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 - Dattelkonfekt

German baking is a great thing. I feel cozy just thinking of it. In my mind, German bakeries are full of dark, sour bread and gingerbread. Stodgy anise and apple filled yeasted pastry. In this mind palace of mine, all German dessert is half breakfast, which is exactly how I like my dessert. Between that and my grandmother's signature kompot, I am a true daughter of my Eastern European ancestry. But we knew that by now, of course. Can't wait for that Polish Princess (next week's recipe, a riff on a modern Polish status cake). I'm also pretty excited for this book.

Dattelkonfekt has many of the ingredients I love--meringue, sturdy sweetness, simplicity--and although I'm not usually given to the sticky sweetness of dates, I do eat more of them around Passover, especially when  I'm feeling Sephardic. So, in a way, this cookie links my Jewish identities. It's a perfect Passover treat, in that it's both flourless and kind of tastes like charoset, at least the date/orange kind I've been making in recent years. That said, my mind has been kind of elsewhere, and I baked this recipe late and took no pictures, and messed around with it.

The original recipe calls for an equal amount of dates and almonds, ground finely and folded into a sturdy egg white meringue with sugar and vanilla and not much else. My food processor was a bit too small for the date mixture, so I ended up with some lumps, although I helped out with my hands. I had no almonds, so I ground up a pile of walnuts. Walnuts are more oily than almonds, so my date mixture remained lumpy, but I thought their bitter edge cut the dates nicely. I also ran out of white sugar, so a little brown sugar entered the mix, which added moisture (bad in a meringue) and also made the cookies more prone to burning. It did add another darker flavor element, though, which worked.

I baked on a humid day, and had the aforementioned extra moisture, so it was no surprise that my cookies came out flat and chewy. They were no beauty queens, but they had a kind of health food cookie satisfaction (basically sugar). I took them to work and put them on the break room table, then noticed there were several bags of oreos there, left over from a book club meeting. I ate six oreos and left the dattelkonfekt. True story.*

*It was probably more like 7 or 8 oreos. I love oreos.

Edible Books: An Extraordinary Journey of Bravery, Endurance, and Jell-O

 The following is a guest post from my mother, Joan. My parents have a long history of diorama-making and Jell-O sculpting, but a few weeks ago they really outdid themselves. I'll let her tell the story, and I'll only add that there are few things more fabulous than calling up your folks on a routine Saturday to hear that they are deep in rigging a ship with spaghetti and celery threads. My parents are now heroes in my office, and we all have ideas for their next act. (Did I mention I work in the Youth and Family Services Office of a large library system?)

Our first entry in our local library’s seventh annual Edible Book contest was a lot of fun. The object of the event is to represent a book or literary genre with a 100% edible creation. This event is not unique to our library. Here is the blurb from the library’s website:

“The Edible Book Event began in 1999, when co-founder Judith Holmberg, of Santa Monica, California, got the idea during a Thanksgiving dinner with book artists. Since that time it has grown and become an international event. The festival honors French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), famous for his book, The Physiology of Taste, a witty meditation on food. His birth date is April 1st. He wrote:
The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star.

Since 1999, Edible Book events have been held in places as far-flung as Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Russia. In most cities where Edible Book events are held, the sponsors are art centers, academic institutions, restaurants, and book arts spaces. Northampton was one of the first places where a LIBRARY hosted the event!”

*The original edible book event website is: books2eat.com

We decided to merge two of Stan’s favorite things – the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s amazing “Endurance” expedition in Antartica, and Jell-O. Spurred on by expedition chronicler Frank Hurley’s extraordinary photographs, we threw ourselves into our project. We had several days to test the properties of jello and meringue and learn how they coexisted. Lots of science experiments balancing heat and cold and timing.

 We were late to this game, only deciding to participate a week prior to event, so we had to source our ‘extras’ locally. Apparently, one can buy everything in gummi form online, but we were lucky to snag some gummi penguins in the downtown candy store.

Tiny people were challenging. Joan wanted to omit them altogether but Stan insisted that the story was one of human survival and they were important, thus the marzipan weirdly trollish forms.(Katya's note: I came down on my mother's side of this one--the people could have been still inside the boat. When she despairingly described her efforts as looking like 'gingerbread men sitting down,' I sympathized, but our resident Shackleton expert had the final say.)

