Happy Birthday, JB

Photo by Avi Glickstein.

In Julie & Julia, Julie Powell describes her friend Isabel's wedding cake as 'vertiginously sloppy,' a description I think is very apt to this cake (and most cakes I make). JB's birthday cake (and Rob's before hers) was a pretty straight rendition of this cake. It's stupidly easy to make, especially the addictive peanut butter cream cheese frosting, and usually garners hyperbolic response. I highly recommend it.

Photo by Avi Glickstein.

Photo by Avi Glickstein.

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.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Peanuttiest Blondies

I just realized that it's been over a month since I posted anything but cooking club posts. This ends soon. Now that I'm back from the Halloween whirlwing tour-guiding, it's time to tell you about many delicious things I've been cooking, and some ideas and dreams and pursuits I've been pursuing.

For now, though, there's Dorie Greenspan's Peanuttiest Blondies. I didn't have chocolate chips, so my blondies were blonde indeed, and I think they could have used something to offset the richness of the peanut butter and peanuts.

Halloween really was nuts, with 11 tours in two weekends, including one that was three and a half hours long, guest appearances from my aunt Nicki and uncle Joe, from Marie and Jim of Heavenly Cake Place, and from Matt, who checked out the tour for the first time and lent his keen directorial eye and New York loving sensibility to making it even better. My tour was ambushed by zombies not once but twice, the second time in the middle of the afternoon, when the foul fiends crept up behind me and were this close to chewing on my neck. I was heckled, applauded, and exhausted. Peter Stuyvesant, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire victims all got their due, McSorley's Old Ale House provided drinks, and I was far too busy walking at night to get half the halloween candy that I wanted. I did, however, get steaming tamales from the Day of the Dead celebration going on at the St. Marks Church, and in the end, I think that's a win.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Peanut Butter Financiers

This week's Heavenly Cake was Peanut Butter Financiers, or ingots. Fancy people make financiers in mini-loaf shaped pans, to symbolize bars of gold. Those of us who are not in high finance make them in our vintage mini-muffin pans that Miriam gave us, which makes them more of mini-cupcakes, although has few other impacts on their general composition. 

Because I made an off-schedule cake this week (Almond Shamah Chiffon with Burnt-Sugar-Apricot Mousseline Buttercream, for those who care), this was the second project of the week that required me to toast and process sliced almonds into almond flour. As recently as last week, I was using regular roasted skin-on almonds in a devil-may-care way, but sensing a lot of this to come, I sprung for some blanched, sliced suckers. They make good decorations too. I have discovered, though, that my little mini food processor does not really do a good job of processing the almonds to a full powder. Usually, I would just use pre-processed almond flour, but all of Rose's recipes very specifically avoid even the mention of that option, so I have to assume there's a reason. (According to Nigella Lawson, there's a fairly serious moisture difference between the preprocessed stuff and freshly ground almonds, so maybe that's it). 

These little cakes weren't much more than brown butter, ground almonds, whip eggs, add peanut butter. They were good, but underwhelming...just little dense peanut butter cupcakes, to which I also added a little buckwheat flour. I just made a half batch at home, and didn't take them to the bakery, as I had a sense that they would turn out not terribly impressive visually.  Still, we ate them, and are ready to move on to the next cake.

While we're here, though, I wanted to take a second to register my unease with the whole 'baby cakes' section of the book. While I appreciate a few instructions for how to convert recipes, and a few fun adaptations such as the Bostini, I think a whole section on this topic seems redundant and overly trendy. Maybe it's my lack of amusement at cupcakes in general, though, speaking sourly through my mouthful of peanut buttery goodness.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Oatmeal Almost-Candy Bars

This week's TWD was one of those fun cookies that can masquerade as a breakfast pastry if you're not looking too closely. If you were to look closer, you'd probably see that they were a buttery oatmeal dough, topped with a chocolate/condensed milk/peanut butter mixture, and then topped some more with that same dough. Intense.  Those of you who like your desserts tooth-achingly sweet yet vaguely wholesome seeming can find the recipe here. Also, over the bars' shoulder you can spot  two jars of my latest project, yogurt. This batch failed, but the previous one was a great success.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Chunky Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Chocolate Chipsters

First of all, a bone to pick with the name of these cookies. Not only is it a bit too cute for me (there's no need for all this 'chippers', and 'chipsters' nonsense, people), but there's simply no sense in a cookie name that takes longer to say than the cookie takes to eat.

All in all, these were very similar to the Mrs. Fields-style oatmeal chocolate chip cookies I make on a regular basis, the major tweaks being the addition of a cup of peanut butter, a few spoons of cinnamon, and the omission of a popular step wherein some chocolate is blended with most of the oats into a cocoa-colored coarse oat flour.
They were very nice. Not my favorite ever, but pleasant, well-received (I put them out at Libby & Rob's going away party), and effortless. I got to use Ellen's big fancy KitchenAid mixer, which was fun.

Here is Libby in her mother's well-loved dream kitchen, slowly built over the years.
I misspent half my youth in this kitchen, and it's so interesting to cook in it now and see just how many of my ideas of how I'd like my kitchen to be must have come from it.