Raccoon and Lobster

Ahh..hubris.

The San Francisco MOMA sells a beautiful Mondrian cake for $8 a slice. It’s a museum attraction unto itself:

With my masterful understanding of economic theory, I decided to make my own Mondrian cake, which I could then sell for $7 a slice. Devious! Unfortunately, it is a lot easier to boast about making a Mondrian cake than actually making an intriciate, perfectly square art cake that is worth charging $7 a slice for.

My recipe was a basic white velvet cake and dark chocolate ganache, both adapted from (say it with me now) Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. In retrospect, a denser pound cake would have worked a lot better structurally. My blue and yellow food coloring was hastily purchased from the grocery store and the color concentration was so miserable that after using the entire tube on a quarter-batch of batter, I had only the palest of icy blues. I was able to achieve pureed a decent blue color by pureeing frozen blueberries and mixing it in with the batter and scrapped the yellow cake completely.

The ganache on the bottom of the cake stuck to the wax paper, forcing me to serve the cake on the same messy sheet that I had decorated it on, losing me presentation points right off the bat. Cutting so many small squares left crumbs all over the table, and it was very difficult to get a crumb-free frosting. Any unevenness in pressure in applying the frosting led to deformation of the cake, and the square shape gradually deteriorated into an irregular trapezoid.

The only good thing about a project like this is the sheer quantity of leftover cake you get to eat. There is excess red and blue cake, excess white cake, and two endcaps that need to be sliced off to even out all the strips of cake. Delicious, if a bit sad to look at.

Total creation time was about 3 hours, which included baking three cakes in two batches.

White Velvet Cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes
3 large egg whites (90 g)
2/3 cup milk (160 g)
1.5 teaspoon vanilllla extract
2 cups cake or AP flour (200 g)
1 cup baker’s sugar (200 g)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter, softened (113 g)

The recipe above makes one 9×2 round cake, I scaled it up to a 9×2 square cake which entails multiplying everything by 1.27.

Whisk the egg whites, vanilla, and a few tablespoons of milk together until combined.

In a large bowl, beat together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt until well combined and any clumps are broken up. Add the butter and remaining milk and slowly increase the speed to medium and beat for 1½ minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl as necessary. The batter should be light and fluffy.

Add half of the egg mixture and beat for 30 seconds, then the other half and beat for another 30 seconds. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a cake tester comes out clean and the cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center, about 30-40 minutes.

One batch of batter can be divided into two standard 9″ loaf pans to make the blue and red cakes. Mix in either food coloring or a fruit puree until desired color is reached and bake.

Cool completely before frosting.

Dark Chocolate Ganache
12 oz dark chocolate (62%)
5 oz heavy cream, warm
2.5 oz unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, remove from heat and add in the heavy cream, stirring until even in color and texture. Allow the chocolate to cool until warm to the touch and and gently stir in the butter and vanilla. Ganache will thicken when allowed to cool. To apply in thin layers, I ended up drizzling warm ganache to get an even application and then smoothing it out and scraping off the excess with a spatula after it thickens upon cooling. This helps to avoid stirring up any crumbs from the soft cake.

It’s been almost 3 weeks since I’ve baked a cake, a funk I attribute to a combination of general laziness, pesky real-life problems, and a lingering malaise brought about by watching the much-lauded but highly depressing TV crime drama The Wire.

I needed something to snap me out of the funk so I strapped on my apron and attempted to bake until the corruption, despair, and hopelessness of inner-city decay was purged my mind. It worked pretty well until The Boyfriend and I settled in to watch the next episode, which is more about the gritty realism of The Wire than about the healing powers of this cake.

This recipe comes courtesy of Shuna Fish Lydon and features a caramel syrup that appears in both the batter and frosting and is also drizzled on top for extra caramel goodness. The frosting is best with a little more sea salt, which adds some complexity to what is usually a sugar explosion.

