Aloha Bakers - Lemon Icebox Cake

This week's bake was light and frothy, except for one bit, which was hard and knotty. First, let it be said, that this is my kind of cake. Billed as an icebox cake, a term I usually associate with wafer cookies and whipped cream, but which really applies to any cake that is as much cream as cake and needs some refrigerator time to truly come into its destiny.
This little beauty started out with a light lemony sponge/angel food, baked in a tube pan. Mine came out slightly wet and salty, but very workable. Next, a lemon curd is mixed into whipped cream is mixed into a gelatinized meringue. All went well until the gelatinization process, which was also around where I shorted out my scale with some spillage. Since it was clear that everything did not weigh 57555@#@$@ grams, I had to go on back into volume measures, which always makes me grumpy. Then, the gelatin just seemed...too stiff. I added a bit more water, and heated it up some more, but in the end what I ended up with were many knotty rubbery lumps and a bit too much water in the whole, which leaked out over the next few days as it rested in the refrigerator. If you look carefully at the photo of the completed cake, you can see a gelatin lump (slightly browner) discoloring the lower right hand quadrant.

I certainly wouldn't have sold it at a bakery, but I would certainly make it again and not screw it up so much. It was much admired at my workplace, lumps and all.

Alpha Bakers - Lemon Almond Cheesecake

One of my favorite Rose cakes, the lemon almond bundt, reimagined in cheesecake form. A multi-step affair, but in the end, a simple one.

First, though, let's discuss something that concerns me. Why do so many cheesecakes have cake on the bottom? To me, the only truly acceptable cheesecake base is a crumb layer, graham cracker or, in a pinch, Oreo. Cake as the base of a cheesecake just seems like overkill, a waste of two good things in a combination that heightens neither. UPDATE: via the great RLB herself in the comments--"The reason for the cake layer is to absorb any of the leaking syrup as I don't like to add thickener to the filling though when I make cheesecakes without a base I sometimes either add a bit of cornstarch or replace each whole egg with 2 yolks."

 

Despite my doubts, I went ahead and made a nice spongy almond-filled base layer for this cake, and promptly forgot to put it in to the pan before the tangy lemony cream-cheesy sour cream filling (spiked with toasted almonds). It was an accident, truly. The cake bases, which could have been saved for future projects (ha), made very nice snacking over the next few days.

 

The only adornment this little devil got was a wash of lemon curd over the top--a quick curd that tasted like 'butter jelly,' according to Catherine, the model above. She was very happy with the cheesecake and with the strange peculiarity of my house, in which 'spare cake' is a thing. She particularly appreciated the almonds in the batter.

 

I took the rest of the cake to work, where one colleague deemed it 'lemoncious' and another told me that it should be in a bakery, but shut up quickly when I pointed out that then he'd have to pay for it.

 

Not my favorite cheesecake ever, but it's not like any cheesecake is a BAD cheesecake. Especially not when it doesn't have some stupid cake layer on the bottom.

Alpha Bakers -- Lemon Cranberry Tart

The winds of winter. So long anticipated, so long delayed. George R. R. Martin may not be on schedule (since when does genius follow a schedule?), and neither may I, but winter has come nonetheless, and up in the frozen northland of Western MA, I made a tart.  

It was a very tart tart. It was a tart who prepared. I had no scale, and something was amiss with the proportions for the cookie tart crust, so it wasn't the prettiest tart of them all, but hell, people. It was a fancy lemon curd tart that had patterns on it. Can I not satisfy you folks?

My mother's strainer was broken, so I strained the lemon curd through a coffee filter, which led to some stiff whisking and some loss of curd, not to mention some interesting shapes and patterns.

The final tart, of which I only got a blurry shot, wasn't the tidiest, but it was interesting. Mom's verdict: "Tres tasty. Melts in your mouth. Very festive." Dad claimed I'd outdone myself. They don't get too many sweets... 

Alpha Bakers - Lemon CreeMees

These were supposed to be Lemon Jammies, They are butter cookies enhanced with lemon zest, filled with, well...not lemon curd. Instead, I made Dorie Greenspan's (Pierre Herme's) lemon cream. 

Then I called them Lemon Creamies, and then that made me think of these. Now they're Lemon CreeMees. They were creamy (creemee). And delicious.

Alpha Bakers - Lemon Posset Sponge

A quick and easy recipe this week--or at least easy. One sponge cake (let's not kill ourselves and call it shortcake), covered in a quick lemon cream. Right up my street. A few special things:

1. The sponge included brown butter. Brown butter is a very good idea. Deb over at Smitten Kitchen tends to suggest brown butter even when it isn't called for. Since I have some leftover, I will probably take her advice soon.

