Alpha Bakers -- ChocolaTea Cake

Chocolate cake, chocolate frosting. Perfect for drop off in the office of your choice. I still make an effort to gift baked goods to my former officemates from time to time, and they are appreciative.

Confirmed. Delicious. Also got an email saying it was one of the best another colleague had had. Simple and delicious wins every time. I didn't have the powdered tea, but I achieved a similar effect with a touch of citric acid in the ganache.  

Heavenly Cake Bakers: White Gold Passion Genoise

Strangely, not my favorite of the Heavenly Cakes. For some reason, Rose and I seem to part ways when the frosting involves cream cheese, which doesn't even make sense, as all cream cheese frosting should be delicious. The cake was a bit dense, which was my fault, as I got the mixing instructions backward and mixed all the egg whites into the butter, deflating them quite a bit.

The frosting was ok, and the passion curd, as always, was amazing. I had it all over my breakfast muffins for days, and am definitely trying to worm it into the wedding cake. The flecks in the passion fruit curd are because I made it with the leftover brown butter. The leftover syrup was spectacular in selzer. I think next time I'll skip the whole cake and just make stuff with passion fruit.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Raspberry Trifle Goes to the Park

This weekend was a banner weekend. I had not one, but two days off. It was heaven.

On Sunday, I puttered about all day, spoke to no one, and made two cakes. One was a wedding cake prototype for Jessica and Christopher. More on this later. The other was this trifle. I made half the recipe, and tucked it into a convenient vase for transport.

I made a few changes in the various components, based on the contents of the refrigerator. The final product was composed of Moist Chocolate Genoise, apricot preserves, creme anglaise made with cream, milk, coconut milk and the dregs of the milk chocolate ganache syrup left over from the wedding cake prototyping (it was in the glass measuring cup I used, hence the brownish flavor), and raspberries. I was going to make the raspberry whipped cream topping, but ran out of room in the container.

After I made the trifle, I felt ambivalent about taking it to a picnic in the park on a hot day, and put a daisy cake (visible behind) into the oven. However, when I emailed my concern to Stacey, her response was, and I quote, "Are you f*ING kidding me? I have been dreaming about trifle all day and night. Put it in a tub, I am bringing my spoon!!!!!" I brought the trifle. Avi took pictures of it with his new camera. All went well.

In the end, it was good that we had two cakes, because all of the lunch that we brought along was disgustingly healthy, including this salad from Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Every Day that has been obsessing me, quinoa cakes, egg salad, and roasted asparagus. On the way to the park, I realized how lame it was that we didn't even have a single bag of potato chips or something. Next time, barbeque sauce.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Genoise with Whipped Peanut Butter Ganache

 This week's Heavenly Cake was not my finest hour. Still, for an exhausted Saturday morning at Lily & Fig, it didn't come out too badly. The cake was a light chocolate genoise. I chickened out on my folding flour into batter, and wound up with plenty of flour pills in the dough. So much for my semi-pro ego.  Still, after I cut the bottom off, it was pretty clear, and frostable. The frosting was a whipped chocolate ganache with creamy peanut butter mixed in. It was very delicious, but I felt that the cake and the frosting were mis-matched, and that the ganache was yearning for a yellow three-layer birthday cake in order to really shine.  I'm thinking of doing something like that for Matt's birthday (shhh...don't tell). In addition to the peanut butter ganache, the genoise was brushed with a syrup, which was supposed to contain Chambord, a black raspberry liqueur. This flavor seemed to surprize many of my fellow bakers, but it actually sounded wonderful to me. Of course, I'd sell my sister, or at least a cousin or two, for a bucket of black raspberries.

Of course, since the sister/berry economy is in a slump with the rest of us, I didn't actually have any Chambord, so I used rum and orange oil. The flavor didn't really come through, though, and I'd like to try again with some kind of intense liqueur of the Chambord variety.

Special thanks to Matt for these pictures, which he went down to the bakery to take for me.