Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

I’m so done with this book. I’m done with three-layer cakes and fillings and frostings. These last couple of weeks I’ve been struggling to pick a recipe to make. At this point, the cakes all seem alike, and they all seem like sooooo much trouble to make.

Right now I want simple. I want savory, not sweet. And I don’t want three different components to have to make. I’m whining a bit, I know.

So, vanilla cake with a peach mousse filling and a raspberry-whipped cream frosting. I have to admit that I was surprised by the cake part of this recipe. I was expecting dry and bland. Instead I got moist. The crumb of this cake is coarser than the other cakes I’ve made out of this book, but it stood up to the filling and frosting quite well. The cake is a cream cake which simply means that whipped cream is the fat of choice instead of butter.

To make the cake, cream is whipped until soft peaks form. To the whipped cream, vanilla, sugar and eggs are added. Cake flour, baking powder and salt are folded into the whipped cream mixture, followed by a bit of buttermilk. As usual, I decreased the amount of leavening from 3 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder to 2 teaspoons. My cakes were perfectly flat, no domes, no craters.

The filling is a peach mousse, and here’s where most of my problems were. The author never tells you how much peach puree you should end up with after thawing frozen peaches and blending them to a liquid. To this peach liquid you add more whipped cream and gelatin. My peach mousse wouldn’t set up, so I ended up having to add more gelatin to it. I suspect I had too much peach liquid to begin with. I had to assemble the cake in a springform pan because the peach mousse was so runny. Eventually it set up, but it took several hours in the refrigerator.

The raspberry cream is pretty simple to make. You thaw frozen raspberries, cook them until they begin to fall apart, then puree them and strain out the seeds. Some of this raspberry puree is stirred into whipped cream, which is then used to frost the cake. Once again, I didn’t have nearly enough frosting to cover the cake. The recipe calls for 1 cup of cream to be whipped. I ended up making almost double that just to cover the cake.

In the end, I had a decent cake. It didn’t have the strong, zippy flavors I was hoping for. Both the peach mousse and the raspberry cream flavors were muted, but it was still tasty. The recipe has you hold a bit of both the peach and raspberry puree and use them to decorate the plate. Forget decorating. I used the leftover purees to spoon over the cake and get the flavor I was looking for. This cake doesn’t hold well. By the next morning, the raspberry whipped cream had started weeping and the cake was sitting in its own raspberry-flavored lake.

I may come back to this book at a later date, after I’ve had time to recover from multiple-component cakes. I didn’t have too many success with this book. The ones that stand out are the ice-cream cake, the maple-walnut cake, the coconut cake and the sour cream-chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

There were no birthdays in my family this week, which is fortunate as I wouldn’t have shared this cake with them anyway. This is one of those cakes where I wanted to protectively curl my arm around it, while snarling and jabbing a sharp fork at anybody who dared come too close.

“Mine, all mine. My precioussssssss.”

You can go in all sorts of directions with this cake. The basic structure is a simple, one-bowl chocolate cake sandwiching any flavor of ice cream you want, capped off with a thick coating of chocolate ganache. For my ice cream layer, I made a vanilla gelato mixed with crushed Oreo cookies. Sometimes I’ve found that the cake part of ice cream cakes gets dry in the freezer, and the whole thing turns into a rock. But even after spending the night in the freezer, the cake was easy to cut through (running a knife under hot water for a few minutes makes cutting easy), and the cake part stayed softish. No dry cake here.

This ice cream cake hit all the right marks for a warm summer day. It was creamy and cool, with a nice chocolate punch. So the next time Bryan starts singing the song from the commercial of a well-known ice cream shop that sells ice cream cakes, I know how to shut him up fast.

And that’s usually not easy to do.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

I almost got out of my bad-cake-rut with this recipe, but not quite. The fault, though, is my own.

This recipe is a lemon cake, marbled and filled with blueberry preserves and finished off with a lemon buttercream frosting. I cheated a bit and used a different frosting. I just couldn’t bring myself to make a buttercream in this heat, so instead, I mixed some lemon curd with whipped cream and frosted the cake with that.

The problem I had was that the cakes were a little dry. I over baked the cakes, then left them sitting out most of the day due to a series of unexpected softball games. I think if I had taken a little more care of the cakes, this cake would have turned out really nicely. As it was, though, the cake was pretty good. I certainly didn’t have any difficulty eating a slice.

The cake had a nice lemon flavor. I thought the blueberries got a little lost (as did my marbling), but simply using more of the preserves in the filling would fix that. I was really happy with the frosting and would probably use it instead of the original buttercream.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

I seem to be on a roll here. This is the third cake in a row that I haven’t liked. I’m starting to wonder if it is me or the recipes I’m choosing.

I thought, for sure, that this recipe would be a hit. It’s got chocolate, hazelnuts and whipped cream! Also, it’s one of the simpler recipes in the book. Instead of a separate filling and frosting, this cake uses whipped cream for both.

Alas, the cake tasted extremely bitter and the chocolate flavor was nonexistent. Bryan and I each took a bite and then pushed our plates away. I let the cake sit overnight in the fridge to see if the flavor would improve, but it didn’t.

