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5 "cake" Posts

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Sundays with Macrina: Brown Sugar & Almond Coffee Cake
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:13:00 -0500

Keywords: Cake , Macrina , Berries

On Saturday Chris was out with The Guys and I was kinda bored and couldn't decide what do to and I thought 'hey, I haven't baked anything in a while...' So I broke out the Macrina book and flipped through to find something that I could make with stuff I already had in the house. I found this Brown Sugar and Almond Coffee Cake that calls for fresh or frozen raspberries. Well, I had frozen mixed berries (raspberries, blackberries and blueberries) and I thought that was good enough. So I follow the recipe and it says I need a 9x9" pan to make this cake in. Well, I don't have a 9x9 pan, I only have an 8x8 pan. I poured it in and it was clearly too full and so I changed it to my higher sided round baking dish, thinking that it could at least hold it in if it puffed up a lot.

Well.....
I think the combination of the heavy almonds on top and the fact hat my oven is slightly tilted resulted in the almonds sliding off onto the bottom of the oven and making a huge mess. I really don't even think a 9x9 pan would have been big enough for the amount the cake rose.

This cake is delicious. It was super moist and really tasty. I happen to love almonds and almond flavored anything so it was perfect for me. I didn't really get a brown sugar taste from the cake and I probably would have named it Berry Almond Coffee Cake instead but either way, it was really great. My only complaint was that the berries sunk to the bottom, which I kind of suspected they would do. I thought about tossing them in flour to prevent this from happening but I thought that if I needed to do that, the book would have said so. Either way, yum. I will be making this again, but first I need to find a pan that can contain it properly :P
St. Patty's Day Cake
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:31:00 -0500

Keywords: Cake , St. Patty's , Guinness

You didn't think I could let St. Patty's go by and NOT make a Chocolate Guinness Cake, did you? And of course it had Bailey's Buttercream on the inside. I made this for our St. Patty's day dinner at our friends house. Chris made Irish Soda Bread but I don't think he took any pictures. Seriously though, I have to get him to make it again and take some pictures because it was GOOOOOD! Although I don't know which was better, the bread, the cake or Vina's KICK ASS Corned Beef and Cabbage dinner. I ate so much that I ran back to our house to change out of my jeans and put sweatpants on (only after all the other already wearing sweatpants people yelled at me for thinking I should wear jeans in the first place :P) It was a great dinner with awesome friends... in other words, the best it could have been.
Sunday's With Macrina: German Pancake with Apples, Rum, & Brown Sugar
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:41:00 -0500

Keywords: Macrina , Brunch , Apple , Pancake

I picked this recipe to do first because Chris and I were looking for something fun to make for breakfast with stuff we already had in the house. The only thing we had to run out for was the apples. Also, because we wanted something a little heavier than a muffin or a scone.

Here's how it came together:

We had to substitute a few things for this recipe. The main thing was the rum. The recipe calls for dark rum, but we didn't have any and since we live in NY, liquor stores don't open until noon on Sundays. We only had Captain Morgan's Parrot Bay Passion Fruit Rum in the house, so we used that. The other two things were minor. First, I don't own a 9" saute pan, I own a 10" saute pan so we used that. Second, we don't drink whole milk, we buy 2% milk so that's what we used.

Wet ingredients: eggs, milk, vanilla

Dry ingredients: flour, kosher salt, sugar

Melting the butter.

While that melts, mix the dry and wet ingredients together until there are no lumps.

Then you pour the batter into the saute pan

After it cooks for a few minutes and starts to brown around the outside, you pop it into the oven to bake.

Meanwhile, you take the cut up apples...

And mix it with the melted brown sugar, butter, cinnamon, rum mixture.

Stir to coat and then cook them for a little while.

This is what the pancake looked like right before I pulled it out of the oven. It kinda made me crack up.

Then it deflated a little and we poured on the apples and dusted with powdered sugar.

Wow. Soooo goood. The pancake wasn't too heavy and really had a nice flavor. It was a great brunch and so easy to make that we will definitely make it again. The only thing was that the apple mixture was a little on the sweet side, but we are blaming that on our choice to use the fruity rum instead of dark rum. We may try it with a different fruit next time. Maybe apricots.

I'm so glad I chose this for the first recipe! I had a really hard week at work last week and wasn't so much in the mood to cook but I thought, hey, this is why I decided to do this in the first place. Chris and I had a lot of fun making it (and eating it!) together.
Cupcakes? No, Cupcake Cake!
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:12:00 -0500

Keywords: custard , cupcake

We went over our neighbors' house for a little barbecue and I decided to make Gâteau À L'Orange (orange spongecake) Cupcakes with Crème Pâtissière (custard filling) and Crème Au Beurre (butter cream) flavored with Eau De Rose (rosewater). If the French didn't tip you off, I got all the recipes from Julia Child's book 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' (40th Anniversary Edition).

On a side note: if you do not have this book, you should buy it. It's excellent. There are tips and directions for everything from buying the right produce to how to use a knife effectively to how to perform seemingly hard culinary feats with ease (such as Soufflé and Roux). It is a teaching book, meaning sometimes it sounds like a textbook, but the directions are so explicit that you can't help but cook a delicious meal.

Back to our regularly scheduled blog...

So Julia's spongecake is supposed to be just that, cake. I decided to try it as cupcakes. Everything went very well, except that I left them in the oven too long, waiting for the tops to be golden brown while the bottoms burned. I thought 'oh no. what do I do? make a new batch? not bring cupcakes?!' Then I was hit with a very clever plan. I would make a cupcake cake!

Since only the very bottoms were burned I was able, with the help of Chris and Danny, to slice off the burnt part and have left the very delicious and nicely cooked tops of the cupcakes. I inverted 9 of them and placed them in a pyrex square dish, spooned over my custard, topped with right-side-up cupcake tops and then iced each cupcake with the Rosewater Butter Cream.

The verdict?

Cake? delicious!
Custard? delicious!
Buttercream? tastes like soap! ew.

It may not have come out very beautiful, but it sure was yummy (once you scraped off that icky pink stuff, what was I thinking with that color?).

So, they weren't the beautiful masterpieces that I envisioned when I started.... so what? This is the lesson of 'you can't always be perfect and sometimes that's ok'.
Orange Chiffon Cupcakes
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:52:00 -0500

Keywords: flower , cupcake , orange

This weekend we were invited to our friends' house for a cookout in honor of her Mom visiting. I decided to make something new that I had never made before. I have been playing around with what flavors I wanted to try out and how I would decorate them. The inspiration for these came from the classic orange/vanilla creamsicle. Another big part of the deciding factors for these cuppies were the fact that I have not gotten to play with my new flower cutter or veiner at all since they arrived about three weeks ago in the mail from A & H Cake Design (and a special thanks to Louise from CakeJournal for telling us which cutters/veiners she uses!).

Anyway they turned out fabulous! The cake was light and fluffy with just enough orange flavor. I just used a regular lemon chiffon recipe and substituted orange for anything lemon and low acid orange juice for the water. The icing (adapted from this recipe on epicurious.com) was delicious and not too sweet (I used less butter and less sugar and more vanilla than recommended).

They were perfect for our first cookout of the season and I cannot wait to try some more of my ideas for flavors!

Anyway, back to the kitchen!