Alpha Bakers - Luxury Chocolate Buttercrunch Toffee

The name says it all. What we have here is some pretty good toffee covered (on both sides!) with chocolate and dipped (on both sides!) in nuts. Madness. Delicious.

The only change I made to the recipe was running out of corn syrup, so I substituted about 2/3 molasses, which worked out because I didn't have the specified brown sugar anyway, so a little molasses was needed. It had no effect on the texture and little on the taste. This was universally loved, although I found it a little sweet and would use a darker chocolate next time. According to my co-worker, the teen shelvers just stood around saying 'mmmmmm,' and one told me that 'chocolate is [her] best friend and [her] boyfriend.' My boyfriend, who as you know generally avoids sweets, but has a weakness for salty toffee and Heath bars, got the two pieces above, and was happy, saying that it 'sticks in your teeth like something very not good for you, in a good way.' I ran out of almonds so covered the bars in half almonds, half walnuts.

Alpha Bakers - Raisin Walnut Christmas Bread

Tucked in between the corners of this weekend, which included a joyful and tearful run-in with Tevye and Co. in the searing and sweet Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, teatime with kids and LEGOs, and a few hours of Sunday overtime, were a few little Christmas activities. Most notably, the baking of Rose's Cranberry Walnut Christmas Bread. This bread sounded so festive that I was imagining something of a quick bread with sharp pops of fresh cranberry and chunks of ginger, maybe even white chocolate. When I realized that I was looking at a simple yeast bread, I had to reboot and revise a bit, using all AP flour instead of the WW flour called for, and adding raisins instead of the dried cranberries I had not bought.

Everything else went smoothly, though. I appreciate the step of incorporating the fruit soaking liquid (to which I added a shot of Campari to acidify those sweet raisins) into the dough--bread dough is always my catchall for whatever bits of liquid (sour milk, ginger beer, beer, mushroom broth) are lying around waiting for a purpose, and this recipe has that tendency built in.

Rose recommends a 3-day preferment to enhance the flavor. I didn't have time for that, nor did I throw in a little sourdough, which would in retrospect have been a good idea, but I did give the dough a second rise in the refrigerator overnight, which helped some with development. The final loaf had a nice crust and crumb, and good spring. It wasn't my favorite bread ever (breads with lots of nuts in always taste a little peanut-buttery to me), but it made for a sturdy lunch with some good butter on.

Alpha Bakers - Walnut Praline Cookies

Last week, I made only half of the recommended recipe. This week, I went in the other direction. These praline cookies start with the making of a toasted nut praline, which is then ground to a paste in the food processor. The recipe nut of choice was hazelnut, but I used some walnuts that I had, which are a bit oilier.

Knowing this, I left out the tablespoon of oil called for in the final mix, but missed the instruction to use less than half of the praline paste in the cookies. 

When I realized my mistake, I doubled the amount of the dry ingredients, but that still left me with a very wet mix, that, as can be seen below, leaked oil and butter.

There were no pictures of these cookies in the book, so I don't know how far off the mark mine turned out.They were nice enough, dark and bitter (the walnuts), and leaving a large lacy crust behind. I gave some to my upstairs neighbors, who recently helped me track down a mystery package, and froze the crumbs and the last few crumbly cookies to use as a crumb layer in some future cake or trifle. I'm looking forward to seeing what the cookies look like made properly by the other Alpha Bakers. I didn't have it in me to make them again, so it's all a mystery to me. 

I did make a truly lovely quince frangipane tart out of the Tartine cookbook. Highly recommended.

Alpha Bakers -- Whole Wheat Walnut Loaf

Bread is so wonderful. My birthday breakfast this year was a large loaf of Zaro's raisin challah, eaten with coffee one day and dipped in milk the next (yes, it was a birthday weekend, nobody celebrates just one day). This week with the Alpha Bakers was 100% Whole Wheat Walnut bread, a cheese-friendly loaf that wasn't very pretty on the outside, but was lovely and simple inside. 

