Alpha Bakers - Renee Fleming Chiffon

The Renee Fleming chiffon. Just a very good sponge. Made it one day, served it for tea the next. Squishy and pleasing. 

We discovered that a chiffon cake has one unanticipated advantage when you invite toddlers to tea. Very few crumbs.

Alpha Bakers -- Banana Chiffon Cake

I have a new home! After lots of soul-searching and apartment-searching, I've moved deeper into Brooklyn, to a quiet tree-lined street very near the buildings where some of my grandparent-generation family grew up. The apartment is, to me, a grandma apartment, with parquet floors and built-in cabinets and arched doorways. I love it. And it's a mess. A work in progress.

 

Between moving and other life things, baking and blogging has slowed. I did make an apple pie and some scones in there somewhere, and I'm sure I'll blog about them, but meticulous multi-step cakes were not on the docket. Even after my little kitchen was more or less set up (hello, Small Appliance Shelf!), I found myself avoiding cooking or baking, or gingerly cutting fruit as though I didn't belong there. Moving engenders in me a camping mentality that is hard to break, and I just didn't feel comfortable settling down to a big project. A few weeks in, I'm starting to feel easier, although everything still feels like it's in the wrong place and it would be a crime to smear the shine off of the microwave (this kitchen is so white).

Those who know me would be shocked to hear that I hadn't baked at all since moving on 9/14, until yesterday, 10/4, when I made both popovers and the Alpha Bakers project du jour, a Banana Split Chiffon Cake. Yes, people, it had been so long since I baked that there were beetles in the flour. Luckily, I am myself and there was a backup bag of non-beetled flour.

Everything else in place, at 10pm last night I pre-heated the oven, mushed up some bananas, separated and whipped some eggs, and made a chiffon cake. I used coconut oil in place of the recommended amounts of walnut and canola oils, but was otherwise faithful to the recipe on pp. 92 of The Baking Bible. The only place where I went astray was in getting it into the oven. As I went to put it in, I mistakenly picked it up by the center tube of the tube pan, causing a bit of a gusher that resulted in the 'undercrust' pictured above. No lasting harm was done, though, and the final result was a squishy, moist banana sponge with a strong (and welcome) lemon tang.

My original intention was to drizzle it with a bit of the chocolate ganache from the white chocolate brownies, but when I re-warmed that in the microwave at work I took it a bit too far and it was burned and separated, and best kept away from cake. Luckily, the cake itself was full-flavored and full of moisture and stood up well on its own, sans chocolate or even the other option, caramel (or my favorite suggestion, strawberry ice cream). I would definitely add all of the 'split' condiments for a fancier presentation, but the non-split banana cake holds up well on its own.

When I get my act together I'll post a little kitchen tour, and you too can see the wonder that is Small Appliance Shelf. For now, I made cake, don't be greedy!

Alpha Bakers -- Chocolate Cuddle Cake

Drifting into 2015...
In my storytimes at the library, I talk. A lot. Most of it goes over the heads of the kids, but at my best moments I like to think that I'm embellishing their worlds with rich language. In the winter, I find myself using words that fall in the 'hibernation' spectrum: snuggle, huddle, wiggle, shelter, and cuddle. I like to imagine us as a pile of soft sleepy baby bears under a pile of leaves, warm and safe for winter.

In that kind of mindset, the Chocolate Cuddle Cake from The Baking Bible couldn't be better named. What can I say? I come from a family that has a tendency to lie in a heap, frequently while watching A League of Their Own. Since some of my heap-mates recently had a baby bear of their own, I was on my own for this baking, and while I can't say I hit a home run, I made it around the bases (mixed metaphor alert! don't care!).

The Chocolate Cuddle is a pillowy soft cocoa chiffon, baked in a parchement-lined springform (see above). Aside from some lazy egg-white mixing (see white spot in photo below), mine came out perfectly. I did not measure how tall it was, because, as our bake-through leader would say 'there's nothing I can do about it now'. I did trim the sides a bit to ensure an even rise, as it sagged a bit like a turban or a decorative squash.
The lovely squashy cake was then frosted with a quick ganache--I followed Rose's recipe but made mine on the stovetop instead of the food processor. I notice a slight difference in texture but it's not enough to make me get out my food processor. All extra ganache becomes truffles, by royal decree.

Things were going so well and then I tried to make the caramel whipped cream, which sounds like a good idea, and probably is, except that I screwed it up royally. Royally as in epically, not as in by royal decree. I am not, in fact, royalty.

Ideally, the caramel whipped cream goes like this:
1. Make caramel.
2. Soften gelatin.
3. Whip cream.
4. Whip in the caramel and the gelatin.
5. Oooh, ahh, frost.

Instead, the whole thing seized miserably and looked like vomit.

Note to self, be more careful of temperatures. I made some half-hearted attempts at rescue, but in the end I just whipped up a little extra cream, added a bit of the lumpy mixture to it, and frosted away. Next time.

It was very pretty all the same--a light and easy cake to carry, make, and eat. One co-worker commented that its spongey nature made it a bit difficult to cut, but everyone seemed to manage all right in the end. There you have it.

Please do forgive any whiff of brimstone or verbal loopiness in this post--I'm high as an off-brand DayQuil kite can be, and most of my internal monologue looks like this.

"I'm Leslie Monster, and this is Nightline."

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Orange Glow Chiffon Cake

This orange chiffon cake (shades of Passover upcoming), is lifted almost intact from Rose's earlier book, The Cake Bible. It owes its inclusion in the Heavenly Cakes book to a new technique that Rose and her assistant Woody worked out to make it as a layer cake. Chiffon cakes are evidently usually too delicate to bake properly without a tube pan, but with the strategic addition of all-purpose flour and a flower nail (the thing that gum-paste flowers are built on) acting as a tiny impromptu tube, they figured it out. Or so the book says, I lacked a flower nail and any reason to particularly need flat layers, so I made the tube version.
This is the same cake base that was used for the Bostini, so it was a familiar mix. As always, I enjoyed cooling the cake upside down on a wine bottle.

The background to the baking was even better than the cake--several hours of Grateful Dead bootlegs, shared by two once teenage tour followers on the twentieth anniversary of their first show. Such a night, followed directly by an evening watching John Darnielle do his transcendent thing, was a strange and bitter rejuvenation, a release, a good thing.