The shipwreck was Joan’s favorite part, using celery strings to tie the spaghetti masts and rice paper sail onto the carved chocolate hull.

Most fun of all? Watching the kids eat the books at the end of the contest.
Here are some of our favorite other fabulous entries.

Blueberries for Sal! Chocolate cake with rich fudge frosting.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds. No word on what kind of pie it is.

And, for the aaarghh factor, a Catcher in the Rye.
Note the yellow bit on the side, which is a part of the striped cover
of the Little, Brown paperback edition.

(Katya's note: This whole adventure was extremely inspiring to me, and I am hoping to make many future cakes based on my favourite books. Most of my favourite books spell 'favourite' that way...is it any wonder I spell British? Taking all requests for children's book themed party favours.)

Tuesdays with Dorie: Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise

This over-the-top little confection is one of my favorite pictures in the book, and the geek in me revels in the complicated component prep and assembly. The dessert itself was good, but I think I'm a purist--give me my roasted pineapple plain. But this was very fun to make.

Coconut and almond meringue circles, layered with a creamy frosting and roasted pineapple. Dorie's creamy frosting was a white chocolate ganache, which I actually bought the chocolate for, but then decided to switch out for one layer of greek yogurt and two layers of Dorie's amazing lemon cream, which I had made to fill the sample wedding cake (see last week). The result was a little different than what the original recipe would have given me, but the technique was the same, and it looked lovely and sliced cleanly. Next time, if I could get past just shoving fistfuls of roasted pineapple into my mouth, I would leave out the white chocolate and do this with plain, very lightly sweetened whipped cream.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Devil's Food White-Out Cake

When I go to type 'Tuesdays with Dorie' into the post title, a long list of remembered possibilities shows up. I've been doing this a while. Lately, my Tuesdays with Dorie adventures have been a little sedate, half-recipe quickies thrown together out of a sense of duty, usually at the last minute. They've been good the last few weeks, but unmemorable. I keep it up, though, not out of guilt, but out of the real pleasure I get from a project continued, from the real effort to stay with this book, get to know this book, and not just flit off to one of my million other cookbooks. I'm spending some good time with Dorie here, learning her style, expanding mine, tweaking (why does everyone in the blog world seem to think this is spelled 'tweeking'? That drives me mad) and just letting the TWD current carry me.

This week's challenge, while quick, but anything but half strength. A full sized layer cake covered in billowy marshmallow can only be called full on baking. I hadn't given the cake much thought at first, but when a newly-vegan friend mentioned last week that it was her birthday, I thought I would do what I often do, and try to use my TWD assignment for an occasion, killing the proverbial two birds (except vegan-the proverbial seitan in the hand?). I searched out a bunch of vegan recipes and advice on substitutes, and somewhere in the investigation I lost sight of the original recipe and just made a new one, entirely forgetting that the plan had been adaptation. The vegan cake was surprisingly successful, especially given that it consisted largely of beets and soy yogurt, and I'll get to that in the next post, but the devils were not satisfied. They wanted their cake the way they wanted it.

In the blur of getting up to frost the vegan cake on Sunday morning, the devils finally had their say.The Devil's Food White-Out Cake just had to be made, and I had to be at rehearsal by noon, so it had to be made fast.

Luckily, it's a pretty simple recipe, and I'm getting pretty good, so I just whipped it out. Often baking in a hurry leaves me with mediocre product, but this time I was in the zone and my guardian devil was watching, and the results were near perfect. The cake is a simple devil's food, with both cocoa and melted chocolate, and it bakes quickly. The frosting is an Italian meringue, where a thick hot sugar syrup is whipped into a pile of already-whipped egg whites. I have had varying success with with this method, but this time it was perfect. When the syrup is added, the egg whites nearly double in height, and it's truly satisfying (and so light, compared to classic buttercream).The final product, sprinkled with crumbs from the layer trimmings, was a triumph of classic American cake, huge and sweet and ridiculous and squashy. The vegan cake looked elegant and slightly appalled next to this fluffy sticky monstrosity, but both were appreciated at rehearsal.