The bread begins with a small preferment, which rises under a blanket of the rest of the flour. The flour I used was Farmer Ground, from an organic cooperative from upstate NY that is sold for a very reasonable price at farmer's markets and my food coop. They have a whole wheat line, but all I could pick up yesterday was their all purpose, an 11% protein flour milled from 'Warthog' winter wheat. Warthog. This made my loaf a little lighter, and I'd like to try with the whole wheat, but the all-purpose is still much sturdier than your average store brand. Whole wheat flour is sometimes a little harder to bake bread with, so Rose's recipe includes a dash of vital wheat gluten, which increases gluten development and elasticity, contributing to a higher rise. 

My kitchen was very, very hot last night (I was making this in the middle of a heat wave) and I accidentally threw in a little too much yeast (must measure, weighing is too inaccurate at those small amounts), so my bread rose wildly and was a little more loose than I would have preferred. I did the first turn in the bowl instead of stretching it out on a counter, but I am pretty good at bowl turns after years of using the Tartine method, so I am confident in my choices. The looseness of the dough meant that the final loaf was a little sloppier looking and not as domed as I could have wished, but the interior was perfect. I'll be serving it for breakfast with jam and Comte, and then taking it to work. 

As for the pie I said it was too hot to make, I didn't make it. Blueberry pie is great but I have extreme difficulty holding on to blueberries long enough to get to that place. I've been skipping around a lot with the Alpha Baking lately but expect to be back on track for the rest of the summer (until I move, more on that later, cross your fingers...). The week before last I made some cookies but haven't blogged them yet because I went to the beach instead. In fact I took them to the beach. Behold the Kourambiethes in their fancy packaging. Buttery and nutty and buttery, we ate them on the beach and threw the crumbs everywhere. Everyone approved, and my friend's two and a half year old, who claimed to be too shy to interact with us, pronounced them 'nummy.' So.

 

Alpha Bakers -- The Polish Princess

The Polish Princess. Sounds like a cruise ship, doesn't it? Or a jewelry display. 

But no, it is a cake. Under its fancy veneer, it is actually quite a humble and homebody cake. Just because a girl wears two layers of buttercream doesn't mean she's stuck-up. Also, doesn't she have a right to some honest pride when she's a righteous sponge soaked in a tea and rum syrup, topped with two smooth and creamy and eggy layers of pastry cream buttercream, one filled with cocoa and walnuts, the other with raisins and chocolate? 

The Polish Princess, or the Ambassador as it is apparently known in Poland, is a bakery cake--the kind you ogle in the pastry case that often doesn't punch its weight in taste outside the cage. This lady, however, holds up, especially at room temperature, where all the layers soften into a creamy blend.

 

The creation of the Princess happened over a few days, in slow stages. First, the sponge was baked and syrup-ed. The syrup, in Polish fashion, was meant to be a strong tea steeped spiked with vodka. Having no vodka, I used rum, which was delicious if not culturally appropriate. According to the recipe headnote, the cake was developed after the fall of the USSR, when new quality ingredients came to Poland, so perhaps it's just an appropriate cultural cross-pollination.

Then came the buttercream--one recipe divided at the end for flavorings. It starts with a goopy pastry cream, into which a LOT of butter is blended. I mean a LOT--about three sticks worth. Because I was making the recipe in stages, I had some trouble with the buttercream--it broke badly and became a cottage cheese looking wet mess. I waited for everything to come to a warm room temperature, added a few more tablespoons of butter, and came out at last with a creamy fluff. 

The Princess had a warm reception at work, as I made sure she was served at a cool room temperature, the spongy buttercream was a great success. One of our young shelvers (who have just been temporarily almost laid off due to budget constraints--call your city councilors!) told me it was a brand new cake experience for him--he had never eaten anything like it. 