Caramel Syrup

2 cups sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cup water for stopping the caramelization

You probably want to have long sleeves on for this part as the caramel can jump and sputter when the water is poured in and burns can happen. Sugar syrup holds an amazing amount of heat. I still have burn marks on my fingers from making Candied Apples when I was a kid, but that didn’t stop me from burning my tongue when I tasted it .

In a small saucepan with tall sides, mix the sugar and 1/2 cup water until mixture feels like wet sand. Use a wet pastry brush to brush down any stray sugar crystals. Turn on heat to highest flame and cook until the syrup is dark amber and smoking slightly.

Pour in the remaining cup of water, pouring evenly and smoothly with control will minimize splatter. Whisk the syrup over medium heat until it has reduced slightly and feels thicker and heavier on the whisk. If you remove a drop and allow it to cool, it should feel sticky to the touch. The end viscosity should be like that of maple syrup.

Caramel Cake

2 cups AP flour, I used 10oz per the guidelines on her blog
½ teaspoon baking powder
5oz unsalted butter, softened
1¼ cups sugar
½ teaspoon kosher salt (or ¼ teaspoon table salt)
1⁄3 cup caramel syrup, cooled to room temperature
2 large eggs, room temperature (I used 100g / 3.5oz of egg)
splash vanilla extract
1 cup milk, room temperature

Preheat oven to 350°F and butter and flour a tall 9″ cake pan. I used a 2″ deep pan, but 2.5″ would probably have been better.

Sift together the flour and baking powder and set aside.

Cream the butter in a mixer until soft and light and add the sugar and salt. Cream until the mixture is airy and fluffy. Slowly add the caramel syrup, letting it get combined in before adding more. Add the eggs and vanilla in the same manner, beating well after each addition to maintain a light and airy batter.

Alternate adding the flour mixture with the cup of milk, mixing in 1/3 of the total in each addition. Mix the batter after each addition until it is incorporated into the batter, scraping down the bowl as needed.

When the batter is smooth and uniform, pour into the prepared cake pan and bake for 45-50 minutes, rotating once after 30 minutes. Cake is done when a tester comes out clean and the top of the cake springs back to the touch.

Caramelized Butter Frosting

6oz unsalted butter
1 pound confectioner’s sugar, sifted
4-6 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2-4 tablespoons caramel syrup
salt to taste

Cook butter until brown and strain through a fine sieve to remove the butter solids. Let cool.

Beat the sugar into the cooled brown butter, adding a little at a time. When the mixture is too dry to take more sugar, add some of the cream or caramel syrup and resume beating in the sugar. Continue until the mixture is smooth and all the sugar is incorporated. Add salt to taste.

I had a little bit of difficulty with the end texture of the frosting, and it turns out that Stacy was experiencing problems both times that she made this recipe too. I used 4 tablespoons of heavy cream and 4 tablespoons of caramel syrup, and the end result came out a bit too dry. I think a little more fat in the form of cream would make it a little easier to work with, but just know that you’re not alone if you have issues with the frosting.

Hello red velvet cake. Why so down?

I was initially very upset about this  tough, dense cake. After all, by this point I sort of feel like I know my way around cake baking pretty well, and I’ve baked 8 or 9 or so of Rose’s Heavenly Cakes and know what her recipes consist of. Why then, did this one suddenly turn out so distinctly un-heavenly?

I had an inkling that something was wrong when the batter didn’t quite taste right. And then when I poured it into the pan, the texture seemed a little off. And 25 minutes later, when the finished cake had risen to only half the height of the pan, I knew something had gone wrong. But what?

Just one day before, I had baked a successful marble velvet cake. Baking powder doesn’t go bad that quickly. My oven was at the proper temperature. I had beaten the batter for the appropriate time, I had measured all the ingredients with my scale and….

Wait.

I remembered seeing the scale read ~340 grams after I added in the cocoa and baking powder. But the recipe called for 200 grams of flour and 200 grams of sugar. Did I zone out and only add half the amount of sugar? And does 100 grams of sugar really mean the difference between a 1″ cake and a 2″ cake?

Apparently a spoonful of sugar not only  helps the medicine go down, it also helps the cake rise up.

