Cakes

I’d like to thank Donna Hay for creating a simple, easy cake that tastes fantastic.

Last weekend there were a couple of birthday celebrations (including a belated one for me). I love making cakes (although to be honest, I may be getting tired of cakes…I’ve made 3 in a week) and I was drawn to the cake that’s on the cover of Donna Hay’s 50th issue.

No mixer is required to make the cake (just the frosting) and it was put together in no time. I did add extra icing sugar to the frosting as the kiddies would be having a piece and I felt it would be too tangy (a.k.a. sour) for them.

Recipe here (printable).

I love making recipes that involve lengthy processes. It helps me learn patience I guess. My family, however, always requests simple easy to make cakes whenever I offer to bake them up something. My mom’s birthday just passed and wanted something simple and not fussy. As usual, I went to my go to cake book, Heavenly Cakes.

This cake is not fussy or complicated at all. I was able to make the cake without going to the grocery store. You may need to go out and buy some whipping cream if unlike me you don’t have a litre of it in your fridge along with 3 pounds of butter. This is a nice and light cake. It does have a huge helping of whipping cream in it, so don’t go thinking this is diet food.

It’s a very short ingredient list and by the time the oven is done preheating this cake could be in the oven. The hardest part about this recipe is buttering and flouring the pan. I also recommend that you grease the cooling rack like the book suggests. I ignored the instructions and the cake ended up sticking like crazy.

This recipe will be in my arsenal of cakes I can quickly throw together. Definitely give it a try.

Recipe here

For my sister’s birthday, when I asked what cake she wanted, she mentioned a cake I had made a year ago for my grandmother’s birthday. It was a simple cake thrown together that the adults liked, but didn’t win the hearts of the kids. I’m guessing it’s because of the lack of sweet frosting. Instead, in its place was fluffy whipped cream.

This recipe comes from The Cake Bible. The cake is dead simple to make. More efficient bakers could probably mix up everything and have the batter in the pan before the oven is done preheating. For the simplest presentation, a dusting of icing sugar is all that’s needed. I decided to cut the cake in half and fill it with whipped cream and raspberries. It’s a great Spring/Summer cake that you can definitely play around with.

Recipe here. For the filling, just beat whipping cream with some sugar and then put it on one layer of cake, add berries, and then place the other cake layer on top.

I have to be honest, ever since working regular hours I haven’t had the inclination to cook. Getting home at 7pm means dinner at around 8 or later. The hours I used to spend making something extremely delicious just isn’t going to happen on a weekday. You know who makes time to cook after work? The husband. He’s a better person than me. I’m now on the lookout for fast easy meals.

Weekends, I can find time to bake. Especially if it’s for a birthday.

R’s mom turned a big number this year and when I asked what kind of cake she wanted, she said carrot cake. I’m a big fan of carrot cake and there was a recipe in Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. I have to say this is one of the best carrot cakes I have ever tried. It’s super moist and the frosting was so easy to make. I was wondering if the white chocolate would work with the carrot cake, but it does. It gives it a nice sweetness without having to use a bunch of powdered sugar. You also make it in the food processor so it’s hassle free (minus the melting of chocolate that can be done in the microwave). If you want to frost the sides of the cake, I recommend making a double batch, I did not have enough frosting to make the cake look pretty enough.

I haven’t been disappointed by any of the cakes in this book and this cake is no exception. R’s dad was really taken by this cake judging by the number of times he would say “Wow, this is really good cake!” out of the blue.

I think I baked more this year than any other year. I was baking bread on an almost weekly basis before all baking stopped when our unit got hit with a flood, but made up for it with the hundreds of cookies I baked as well as pies and cakes. This year I really got into cake baking and loved making complicated potentially stressful cakes for birthdays. R got 3 birthday cakes this year: His early bday cake so he could open his gift, his birthday with our friends, and his birthday with his family. I decided after the big complicated lemon cake I made, I would do something simple and easy. This spice cake with peanut buttercream fit the bill.

For a Beranbaum recipe, this cake is really simple. One pan, no obscure ingredients, and you make the frosting in a food processor. Simple and tasty.

Recipe here

Today is R’s 30th birthday.

Happy birthday to a wonderful husband! What do wonderful husbands do? They help clean the messy kitchen when you’re covered in frosting trying to get a cake done before all the guests come over.

Lately I’ve been pressed for time, but I absolutely had to make a birthday cake. Of course not a simple one, but naturally something that would take days to make. I really need to make better use of my time management skills.

R wanted something citrusy, so I made Woody’s Luxury Lemon Cake. It’s been featured on the Heavenly Cake baker’s blog so I sort of knew what to expect. This cake takes a long time to make and you’re best off splitting the work over a couple of days. I did the lemon curd and baked the cake the day before and the buttercream the day of. I think it’s called “luxury” for a reason: 17 eggs (13 of them egg yolks) and you need the luxury of having enough time to make it. This recipe uses white chocolate and even though I’m not a fan of it, it really adds to the cake.

Everything went together fairly smoothly for me. I’ve made the curd before so that wasn’t a problem. The directions for the curd in this book omit the temperature it should be. The Cake Bible says an accurate thermometer will reach 190F. I took my curd off before it reached 190F because it wouldn’t of been pourable if I let it sit longer. The custard base didn’t cool to the proper temperature either after 45 minutes so I gave it another 30 minutes in the fridge. It still didn’t reach the proper temperature so I pretended my thermometer was wrong and threw it into the mixer anyway. Nothing melted and nothing curdled. The buttercream is a very soft so I recommend chilling it in the fridge for a few hours. If you’re going to leave it in the fridge overnight, allow it to go to room temperature before beating so it doesn’t curdle.