The last few weeks have been stressful. Some of the stress is personal, a result of something very wonderful that I have the privilege to do, that is none the less...stressful. Also, a few mountains have been falling and a few cities have been burning, and that's not without its impact too, however far away it may be. Many of my friends seem to be finding themselves in a slightly ragged place as we straggle into spring. The reasons vary, from the personal to the professional, from life to love to happiness to sadness, but regardless, most of us need a heavy dose of cake and flowers and soup. 

Last Sunday I had a few dear ones over and made this soup--quick and simple and rich, a basic potato soup raised up with prosciutto and saffron and garlicky ground almonds, from my new cookbook, Food52 Genius Recipes. More from this cookbook soon. I'm going through my cookbook back catalogue and trying not to buy many more, but this one was a printed version of about half the recipes I have already bookmarked and printed out, and it seemed prudent to pick up the bound version.

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.

Alpha Bakers - Very Slow Caramel Buns

Cake is all right, and pie is delicious, but my real passion is for breakfast pastry, from waffles to scones, biscuits to brioche. Sticky buns are akin to the waffle sundae, a good thing taken to heights of unbelievable overkill, then garnished with nuts. I love them, although sometimes I love them better without the caramel. The sticky buns in The Baking Bible are called Caramel Buns, and they are a brioche base rolled with nuts, sugar, and rum raisins, baked, glazed with raisin sugar syrup, and covered in a thick drippy caramel and more nuts. I know. Seriously.
 
Rose's brioche is a simple but slow dough, one that makes me glad I have a mixer, as it would be a gigantic pain without. It starts with a little sponge, which is then covered with a flour mix and refrigerated for a while.

I ran out of flour so I supplemented with a touch of my gluten free mix, accidentally contaminating the GF mix in the process. I'll need to make a new mix (enriching Bob's Red Mill as usual), but the old one will still be useful for gluten light baked goods and experimental models.
 
After some overnight rising and then stretching and folding and more rising, the dough is rolled out, brushed with egg, sugar, raisins, and, in my case, walnut bits, and then rolled up and cut. Rose recommends cutting the rolls with a piece of dental floss, which works perfectly and is weirdly satisfying besides. I have a twitchy response to public flossing, as my family knows to their sorrow (seriously, why is this a public event?), but public cinnamon roll cutting is full acceptable.
 
When I rolled it up, I completely forgot the rum-soaked sultanas, so I poked a few in on top. Most of them were forced up and got a touch toasted, but I really wanted them in there. Not sure what to do with the remainder, but especially with the rum, they'll last a little while in the refrigerator.

The buns are proofed for a while (it was a snow day so I let it run a little longer), and then baked with a Ball jar in the middle. The jar is filled with water--boiling water. I almost missed that the water was supposed to be boiling but caught it at the last minute.

While the buns were baking, I made the glaze (mostly raisin, rum, water, and sugar) and the caramel. The caramel was a pretty basic sugar/cream/butter shake-up, but I got a little creative and threw some cloves, Meyer lemon slices, and half a vanilla bean in with the boiling sugar, straining them out afterward. This gave the caramel a sort of 'Christmassy' flavor, as one taster said. Candied Meyer lemon slices were a good cook's treat.
 I overbaked the buns a bit, or they would have benefitted from the leftover raisins, as they were a little dry. Now that I think about it, that might have been the non-wheat flours, too. Next time I might make them larger.  Perfect baking for a snow day.

"...we hope this doesn't ruin your life..."

Last week, we caused our downstairs neighbors some inconvenience (I won't go into it, but let's just say there was some water coming through their ceiling), and I baked them a bundt cake to make amends. They weren't home when I went to drop it off, so I left the covered plate outside their door.

The next evening we went up to visit our upstairs neighbors. This makes our building sound absurdly cozy. The truth is, that while there are only five apartments, and we're friendly all around, we don't socialize all that much. Still, we have a lot in common with the folks upstairs, and when we do see them, even for a short stairway conversation, I always think that we should spend more time hanging out.

Back to the story at hand--we went up to see the upstairs neighbors. The conversation turned to the water incident, and Clarence, who also has a food blog and loves to cook, said, "Oh, is that why there was a cake in the hallway?" I admitted my complicity, and he mentioned that any cakes that came their way would also be welcomed.