2. The sponge is brushed with lemon syrup and then with apple jelly. There was no apple jelly to be had at the approximately 17 gourmet stores and delis near me, so I settled for pear. Pear jelly is also a very good idea.

The recipe was for individual sponges, but my Maryann pan is a single, and I was taking it to work anyway, so I just made the one. I had a few flour balls in the bottom but just picked them out with a knife tip.

3. Posset is fun. Posset is all of the medieval children's books I used to read. Posset is nursery sponge and jam and mysterious things people in books eat that I never really knew were things. Posset is just cream thickened with, in this case, sugar and Meyer lemon juice. Posset posset posset. Drink your posset. Posset is fun. My posset was creamy and nice, and a little mild for my taste. Regular lemons next time.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Lemon Loaf Cake

Tough day yesterday. Broke, breaking things. Also: Russians and Lemon Loaf Cake.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Woody's Lemon Luxury Cake

Baking is the butchest thing I do. To an outsider, it might seem to be all fluffy buttercream and sugar and spice, but on a day to day basis, it's burns and heavy lifting, precision and speed. Well, sometimes. And sometimes I bake at home, where I do stare down the occasional smoking caramel, but on the whole it's a lighter endeavor. It's hardly disaster-free, though.

My late foray into this week's Free Choice Cake, Woody's Lemon Luxury, was somewhat marred by the dive taken by one of the layers. But not really. I have a container full of cake crumbs, and the slightly shorter cake is plenty rich and pretty.

Both the cake and the buttercream have white chocolate in them, which adds significantly to the richness of both. I have a bunch of leftover buttercream and lemon curd left, so maybe some cupcakes or something lie in the future.

Science Shows: Lemon Does Not ALWAYS Conquer Sweetness

Quite often, I miss the Heavenly Cakes deadline, make the cake a few days late, and then don't post about it for months. Sometimes, the opposite happens--I page through the book looking for something to make for a sometime-in-the-future free choice. This post is an amalgam of these two very very serious events.

First, there was the Lemon Canadian Crown, made in stages (first ladyfingers, then lemon curd, then lemon cream....), frozen for over two months, and then eaten happily, without the meringue topping that had been holding off the finish. I just didn't want any meringue, and more to the point I knew the cake couldn't be re-frozen once it had meringue on, and that it would take more than a day to finish.

At the time that the Heavenly Cake Bakers made this cake, there was a lot of moaning and groaning and triumphal shouting about ladyfingers. For the record, I love making ladyfingers. I also love eating them, so I often have to make a double batch. They're sponge cake. Nuff said. That double batch thing helps in the difficult art of getting enough of them to be picturesque. As you see. The entire thing was very good, and not at all freezer-burned from all that storage. And Matt made the amazing scientific discovery that when eaten with a bit of ladyfinger, the lemon in the cream did NOT conquer the sweetness, and he finally understood the point of lemon and sugar combinations.

A few weeks later, Jill and I got hungry, and were hunting for a cake that could be made with the ingredients on hand. We settled on a free choice preview, the Black Chocolate Party Cake, a cocoa and walnut bundt with a Kahlua-cocoa syrup. Bitter and rich, this was a favorite, and will definitely be repeated.

Last of the catch-ups was the Quail Egg Indulgence Cake, which I made with plain old chicken eggs. It was crusty and delicious, very dense and rich.

Best of my love.

Tuesdays with Dorie Rewind: Lime Cream Tart

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Come to think of it, I don't know if I've ever posted this tart, though I've certainly posted the graham cracker crust version of it. This buttery citrus cream, a recipe from Pierre Herme, is so good that it appears three times in Baking: From My Home to Yours, in lemon, lime, and orange guises. While I'm eager to try the orange someday, for this Thanksgiving dessert, I gave the shoppers the option of the citrus of their choice, and they picked out lime.

Unlike the classic lime pie, a baked custard with condensed milk, this cream is a stovetop custard that is then blended with an undisclosed amount of butter until it emulsifies into a rich spoon-licker of a cold filling. The filling went into a somewhat sloppy cookie crust (next time we're back to graham cracker, early training can't be contradicted), and seemed to make everyone happy. We also had an apple crisp (somehow not as crispy as hoped), and a vanilla ice cream taste-off between two artisan brands that both had 'Island' somewhere in their names. I guess they have a lot of islands around Seattle here.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Lemon Meringue Cake

More than one person has recently confessed to me that although they consider me the most serious baker in their life, in their own work or social environments, they themselves are the ones called on for birthday cakes and fancy tarts. While I'm glad that we don't all work together, as our other co-workers would probably get very tired of us and our shuffling for mastery, I'm under no illusions that I'm the only fancy baker around. Many of my friends are extremely accomplished in the kitchen, and I eat their savory and sweet cooking regularly. I think I differ from them less in skill than in the depth of my obsession.