The cake was a huge success and everyone loved it. It’s definitely a repeat recipe.

Coffee cake is somewhat of a misnomer. Most of the time it doesn’t actually contain coffee, it’s just a treat you can have with coffee. One thing is for sure, coffee cake is delicious. It’s got some substance to it and it can easily pass as something you can have for breakfast.

This recipe is a snap to make, but with all coffee cakes you are most likely spooning the batter out and not “pouring” it as many recipes state. It is such a thick batter that it needs a bit more help to come out of the bowl than just gravity. It’s also a pain in the butt to try and get the batter to go all the way to the edges of the pan. I’ve given up on this.

This is a Heavenly Cakes recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum. It’s supposed to be baked in a small bundt pan. I only have the large size so that’s why it looks kind of squat in the picture. It’s still just as tasty! I think next time I make the recipe I’ll double it so it’ll fill the whole pan. The cake went pretty quick anyway.

Recipe here

I bought a Nikon 35mm lens for R’s big 30th birthday. When we go anywhere he’s the majority picture taker. Our trip to Paris, about 1000 shots were taken. I took 5 pictures. So even though it looks like a gift for me too for all the food photos I take, it’s really for him. Besides, trying out the 35mm, I don’t think it gives me the tight shots that I like to take even though the depth of field is amazing. I’ll just have to save my pennies for a lens for me.

R’s birthday isn’t until near the end of the month and he wanted to open it up early, but not without blowing out a candle. So I made the Chocolate Birthday Cake (pg. 16) from my Small Batch Baking Book. I didn’t have any empty cans to bake the cake in so I used a big cappuccino mug. I think I over-baked it and this resulted in more of a dense brownie than a light cake. I used the chocolate sour cream frosting that the recipe uses which is super over the top rich. This cake is supposed to feed two, but we still have leftovers!

On my lengthy to-do list I’d like to tweak this recipe for something more moist and lighter with a not as rich frosting. Because you never know when you want to make cake for 2 people, right?

I had to make 2 cakes in a weekend, my grandmother’s birthday cake and my brother-in-law’s. No picture for my grandmother’s cake, but it (eventually) turned out. I picked a fairly easy cake (Golden Almond Cake from The Cake Bible) but decided on filling the layers with some leftover jam I made and whipping cream.

I messed up making whipped cream — twice!

I tried to make stabilized whipped cream by using gelatin. The first time it failed was because I let it cool too much. The second time I didn’t let it cool enough so it interfered with the whipping process. It took so long I said aloud, “Any more beating and this will turn into butter.” And at that exact moment I had made butter. I didn’t bother trying the third time. Despite all the whipping cream drama, the cake was fabulous. At least for the adults. Anything that’s not chocolate doesn’t seem to appeal to the kids.

For my brother in law’s cake I made the Chocolate Layer Cake with Caramel Ganache from Rose’s new book Heavenly Cakes. Without going into a book review (I’ve only tried one recipe), the book is full of gorgeous pictures and it’s a pleasure to thumb through.

This cake makes it possible to have decadent rich chocolate, but not be heavy. It caught my attention when it said it was light but fudgey which somewhat fit the description of my cake “guidelines”. The guidelines was that he liked something like a cheesecake, nice and dense, or chocolatey or light, like a mousse.

Yeah.

The cake went together easily and quickly. I used pastry flour to make it extra tender. I didn’t burn the caramel when making it which is always iffy because there’s a 50% chance I mess it up. Putting the cake together was more problematic. I ran out of time to let the ganache fully cool so I used it more like a glaze and as I picked up the cake to split the layers it fell apart on me. It was not a pretty cake, but it was tasty. Next time I will refrigerate it like I usually do so the cake isn’t as fragile.

Heavenly Cakes is still a new book and recently published so there’s not as many recipes floating around. Check out the Heavenly Cakes blog for a few select recipes and pictures.

On Twitter I saw a tweet about a Toronto cupcake meetup at The Drake Hotel that Cupcakes Take The Cake was throwing. I immediately sent an e-mail to rsvp. Then I remembered how shy I am. Was this a good idea?

I overcame my shyness (maybe all that sugar helped?) and had an absolute blast! Everyone there was super nice and friendly and I got to meet Juanita from Sweet Things, someone whose blog and twitter I follow. Juanita brought the cutest cupcakes

We We got to sample 4 different flavours: vanilla with a homemade marshmallow, coconut, pistachio cupcake with lavender frosting, and a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting and edible gold leaf sprinkled on top.

It was interesting to hear everyone’s opinions on the cupcakes. A majority of people liked the vanilla cupcake, but I thought it was too sweet for my tastes. My favourite of the bunch was the coconut cupcake. This was surprising for me as it was the one I least wanted to try. I’m not a big fan of coconut at all, other than coconut cream pie. This cupcake tasted like coconut cream pie! It had a huge pile of coconut frosting bathed with shredded coconut and hidden in the cupcake was a custard filling. Delicious! The chocolate cupcake would be good for a lover of dark bitter chocolate. It was incredibly rich and the frosting looked like a sour cream chocolate ganache. The pistachio and lavender one was my second favourite out of the bunch.

Before I didn’t know what the appeal was with cupcakes, but I get it now. For me it’s like a mini cake where you can try different flavours in bite sized amounts. If you’re ordering a cupcake, you don’t have to commit to ordering an entire cake.

Big thanks to Cupcakes Take the Cake for setting this up. It was awesome meeting Rachel and everyone who was there!