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.

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...