Now, it doesn't take a special occasion to get a cake out of me, but I knew they'd be getting a cake immediately when he followed up his cake observations by saying they had something to tell us...

"Now," he said, "we hope this doesn't ruin your life...but we're going to have a baby."

We assured him that we couldn't imagine it ruining our lives (we like little people, and are already up at all hours). In fact, if they let me put a funny hat on their kid, it may well enhance my life immensely. They laughed, and said they had heard that it might ruin their lives, but they would take advantage of Matt's 3AM ukulele solos as lullaby fodder.

With all this good news and running up and down the stairs, it was clearly time to make them a cake. I chose one of the last contenders in the Rose's Heavenly Cake countdown, an Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake.  It's a simple but appealing sweet, two layers of sour cream coffeecake, sandwiched around a thin apple cinnamon filling, and covered with buttery walnut streusel.

Two unrelated notes: my spellcheck doesn't recognise coffeecake or streusel. Or spellcheck. It has a lot to learn. Also, I am really over people using 'buttery' to describe rich tuna belly or other sashimi. Maybe I just don't like sashimi. At any rate, Clarence assures us that the cake was excellent.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Far Breton and Honey Nut Scones

Rustic pastry bathed in golden light? Oh yes.

As I may have mentioned, Tuesdays with Dorie is finishing up and doubling up recipes to make it to the end by year's end. This week, both recipes were so appealing that I made them in one night.

Above, we have the Far Breton, a high-level example of what the British call nursery food--custardy batter pocked with sweet dried raisins, craisins, and cherries. The Far was a close cousin of some other good friends of mine, the clafoutis, the popover, and the cup custard, and so completely compelling in its eggy-ness that I ate it all in about 24 hours.

With most of my attention focused on the Far Breton, I didn't have a lot of time for the eating of scones, but these honey-walnut ones won my approval by being very plain and simple. Whole-wheat pastry flour was allowed to shine, and they were a perfect jam vehicle.

Speaking of jam vehicles, nursery custard, and the end of the year, I wanted to take a second to float an idea I've been hatching. (Mixed metaphor alert--unless the idea is perhaps a duck.) Having built a pretty decent reputation in the neighborhood as a provider of delicious things, I'd like to launch a little consignment business for the holiday season, providing pies, cookie plates, and other good things upon request. Perfect for your dinner party or host gift dilemma. More on this shortly, and all suggestions welcome.

Cakes and Cakes and Cakes

On looking back, that last post seems very ambitious. Did I do all of those fun sounding things? Well, not yet. The bike is still blocking the side door, the African dance remains a myth. I did go to yoga, though, once, and I made three cakes. Although the photo above was the only survivor of the process (Matt deemed the others 'unacceptable,' and I have to trust his word), there were in fact three cakes, and all three were Heavenly cakes, it seems only right to have a little discussion of them, photo or no.

Two weeks ago, I made the Apple Upside Down Cake, one of the first recipes in the book but one that I hadn't gotten around to yet. Caramelized apples under a yolky, buttery cake layer, sprinkled with nuts...that one was good. I tried to give it away as a housewarming present for my cousin, who just moved back to town, but only half of it made it over (next time, Sophie). Luckily, my Aunt Nicki was down the following weekend, and as a fellow devotee of Dorie Greenspan, she instigated the making of a Swedish Visiting Cake, so all was well.

Last week, I made the much-awaited Ginger Cheesecake, a fairly classic cheesecake made with a ginger crust (in my case, crushed oatmeal cookies), and juice squeezed from grated ginger. I didn't have quite enough ginger to get the amount of juice recommended, but it was still clearly present in the final product. My crust was oily, probably because my cookies were less austere than your average gingersnap, but the cake itself was excellent, and was devoured whole by hungry librarians at a training I helped conduct on Saturday. 