Every now and again, though, I do pull off a whopper. And this week's Heavenly Cake, a many-step Lemon Meringue Cake, was just such a show-stopper.  This is the kind of cake I love to make, many steps without too much butter.

The cake itself was a very light biscuit, or sponge. After it had cooled, I removed the top and bottom crust by pinching and rolling and peeling it, a very satisfying maneuver that reminded me of peeling sunburnt skin, which I regret to say is also an activity recently engaged in by me.

The denuded cakes were brushed with lemon syrup, sandwiched with leftover rhubarb curd (which tastes remarkably similar to lemon curd), and then covered in huge clouds of one of the best Italian meringues I've ever made. For once the syrup didn't clump everywhere! For once the meringue stayed white and didn't turn caramel colored! I am awesome. Also, the meringue had lemon juice right in it, a nice touch.

For the final flourish, the cake went into the oven at 500 degress, where it proceeded to complete its resemblence to its namesake pie by browning beautifully.

The cake came together perfectly, but a touch of anxiety was added by my old enemy, transportation. Any cookbook or pastry chef will tell you that you can't make a perfect meringue on a humid day. Unfortunately for me, if I wanted to wait for a dry day in Brooklyn I'd be waiting until November, so I just decided to give it a try. Shortly after frosting, I noticed the beginning of telltale cracks in my perfect cloudy billows, so I took drastic action, and whisked the cake into storage in our air-conditioned bedroom. I fretted about it for the next several hours, and indeed it didn't make it to its destination dinner party unharmed and crisp, but it did arrive nearly perfect, and was greatly admired, and eaten up. I never got a slice shot, but if there were one you would see that the meringue rises nearly an inch and a half above the cake, providing the final homage to lemon meringue pie.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Baby Lemon Cheesecakes

According to Lily, this last week has been Cheesecake Week at the bakery, everyone who comes in is fiending for cool creamy richness. Both of us are constantly bemused by these fleeting market trends--one week everyone wants whole wheat bread, the next they need cheesecake--but it's fun to watch them come and go. And luckily, this week's Heavenly Cake Bakers recipe was right in line with the trend--mini cheesecakes topped with lemon curd. Just the kind of creamy, impressive, twee creation that everyone wants. Too bad I ignored Rose's exhortation in the intro note and made only half the recipe. These flew off the shelf so fast that we might be making more of them very soon.

The cakes are easy, although there are a bunch of steps. Luckily, they're steps I like, such as making sponge cake and lemon curd.  The recipe starts with a small note indicating that one should begin by making the sponge. Several bakers missed the step, and then backtracked in surprise. I was lucky enough to catch it this time (although I've been forgetting everything right and left, so it was just luck, believe me), and whipped my egg whites, yolks, sugar, et al in style. I love sponge cake, and everything that didn't get cut out went straight into my mouth.

Once the sponge was made, I cut it into small circles (Lily came in while I was doing this with a jar lid and pointed out that she has a small box of round cutters in EVERY size. Jealous). Then the very simple cheesecake mix was mixed. It consists largely of sour cream, so it was whiter and creamier than any cheesecake I've ever made, causing one fellow baker to describe it as similar to the Jell-o mix variety. The cake mixture was poured over the biscuit rounds (in paper muffin cups in a regular muffin pan), and baked in a water bath for about 20 minutes.

I cooled the cakes for a day, and the next morning made lemon curd and poured it hot onto the cold cakes. I was a little low on curd (should've made the full recipe), but managed to make it come out even, and by dint of a small offset spatula, was able to peel off the wrappers and smooth the sides pretty successfully. And the last one was gone by 1:00 pm.

The success of the cheesecakes was a balm to my wounded baker's soul, as, owing to some poor flour purchasing on my part, the bread was an unmitigated disaster, with some of it refusing to rise at all and the rest lacking strength in the extreme. Most of it had to be written off. Walking by the store, I saw my most loyal customer, a bread loving Swiss fellow, looking awfully disappointed, and I hid. Next week it will all be better. And I already made the Palet D'or Gateau, so maybe I'll try my hand at some croissants.

