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."

Ivoire Royale

These pictures are terrible. You can't see the creamy inside, with strawberries and white chocolate sour cream ganache. You can't see the painstaking process of building this lovely cake, freezing it, and decorating it. You can see the melting whipped cream, and the beads of condensation decorating this cake because I lugged it to work in the heat. But you can't see the glee on the faces of co-workers who ate it anyway, because it was amazing.

Yes, it's another bake-through, with some old friends from the Heavenly Bakers crowd. Yes, their photos and blog posts are much prettier. Yes, I'll do better next time. But here's a look at a cake from a nice day a few weeks ago. It is from Extraordinary Cakes, by Karen Krasne and Tina Wright, and is a sour cream pound cake with whipped cream and berries and white chocolate ganache. It is excellent. That is all.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Coffee Chiffonlets with Whipped Cream

Back to babycakes!
Although I usually substitute pans and shapes with abandon (sorry Rose and NordicWare), in the case of these little cakes, an angel food cake pan of some kind, large or small, would have been a help in maintaining height. Although these chiffon cakes have eggs in them, their texture is light and spongy, and because making them in cupcake pans made it impossible for me to invert them during cooling, they shrank alarmingly.

They still tasted good, though, so I brushed them with coffee syrup and went ahead. A search of five bodegas and a supermarket in my neighborhood (which is strongly Caribbean, and has a fairly small Latino population) yielded infinite condensed milk and no dulce de leche, and I didn't have the time to make any, so my whipped cream got flavored with a mix of golden syrup and dry milk powder, which actually tasted quite nice.


I put them out at the bakery, but because I then ran off into a very busy week, I don't actually know how they did. If anyone had one, let me know what you thought. I would make them again, or make the recipe as a large angel food cake, if I ever get it together and get an angel food cake pan.

And yes, doubters, there are pieces of kitchen equipment I DON'T possess. Really.