese frosting.

My sister, on tasting it: "You should have made a cream cheese frosting."
Me: "I did. It is."
Liana: "Oh. It tastes like yogurt."

Jill was very pleased, and took these lovely photos for me. I made a small cake, proportional to the amount of carrots I had in house (approximately 1/3 of the recipe), and it didn't last very long at all.

I'm baking and cooking a lot, but also looking forward to a week in Lisbon, letting all the bakeries there bake for me. Eggy pastries, here I come.