For more information, I turned to the authoritative nerd’s guide to the kitchen: Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. Baking powder doesn’t act by creating air bubbles, it enlarges the bubbles that are already in the batter. That is why creaming the butter and sugar together is so important, it generates the small air pockets that will be enlarged by the baking powder. Half the sugar in a batter that is beaten for the same amount of time means fewer air pockets, which means less rising. I initially attributed the texture of the batter to the fact that it used a mixture of butter and oil instead of of just butter but now I suspect that there just wasn’t enough sugar to properly cream the butter into the fluffy airy mixture I needed. Fear of overdeveloping the gluten in the flour kept me from continuing to beat the batter, but perhaps more beating time would have helped salvage the fail cake.

On top of that, sugar is hygroscopic, or water attracting, so its presence in a cake means moistness in addition to sweetness. Less sugar? Tougher, dryer cake.

SCIENCE!

Angel food cake is as virtuous as the name implies. No butter, no oil, no fat of any kind. Naturally, the boyfriend took this opportunity to eat four slices.

Very stiff peaks are necessary to ensure a light texture to the cake.  This bowl contains 14 egg whites. This means, of course, that the next cake will be some sort of insanely dense egg yolk concoction filled with fat to balance things out.

An angel food cake needs to be inverted immediately after baking so it can set while stretched to its full height. Mistakes in baking, an errant draft, or evil pixies can cause the cake to fall out of the pan at this time so pay attention to your baking times, put your cake away from open windows or doors and scatter anti-pixie dust as appropriate. It’s also a good idea to put down a sheet of parchment paper or a large tray so you can salvage your cake if it does fall.

Mine did not!

In fact, it is steadfastly refusing to come down. Hmph.

Okay. That’s better. Angel food cake is not the most photogenic of cakes. You can barely see the tweed peeking out behind the crust. What this cake needs is a tweed jacket.

There, that’s much tweedier!

Chocolate Tweed Angel Food Cake from (who else?) Rose’s Heavenly Cakes (the tweed comes from grated chocolate in both the cake batter and the frosting).

At this point I am baking enough of Rose’s cakes that I can’t in good conscience continue posting recipes for every one I bake. This is a four layer cake (made from two 9×2 cakes) with two layers of lemon curd and one layer of the white chocolate custard buttercream that also forms the frosting.

Between all of the components, this baby took me the large part of the day but I got to break in my new rotating cake stand and my enormous 14″ cake slicer. Assembling all of the pieces to put together a cake is the most fun part for me right now, actually eating the cake comes in a distant second. Good thing I have a willing army of cake eaters at my beck and call.

Do me a favor and click  to see the large version of this picture. Please.

I don’t really care for Valentine’s Day, but once I saw the recipe, I couldn’t resist making this rich, fudgy, chocolate cake. I just can’t stop baking from this cookbook. The cakes that come out have great texture and flavor and the pairings with frostings and glazes are spot on. If you are looking for a cake recipe book to buy, this one is it. Just stock up on eggs and butter and renew your gym membership first.

Double Chocolate Valentine from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 9 x 2 cake pan with a cake strip, coat the bottom with a thin layer of shortening and top with a sheet of parchment cut to shape. Butter and lightly flour the inside. Turn the cake upside down and tap to remove excess flour.

Whisk together the cocoa and boiling water until smooth and cover and let cool to room temperature. Whisk together the egg yolks, the 3 tablespoons water and the vanilla until just combined and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt until well combined and any clumps are broken up. Add the butter and the cocoa mixture and slowly increase the speed to medium and beat for 1½ minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl as necessary. The batter should be light and fluffy.

Add half of the egg mixture and beat for 30 seconds, then the other half and beat for another 30 seconds. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a cake tester comes out clean and the cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center, about 30-40 minutes.

Ganache Glaze

Scald the cream and pour it into a bowl over the chopped chocolate. Whisk until smooth and set aside. By the way, if you taste the ganache glaze by itself, it will seem a little too dark. Paired with the cake though, the two complement each other beautifully.