Heavenly Cake Bakers

The wheel has spun again...
Time has gone by, dreams have risen and fallen, kitchen scales have balanced out the sands of life...and I have joined another baking group. For those of you keeping score, this is the fourth, although I regret to say that I didn't stick with the Daring Bakers long. I think this had to do with the regulated irregularity of it--once a month was too infrequent to get into. I could do the BBA challenge because it was entirely self-regulated, but having to get something on time just once a month didn't leave enough margin of error. I haven't quite finished the BBA challenge (the hurdle of two very poorly peer-reviewed breads is putting a damper on my final sprint), but I plan to, and then I plan to focus, and stick closely to Tuesdays with Dorie till the end.

At least, that was the plan until a friend's generosity landed me with a brand new, very special book--Cake Master Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes. A little glitzier and less endearingly geeky than her classic Cake Bible, Heavenly Cakes is a coffee-table style cookbook, aimed maybe a bit more at the ambitious non-professional, while retaining standards rigorous enough for anyone, pro or no. Whatever it is, I've been lugging it from room to room like a favorite stuffed animal.

A baking group is like a correspondence course--a slow mastery of technique in the privacy of one's own home, but in a blogging baking group, you get to share results and thoughts with all your classmates. I am lucky to have been allowed into the distinguished classmate company of the Heavenly Cake Bakers of Heavenly Cake Place. Might as well learn from the best, and Rose is the acknowledged expert on all things cake. This time, though, there's a bit of a twist, as Lily has agreed to allow me to make some of the cakes at the bakery, and put them in the case as one of a kind specials. As I hover in that pleasing void between amateur and professional baker, I think this is a very exciting step.

I started baking from the book the day that I received it, and so have already covered some of the older recipes that the group worked on before I joined, including the Golden Lemon Almond Cake (I added crystalized ginger, and ground my almonds with the skin still on for a slightly more rustic presentation, and the English Gingerbread Cake (with Lemon Butter Sauce)...and a version of the Southern (Manhattan) Coconut Cake on page 23, although the birthday girl preferred the classic seven minute icing to the Silk Meringue Buttercream Rose recommends.

This week, I entered the formal baking schedule with a 'Purim' cake, Rose's signature Lemon Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cake. I actually made this cake twice, because the first one broke coming out of the bundt pan (it's a tender, delicate cake, although reasonably easy to maneuver), and I was too proud to join a group without a perfect picture. Both times, though, the cake was superlative, and went a long way toward reconciling even Matt, who usually maintains that 'lemon conquers sweetness,' to lemon in dessert. This is about as Jewish a cake as you can get--only apple cake comes close, and so I feel less sad about having skipped my annual hamentaschen making than I could. While the cake style and flavors might be generally Jewish, though, the perfection of this version is all Rose. Tart, moist, crunchy, syrupy, and almost cottony, it is definitely the Platonic Ideal of lemon poppy cake.

One interesting baking note: the butter cakes in this book all use Rose's signature ingredient mixing sequence, which eschews creaming butter and sugar in favor of blending them right into the dry ingredients, then slowly moistening with the remaining elements. So far, so good, and it makes an easier job for my arthritic mixer.

So far, I've stayed pretty much in the bundt and unfrosted areas of the book, but all that changes next week, when the Chocolate Apricot Roll with Lacquer Glaze arrives to keep me on my semi-pro toes. Welcome to 'Mondays with Rosie,' as it were.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Honey Wheat (Germ) Cookies

 

As Laurie, who hosts TWD, guessed, the snowy weather and simple nature of February's recipes combined to make it a near certainty that all the recipes would be done weeks before posting. In my eagerness, I made nearly all of them before January was even over. These honey-wheat germ cookies, though, although the ones I was most eager to make, had to wait until I could buy bulk wheat germ ($0.19 for a quarter pound!) at Fairway. Luckily, the show I am working on will be performed on a small and wonderful barge about 100 yards from the Red Hook Fairway, and on a recent windy night the production team made a site visit. Following our cozy and delightful conference, full of wood, woodstoves, carpets, and marvelous things, a few of us detoured to grocery shop, and I got my germ.

I have been convulsed with laughter by the general assertion going around some of the TWD blogroll that these cookies  are 'healthy' (with a stick of butter and white sugar and white flour). I know the general connotation of wheat germ, but people, please. It's almost as funny as when people insist that brown sugar is healthier. Just for the record, unless what you have is some fancy cane juice product, brown sugar is white sugar that has had molasses or color re-added. It's delicious, and has more flavor, but healthy? Well, exactly as healthy as white sugar. 