This week's cake, pictured above, was a riff on the Chocolate Covered Strawberry Cake, which I last made for Liana's birthday the year before last. I didn't have white chocolate, which is called for in the cake, so I made Rose's White Velvet cake layers instead, and filled it with a pear buttercream and pear butter, then covered it with the Sticky Chocolate Frosting. The result, although it looked like Boston Cream Pie, tasted more like sheet cake. The pear frosting didn't really make itself heard, and without it the cake was, as Liana and Matt both admitted, somewhat boring.  My co-workers disagreed, and finished it happily, proclaiming Liana and Matt spoiled, to which they both readily and happily admitted. I thought it might improve with chocolate ice cream, but then just went for the ice cream and ignored the cake.

It's been a chaotic few weeks, at least under the surface of placid librarianship.There's a new year coming, and I'm not ready, but maybe I'll get there. Right now, I'm trying to remember what's best in life, and to hold on to it with a fierce grip.

Somewhat on that last note, I've had one more Rose Levy Beranbaum-related milestone. I finally got too annoyed at the broken binding and sticky pages of Rose's Heavenly Cakes, and bought myself a brand new copy. Time to make that one sticky too.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Mud Turtle Cupcakes

I just watched an episode of Top Chef All-Stars where Fabio, the ridiculous and usually charming Italian madman, goes into a monologue in a Chinese grocery store about his pet turtle. Apparently, he bought one when he moved to New York, he loves it, takes it for walks, etc...and is deeply saddened by the cruelties of turtle soup.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

I don't think, though, that he'd mind these cupcakes. They don't so much look like turtles as sport that classic 'turtle' flavor combination: chocolate, caramel, and nuts. The base is a simple sour cream cocoa cupcake. The ganache was supposed to be dark chocolate, but my bodegas (even the fancy one) failed me, and it became a Hershey's milk chocolate whipped ganache, over which my bitter caramel sauce dripped nicely. I rarely buy pecans, so the nuts of choice were walnuts, as they have been in the last two Rose cakes that I made (one is upcoming, for free choice). I didn't eat one yet, but I tasted all the components. My taster, who is also my long-lost photographer, home from the opera wars, approved of them, looking askance at the number that I proposed to bring to work. As I work with about four people, he's probably right.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

So happy to have Matt back in the home and back at the tripod--I did extra special food styling tonight to feed his hobby. But he leaves again in not too long, so I'll be needing to get my camera fixed.

Those of you waiting for Lisbon updates, they're coming. Had to wait for most of my pictures to arrive, and I'm still waiting for five minutes to stop, breathe, and reflect. But in the meantime, enjoy the cupcakes.

French Fridays with Dorie: December Round-Up

Since it's January, it does seem like a good time to clear the decks on the December cooking from Around My French Table (did everyone remember that I was in that cooking group--I did). Back in November I decided that I wasn't going to let cooking clubs take over my blog quite as aggressively as they have my life, and thus I would only do monthly roundups of my French Fridays with Dorie cooking. Somehow that seems to have translated into losing most of the pictures, so this round-up will be mostly text-based, an overview for the curious.


There were five recipes for the month, of which I made four. The butter-glazed carrots will have to wait, but not too long, if I know the carrot fiend with whom I live.

Sweet and Spicy Cocktail Nuts, page 18 -- Made 'em last night.

Photo by Matt Korahais

An egg white, a little sugar, some spice (more and bolder next time), some salt, and as some people in the blogosphere say, causing me to giggle hysterically every time--"Walla!" You know how Bush mentioned the internets and now they're called that? Yeah, unfortunately it's like that. Voila!

I covered the bowl, ate one, and then went back and uncovered it for another. This may go badly. Also, note the lovely bowl, courtesy of Stacey.

My Go-to Beef Daube, pages 244 and 245 -- I bought beef for you, Dorie, and I never buy beef. I made stew for you, Dorie, and I love making stew. My version was a bit quick and dirty, but it was eaten. Stew rarely goes astray. I found it a little acidic for my palate, which is odd given that I eat unripe fruit and suck lemons. But there you have it.