When the cake comes out of the oven, poke holes into the top and brush half of the glaze onto the cake. Wait 10 minutes and flip the cake onto a flat surface covered with plastic wrap. Remove the parchment paper and brush the remaining glaze onto the cake. Cool until the chocolate is firm to the touch, at least 1 hour.

If the chocolate is set you can now transfer the cake by flipping it onto a flat, plastic-wrapped plate, and then again onto your final cake destination*.

Cover the cake with fresh raspberries (one of the perks of living where I do is that fresh raspberries are available at the farmer’s market in February) and dab with warmed red currant jelly.

*Final Cake Destination would be an awesome movie. Or a truly terrible one.

When I made the almond cake for Tim last week, I asked him if he had any whipped cream in the house.

Tim: Nope. I can bring a ziploc bag? Spray a little?

Spray a little? What did that even mean? It took me several minutes to parse that statement.

When I informed him that we didn’t serve whipped cream from a can in this house, he replied that it was the only source that he knew of. Somewhere in Wisconsin, there is apparently a pasture of cows with nozzles on their udders, grazing peacefully on hydrogenated palm kernel oil and nitrous oxide.

Since he was coming over for dinner tonight, I couldn’t resist taking a little jab by baking a whipped cream cake.

Whipped Cream Cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes

All the recipes in Rose’s Heavenly Cakes come with weight measurements in ounces and grams, and baking with gram precision just feels like serious business.

8 oz or 225 grams cake flour (I subbed 200 grams AP flour and 25 grams corn starch)
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
12 oz or 348 grams heavy cream
3 large eggs or 150 grams
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons or 225 grams baker’s sugar

Preheat oven to 375°F. Grease and flour a 10 cup tube pan. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside. In a medium bowl, whip the cream until it forms stiff peaks.

Whisk together the eggs and vanilla and gradually beat into the whipped cream. Add the sugar and beat until fully incorporated. Fold in half of the flour mixture and then the other half until just combined.

Scoop the batter into the pan and use a spatula to smooth the surface. Shake the pan gently to remove any large air bubbles and bake for 30-35 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.  Let cool for 10 minutes before inverting.

Serve with strawberry coulis, meyer lemon curd, or

Blueberry Compote
3 cups fresh blueberries
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes, until the mixture thickens. Remove from heat and let cool. Blend in a blender or food processor until uniform. Cover and refrigerate.

I was informed too late that today is National Chocolate Cake Day, a day that I am sorely unprepared for. This cake, tucked at the back of Bouchon, is one that I had been eyeing as a project to tide me over until the arrival of my cake book. It has absolutely no chocolate in it. Damn. Just a few hours after I had purchased the ingredients for the cake and the strawberry coulis to go with it, I was informed that the intended recipient of my cake is allergic to strawberries, or as he calls them, murderberries. It also pairs pretty well with meyer lemon curd, in case you were wondering.

Strawberry Coulis

12 oz hulled strawberries
1/4 cup water
5 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in a blender and puree until smooth. Strain with a fine mesh strainer to remove seeds and cover and refrigerate until cold.

Gâteaux aux Amandes adapted from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon

7 oz almond paste
1/4 cup granulated sugar
4 oz unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
2 tablespoons honey
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon almond extract (or 2 tablespoons amaretto)
1/3 cup (I used 1.5 oz) all purpose flour, sifted
pinch of salt
1/2 cup sliced almonds, toasted
confectioner’s sugar
sugar syrup (1 oz sugar and 1 oz water, heated to a boil in a small pan) or amaretto

3/4 cup  crème fraîche, whipped to soft peaks

The original recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of amaretto in the batter and more to brush on top of the cake. Here, it has been replaced with almond extract and sugar syrup, respectively.

Edit: I have since obtained amaretto and baked a cake using it as the original recipe intended, and it was even better, so it is totally  worth your time to pick some up.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and flour an 8 inch pan and line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper. I only have a 9 inch pan so my cake is a bit thinner than intended

Beat the almond paste and sugar in a large bowl on low speed until the paste is broken up. Increase the speed to medium for about 2 minutes, until the paste mixture is broken into fine particles. Add the butter and beat for 5 minutes until the mixture is light and airy, stopping to scrape down the sides as necessary. Beating enough air into the mixture at this stage is key to avoiding a dense cake.

