Raccoon and Lobster

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.

Friends, our long national fatmare nightmare of gluttony is almost at an end. No longer shall our lives be filled with the delectable scent of freshly baked cakes, no more shall our stomachs strain against the unrelenting tyranny of a waistband. Freedom is coming, friends. But not today. Today, we eat.

Brown Sugar and Chocolate Chip Pound Bundt with Maple Glaze via Epicurious, with thanks to the Food Librian.

12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
3 cups all purpose flour (I used 13.8 oz)
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1½ cups packed brown sugar (I used about half dark and half light)
2½ teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon maple extract (omitted in this cake)
4 large eggs
1 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 325°F and grease your bundt pan. Mix chocolate chips with a dusting of flour and set aside. This helps prevent them from sinking in the batter. Whisk together the flour with baking soda, baking powder, and salt and set aside.

Beat the butter and brown sugar together until light and fluffy. Have you noticed how there really is very little variation in technique between the cakes? Add the vanilla and maple extracts and then the eggs, one at the time, beating well. Gradually add the buttermilk, alternating with the flour mixture, beating until just combined. Stir in the chocolate chips and pour into your bundt pan. Bake until a cake tester comes out clean, about 55 minutes.

Cool for 10 minutes in the pan before inverting and then drizzle with

Maple Glaze

1 cup powdered sugar
3 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons whipping cream
1½ teaspoons instant espresso powder (omitted in this cake)
milk

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and whisk until smooth. Add milk by ½ teaspoon increments to adjust the thickness of the glaze if necessary. Remember that the glaze will become more liquid when it comes in contact with the warm cake.

Normally a fifth wheel is considered a bad thing, but when we are talking about wheels of cake, it’s a different matter completely. I’m really proud of how this cake came out, it’s one of my favorites so far. The Boyfriend had inquired about the possibility of a lemon-flavored cake, and so I went out in search of Meyer lemons. It took a few tries, but I finally located a stash and I needed a recipe that would put them in their best light. The last citrus cake acquired most of its flavor via the syrup drizzled on it, and I wanted bigger and better things for my hard-sought lemons.

When I considered making a lemon curd to go with the cake, it was Stacy who suggested using the curd as a filling. I wasn’t sure if the curd would survive an hour in the oven without getting soaked into the cake, but the allure of a warm, gooey punch of lemon was too much to resist.

As for the cake, the final recipe was sort of a hodge-podge. Google introduced me to a Lemon Poppy Seed Cake whose ingredient list looked very similar to the Orange Cream Cheese Pound Bundt I made on Monday. This cake had a little bit less butter, and some baking soda added for leavening, which made it a lighter variant. One might even call it a cousin to the previous pound bundt. I expanded on that and added more lemon flavor and switched out half of the sour cream for crème fraîche to make it even lighter. It’s pretty good by itself, but paired with the lemon curd filling it really turns into something special.

Is it bad form to post extremely flattering reviews of your own food? Granted, the person who wrote this has been bribed with warm cake for 5 days in a row, but I was still tickled pink when he said

There should be a warning about the lemon curd – it’s so awesome it could cause injury.

That’s a smart guy who will be getting more cakes in the future. And this is a cake that I’ll definitely be making again.

Meyer Lemon Curd

1/4 cup Meyer lemon juice
zest from said lemons, about 1 tablespoon
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
4 ounces butter, cut into 4 pieces

Heat a saucepan with about an inch water over medium high heat. In a metal bowl large enough to function as a double broiler, whisk together the juice, zest, sugar and egg. When the water is simmering, turn the heat down to low and place the metal bowl over the saucepan. Whisk the lemon mixture until it thickens about 5 to 6 minutes. You should be able to coat a spoon and draw a clean line on the back with a finger. Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the butter one piece at a time, letting each piece get fully incorporated before adding the next. If you want, you can force the curd through a sieve to remove the zest, but I liked the extra flavor it added and the mixture was not lumpy, so I let it remain. Transfer the curd to a clean container and layer plastic wrap directly on the curd surface to prevent the formation of a skin. Keeps for up to 2 weeks.

Meyer Lemon Cake

3 cups flour (I used 13.8 oz)
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, room temperature
3 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
6 large eggs
½ cup sour cream
½ cup crème fraîche
3 tablespoons Meyer lemon zest
1/4 cup Meyer lemon juice

Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease up a 12 cup bundt pan and set aside. Whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt together in a bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy and then add the vanilla and the eggs, one at a time. Whisk together the sour cream, crème fraîche, zest, and juice. Gradually add the flour mixture and the lemon mixture to the bowl, alternating between wet and dry ingredients and mixing only until just combined.

Pour most of the batter into the bundt pan, reserving roughly 2 cups worth. Using a piping bag or a freezer bag with a corner cut off, pipe the lemon curd in a circle on top of the batter, making sure to keep away from the inner and outer edges of the pan. Cover with the remainder of the batter and bake until a cake tester comes out clean, about 1 hour and 10 minutes.

My cake rose to be exactly level with the top of my 12 cup bundt pan. Slightly harrowing.

I also got a few small spots that stuck to the pan, so I dusted this cake with extra powdered sugar.

And if a little bit of the curd filling gets smooshed by the layer of batter on top and touches the edge of the pan, this is what happens. It’s not a big deal. Maybe use more powdered sugar concealer. No one will notice. Or care.

Even though there is about 3/4 of a cup of lemon curd filling, it looks like a lot less in the cross section. Rest assured, the lemon curd offers a sweet, tangy bite that will not disappoint. Just ask Joe.

When I asked for cake suggestions for the remaining cakes, I had no idea that someone would try to set me up as an unwitting accomplice to murder.

My “friend” Jackie asked for two cakes: a Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt and a Monkey Bread Bundt. Innocent enough on the face of it. What you don’t know is that both of these recipes have walnuts as an ingredient. An ingredient that is conveniently not listed in the title. An ingredient that her boyfriend is conveniently deathly allergic to. An ingredient that an unwitting baker might cheerfully include in a recipe and serve to Jackie’s loving boyfriend and thus unknowingly become the agent that carries out her deadly plan. Of death.

mgp, if you are reading this, look out behind you. She will not be foiled so easily.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt…of Death adapted from Epicurious

1 3/4 cups all purpose flour (I used 8 oz)
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
½ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/4 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1½ cup canned pure pumpkin
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup whole milk
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease your bundt pan and set aside. Combine flour, spice, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and whisk together. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add in eggs one at a time. Beat in pumpkin and vanilla. Gradually beat in the flour mixture, alternating with the milk. Fold in the chocolate chips and death walnuts.

Pour batter into bundt pan and bake until tester comes out clean, about 55 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan. Dust with a mixture of powdered sugar and cinnamon. Serve.