However, I don't have any requirement that my cookies be 'healthy'.  I don't mind if they are, but I don't really care. After all, they're cookies. I guess if healthy is for you the curse word that some of my fellow bakers find it to be...I know, they don't have a problem with 'healthy,' it's the perceived 'crunchy' that's bothering people. While I'm not denying that there are some segments of the brown-rice-lentil-burger world that taste terrible, there are also some segments of the velveeta-hamburger-steak world that suck. Getting all aerated about 'healthy' food can sometimes be as lame as having a fit about food that's meatless, as if it needed to be hysterically highlighted...'this is a vegetarian lasagne...but I had to put some bacon in so my husband didn't whine...' As someone who didn't know that lasagne without meat needed special fanfare until I reached the age of 25 or so, I'm underwhelmed by such statements. 

Healthy or no, these cookies were wonderful, lemony and honeyed and crunchy and soft, and irresistible. Too bad I only made half the recipe. If anyone would like to make a whole batch, and I strongly recommend it, the recipe can be found here.

Pretty Much the Only Cupcake Post Ever Featured on Second Dinner

Or, my cousin gets married!

That was really the important part. But, as we waited eagerly for that to happen, my mother, Matt, and I spent two full days on a dream team cupcake production line, and turned out, if I do say so myself, an extremely impressive dessert extravaganza.

Here is the story of Wedding Summer '09, Preakness edition: Wedding Cupcakes.

So much to tell. So many pictures and thoughts. Good thing I'm almost a librarian. That means I can select and order--or censor if you prefer (I don't). Or, I could just be lazy and free-associate. I choose that.

First, a small meditation on the wedding cupcake. Surprisingly, it's actually more difficult to produce 250 cupcakes than one 90-person wedding cake (at least if the wedding cake is allowed to be a little rustic). Of course, it's hard to compare the two, especially when they were created in two entirely different kitchens and the cupcakes had to be transported to the venue, which the cake did not. The other major factor involved here was the recipe variety. The wedding cake required several batter mixings, but used only one base recipe for cake and for frosting. When it came to cupcakes, I overcomplicated it bit.

In the end, the great cupcake caper included four varieties of cake and three varieties of frosting:
  
Coconut Cake with Seven Minute Frosting
         
Rose Levy Berenbaum's White Velvet Cake with Wineberry Buttercream
              
Barts' Chocolate Cake with Mocha Buttercream

Lemon Cake with Lemon Buttercream (Sugar Sweet Sunshine Recipe)

For both the mocha buttercream and the wineberry I improvised using this Martha Stewart recipe for Strawberry Meringue Buttercream, and was very satisfied with the results, although heat and time constraints worked against it.

The wineberry version was slightly easier to work with than the chocolate, and held a firmer peak, possibly because of the added pectin from the wineberry jam.







My mother, who did the largest share of the frosting (this, she says is how she 'gets [her] ya-yas), became expert with the oversized tip pictured above, using one large squeeze and topping it off with a smaller one for the frilly design at right.


We used the same method for the mocha cupcakes, and sprinkled them with shaved chocolate. Later on, Matt also improvised a swirl adaptation of the frill. 

Although the process was certainly not  at peak efficiency, it was a lot of fun, and it would have been impossible without the complete and selfless support of my parents, who donated their kitchen to the messy, buttery, overheated, outlet-blowing enterprise, and then helped withevery facet of it from groceries to delivery, of Matt, who separated eggs, frosted, put up with me, took me swimming, and took most if not all of these beautiful pictures, of Nicki, who researched and procured six unique cakestands, and of Ellen, Hayat, Drew, and all the others who dropped by and pitched in.

Next time, I would streamline a bit, possibly making more of the cupcakes from the same cake recipe and then just varying the icings. Even the icings could have been restricted to those that used one frosting mode, but the overwhelmingly positive response to the Seven Minute Frosting, which can't be piped,  suggests that it was worth the trouble. The coconut cake recipe (to which I added coconut, it actually contains none) was better than the White Velvet cake, which staled quickly, but the advantage of making both of them was that one uses all yolks and one all whites. However, since all the frostings except the lemon buttercream used egg whites as well, the problem could have been better solved by not making any cake that involved egg whites, as we wound up with a large leftover jar of yolks, and I had to make challah a few days later.

Oh. And there was a wedding. I wore red lipstick. There was a tropical storm. And a photo booth. I picked out the weirdest horah ever (sorry Michelle). It was simple and friendly and ever so slightly awkward. It was sweeter than sweet.

It was just like Becky and Michelle, who are many things but above all good good people, and happy in one another. I was so lucky to be there, and equally lucky to get to hang out with the brides all week, and have swimming and questionable Chinese food. Lucky to have my sister home for a moment. Lucky in family and friends and swimming in lakes and swimming in butter. It was a good week.