Leek and Potato Soup, pages 66 and 67 -- My Christmas weekend dinner, breakfast, lunch, snack... Somehow, Matt never got any, nor any chance to photograph. I had it all. I made the basic recipe, garnished it with parmesan croutons (from SCRATCHbread's country parma loaves). Then I added more potatoes, because it was like a delicious warm milk. I think perhaps a potato weight would have been helpful. But then I've been whining about the fact that this book doesn't have weights in general, so chalk me up for a whiner and move on. The soup was great.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Speculoos, pages 406 and 407 - Not my favorites, only in that they were like yet unlike the fiercely spiced, barely sweet gingerbread that I crave. No fault of the cookies themselves, which I had great fun shaping in many shapes. I have a great many cookie cutters and they don't get put through their paces enough.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Looking forward to another month with this book, which is more than the sum of its parts, making these recipes.

French Fridays with Dorie: November Round-Up

Remember French Fridays with Dorie? I'm still cooking from Around My French Table, but I decided that instead of a weekly post it would make more sense for me to do a monthly round-up. The rules of the group are very low-key, and this past month the recipes could be made in any order. I made three of the four selections (and will probably still make the fourth, eventually).

The first recipe of the month, Roast Chicken for Les Paresseux (the lazy folks), was a chicken roasted breast down in a dutch oven, surrounded by root vegetables and garlic. The chicken, which was never turned, rested on a large piece of sourdough, which was meant to absorb all the chicken juices and become crispy and delicious. It was delicious, but because I thoughtlessly put the tough slice crust down, I missed out on the golden bottom, and nearly cracked a tooth trying to chew it all. Still, delicious. Next best was the garlic, and it was all gone pretty quickly.

One of the forum posters mentioned that she had made stock with the chicken carcass right in the roasting pan, a genius idea that yielded a rich, browned stock, which we ate last night with some frozen Udon noodles and pork dumpling filling meatballs.

It seems like we're working our way through the classics first, and nothing is more classic than Pomme Dauphinois. My version used slightly lower-fat dairy products and so was a little juicier than it could have been, more like potatoes floating in the sauce. It was garlicky and good.

The last recipe I made for the month was one of those that looks really good, has great things in it, and never really gets eaten. It just didn't tempt me, somehow, although I was looking forward to it, and I didn't sell it well to the rest of the household.
Maybe another time, Pumpkin Flans with Gorgonzola (it was Chevre) and Walnuts.  Looking forward to next month's recipes, as I continue to dip into the book at my own pleasure.

Some Breads in the Tartine Style

Photo by Matt Korahais.

I've been playing around a bit with the bread method described in Chad Robertson and Eric Wolfinger's Tartine Bread (the book is beautiful, by the way, check it out). Robertson's method uses a sourdough leaven in a wet dough--but one a little drier than Lahey/Bittman's no-knead.  The dough is turned three or four times during a long bulk fermentation lasting 3-8 hours, depending on temperature.

After the initial mix, the dough gets a 20 minute autolyse before salt and a small amount of water are added in to finish it off.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

The recipe is geared toward two loaves, so each time I baked one in the cast-iron dutch oven and one in the BreadPot. I scored the loaves, but somewhat haphazardly, as the depth of the pots made it difficult for me to get my scoring knife in.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

For the second bake, a walnut pecan golden raisin loaf, the garnish was added after about 40 minutes of the bulk rise, during the first turn.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

I turned the dutch oven into a cloche by turning it upside down and using my skillet as the bottom.

Photo by Matt Korahais. Uncropped!

The crumb was light and airy, well-gelatinized and full of large, irregular holes.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Pumpkin Cake with Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream

A few weeks ago, I accompanied one of my Tuesdays with Dorie postings with a little homily about the group itself, and there have been requests for a similar rundown on how my other cooking clubs work. For all of you out there who are perpetually baffled by my superfluous cakeage, this is how it works.


Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of The Cake Bible, The Bread Bible, and a few other equally influential tomes, has been one of the pastry world's go-to references for many many years. Her detailed, scientifically tested recipes, which include tables, weights and formulae, and no apologies for precision or difficulty, were a great help to me in planning last year's wedding cake extravaganzas. Also, because Rose is an Ashkenazi Jew with a New York background, I've always enjoyed the way her palate skews toward things like poppyseed and apricot. When I heard her new cookbook was out, my friend Catherine immediately volunteered to get me a copy. I didn't tell her my hidden motive, which was that I had to join up with this wonderfully crazy woman on the interwebs who had already schooled my bake-through self-importance by making it all the way through The Bread Bible, and nearly twenty cakes into Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

As soon as I had book in fist, I emailed Marie and begged to join the Heavenly Cake Bakers. She graciously agreed, added me to the blogroll, and it was on. While I've had my struggles with babycake overload and frosting glut, it's been an educational and enjoyable journey so far, often aided by Lily's willingness to let me bake the cakes over at Lily & Fig and sell them as specials. The Heavenly Cake Bakers group is much smaller than Tuesdays with Dorie, but still manages to span several continents. Each week, we bake a cake selected by Marie, the group leader, and post it in the neighborhood of Monday. Mid-week, Marie posts a much-appreciated roundup of everyone's efforts, and Rose and her associate Woody often chime in to answer questions or concerns. Some of us (Rose included) are precise sticklers, others of us (self included) fall more into the free-and-easy camp. Everyone, though, is very supportive, and the group discourse is lively, and sometimes pleasingly technical.

A few randomly chosen examples show the diversity of our membership. In addition to me, previously described, there is Mendy, my fellow Brooklynite, an orthodox Jew who bakes for his family in a toaster oven. Then there is Lola, who according to her blog lives in Mexico, and is part of even more cooking clubs than I am. There is Sarah (the Bear), whose profile photo includes poultry and who dreams of cooking school, someday, maybe. Raymond posts on Sundays and gets us in the mood...and the list goes on and on. Check out the blogroll on the Heavenly Cake Bakers site for more.

Because Marie baked quite a few of the cakes before the group's official start, every now and then she designates a 'free choice' cake to catch everyone up. These are selected from the roster of cakes that Marie or the group has already baked, but I haven't. My choice this week was very Halloween/Thanksgiving appropriate -- Pumpkin Cake with Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream. The cake almost didn't make it to the buttercream stage, but that's getting ahead of the story.

In Rose's book, the pumpkin cake is one of the most imposing decorating projects, baked in a double mold that creates a ball/pumpkin shape when the two halves are pressed together. Rose's picture is decorated with bright orange buttercream and fondant leaves. Mine was baked in a single fluted tube pan. The cake is a simple oil cake, with walnuts, walnut oil, and pumpkin puree. I used a CSA butternut squash, roasted, pureed, and drained (it lost nearly a cup of liquid). Eager hands surrounded the bundt almost as soon as it came out of the oven, and several slices mysteriously disappeared before frosting time. To be honest, we just don't love frosting in my house, and both Matt and Liana (and I) have a yen for these kind of rustic bundt-y banana-bread-pumpkin-bread style cakes, which Matt categorized somewhat vaguely as 'one of the three kinds of cakes you make' (bundt-y, creamy, chocolately).

I do love making frosting, though, so the buttercream made it onto most of the cake. Orange silk meringue buttercream is a multi-step process, that begins with caramel creme anglaise, takes a stop at Italian meringue, and ends by combining the two with a fair amount of butter.

Two caramels for one frosting, folks. It can be difficult to make such a small quantity (based on one egg white) of Italian meringue, but none of the steps were hard, and the final result was more addictive than I had expected. I didn't eat it on the cake, but kept taking little nips. The final result was flavored with orange oil and lime zest and colored orange to boot.

I am terrible at frosting bundts, so it wasn't terribly photogenic, but the texture was excellent. Final verdict, though, was that it was better unfrosted.