Mix in the honey and add the eggs one at a time, beating until each one is fully mixed in and the mixture remains fluffy. Add the almond extract, flour, salt and mix until just combined.

Pour the batter into the pan and shake or smooth the top with a spatula. Bake for about 25 minutes for an 8 inch pan, or until the cake is golden and springs back when pressed. It took me about 30 minutes in a 9 inch pan. Let cool on a rack.

When the cake is cool, invert the cake onto the rack, remove the parchment paper and invert again. Brush the top of the cake with sugar syrup and sprinkle with sliced almonds. Dust with confectioner’s sugar. Serve with a dollop of the whipped crème fraîche and the strawberry coulis or lemon curd.

I was so delighted when a friend of mine offered to buy me the cake book I was looking at.  I told him to choose a cake when the book arrived as a way of saying thank you. He marked two recipes and then passed the book on to a coworker. This is what greeted me when I went to go pick up my prize.

I foresee a lot of time spent in the kitchen in the near future. I’m just grateful that no one selected one of the multi-tiered wedding cakes!

And…we’re done. The final bundt was an adaptation of Kiss My Bundt’s Red Velvet Bundt, as published in the LA Times and found via The Food Librarian’s epic Thirty Days of Bundt.

As I am apparently in a storytelling mood, here are a few random factoids before we get to the recipe.

Numero uno: I am, and always will be, against food coloring for the sake of food coloring. So, no dye.

Item II: It used to be the case that Devil’s Food Cake and Red Velvet were the same thing. The names used to reflect the ginger color that resulted from a reaction between (alkalized) cocoa powder and acidic buttermilk. Then at some point they diverged and Devil’s Food Cake meant chocolate cake and Red Velvet was cake with red food coloring and eventually there was not so much chocolate in the Red Velvet cake, and plenty of red dye instead.

C) There is no C.

Four. Funny story about Dutch processed cocoa, aka alkalized cocoa. When I made my first batch of Red-Headed Stepchild Velvet Cupcakes, I used non-alkalized fancy cocoa powder, because The Boyfriend is a chocolate snob. When I offered him a warm cupcake fresh out of the oven, he said “It’s good,  I can still taste the baking powder.” Well, you can clearly see from the recipe that there is no baking powder, so I retorted hotly that in the course of running errands that day, I had run out of time to travel to the nega dimension to buy nega baking powder to counteract the complete absence of baking powder. Later, I realized he was tasting the tang of buttermilk (which, by the way, tastes nothing like baking powder) and I switched to alkalized cocoa. Thus ended his Monday-morning backseat guessing of the cupcakes.

Extra Chocolatey Not-Red Velvet Bundt Cake adapted from Kiss My Bundt recipe

I upped the cocoa powder in this recipe quite a bit and ended up with a rich chocolate cake. You can adjust back down to one tablespoon of cocoa for the original recipe or split the difference and go with two.

1¼ cups vegetable oil
1 cup buttermilk
2 eggs, room temperature
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2½ cups flour (I used 11.5 oz)
1¾ cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon fine salt
3 tablespoons high-fat cocoa powder (I used Valrhona)

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and set aside 10 cup bundt pan. Combine oil, buttermilk, eggs, vinegar, and vanilla and beat well. In a separate bowl, whisk together remaining ingredients. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until just combined. Pour into bundt pan and bake until a tester comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Cool in pan for 10 minutes before inverting. Let cool at least one hour before frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting

8 ounces cream cheese, softened
4 ounces unsalted butter, softened
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ cups powdered sugar, sifted

Beat the cream cheese, butter, and vanilla until well combined. Gradually add the powdered sugar and beat until well combined and frosting is light and fluffy. Apply frosting. Let me know if you figure out how to do this on a bundt shape without looking like a hot mess.