The cake is made by finely grinding toasted hazelnuts and sugar and mixing that with graham cracker crumbs, grated unsweetened chocolate, eggs, sugar, flour and oil (not necessarily in that order). The cakes baked up beautifully. Once cool, you moisten them with a rum syrup (I don’t like rum, so I used a hazelnut liquor instead). The filling and frosting are simply whipped cream slightly sweetened with powdered sugar.

Besides the cake being bitter and not chocolately at all, my other major gripe about this recipe is that the recipe doesn’t make nearly enough whipped cream. I would have liked a thicker frosting.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

If only this cake had tasted as good as it looked. Unfortunately, it was very dry, and I didn’t like the cranberry part of the cranberry-raspberry preserves. The only bright side of  this recipe was the white chocolate frosting. That was good.

The cake is an all-egg-white type of cake, with some added fat coming from buttermilk and oil. The filling is made by cooking dried cranberries, frozen raspberries, sugar and orange juice until thick. I really thought I’d like the filling, but the cranberries gave it an off flavor that I found really unappealing.

As I said above, the only bright spot was the frosting. This is a standard buttercream (egg whites, hot sugar, a ton of butter) with some melted white chocolate stirred in. The white chocolate gave the buttercream a nice vanilla flavor and really smooth texture.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

I’m calling this cake “Everything but the Kitchen Sink Carrot Cake.” It was a train wreck in cake form.

This carrot cake had a little bit of everything in it, and I do mean everything. Besides the carrot, there’s dried apricots, honey, walnut oil, ginger, pineapple, coconut and orange marmalade. All wrapped up in a cream cheese frosting. All good-tasting things. And yet, still a train wreck.

I’m not sure where the cake went wrong. There is nothing unusual about the mixing directions. Besides using a flavored oil instead of something more neutral, there aren’t any really strange ingredients. I think there was just too much stuff in the cakes and not enough batter to suspend it all. The cakes themselves are very fragile and sticky, and it was a bit of a battle to get the parchment off and get them stacked.

The frosting is okay, there just wasn’t nearly enough of it to fill and frost a 9-inch, 3-layer cake.

And speaking of that flavored oil? The author calls for walnut oil instead of using walnuts. She says you get a subtle walnut flavor without the nutty texture. One bottle of $10 walnut oil later, I couldn’t taste nuts at all.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne

I wish this cake had tasted as good as it looked. As I was reading through the ingredient list, I started imaging how the cake would taste. A dense, moist chocolate cake filled with a smooth, luscious cream that tasted faintly of sweet almonds, all wrapped up in soft bittersweet chocolate frosting.

Well, I got part of it right.

The chocolate cake is a winner. Although the ingredient list is long, it results in a very moist, tender crumb that was dense enough to hold up as a layer cake. The recipe calls for both unsweetened chocolate and cocoa powder. On the liquid side, strong coffee, honey and buttermilk give it a real depth of flavor. The cakes baked up fairly evenly, only needing a little bit of trimming.

The almond cream, on the other hand, was not so successful. Thanks to 2 teaspoons of almond extract, the filling tasted harshly of almond booze. The cream was thick and smooth, but I just couldn’t get past the taste.

The frosting, sigh. There were no soft swirls of bittersweet goodness here. The frosting is made of bittersweet chocolate, cream and butter. Warm and at room temperature, the frosting was fine. But it hardened up quickly and became almost shell-like, especially straight out of the fridge. Allowing the cake to sit at room temperature before serving would help this. Also, I think this cake benefits from a thinner coat of frosting.

To finish off the cake, a thin layer of apricot preserves is spread across the top. I had no problem with this part, and in fact, thought the tartness of the preserves balanced everything quick nicely.

I will say that other people who tried the cake liked it. It just wasn’t what I imagined.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne

I couldn’t wrap my head around the flavors of this cake. I know what maple syrup tastes like, and I know what walnuts taste like. But I couldn’t quite figure out how they would taste together in cake form. I think that the fact that there was no chocolate in this cake was throwing me off.

This cake intrigued me from the moment I read the title. It has a different method of mixing the cake, plus, it has a cream cheese frosting, and I’m a sucker for cream cheese frostings. You start out by toasting walnuts and then finely chopping them. The nuts get combined with flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Then you add butter and maple syrup and cream the whole thing until it is light and fluffy. In the final step before baking, a couple of eggs and milk are mixed into the batter.

I had to make cakes twice. The first time, I was right to be worried about the amount of leavening; there was too much for the amount of flour used in the batter. The cakes fell badly and were so tender they cracked as I tried to get them out of the pans and take off the parchment paper on the bottoms. The second time I made the cakes, I decreased the baking soda by almost half. I also increased the amount of walnuts and didn’t chop them too finely. These cakes came out just fine.

Next up was the maple cream frosting. Cream cheese and maple syrup? Count me in. Two sticks of butter and melted and boiled with 2/3 cup of maple syrup. Once this syrup has cooled, you add it to cream cheese that has been whipped with powdered sugar. ALOT of powdered sugar. I suspected that this was going to be a very soft frosting, and boy was it. It kept sliding down the cake to puddle at the bottom. After sitting in the fridge overnight, it finally firmed up, but it was a mess to work with. It was also too sweet. Six cups of powdered sugar to 12 ounces of cream cheese? Next time, I’ll increase the cream cheese to 16 ounces, decrease the sugar by at least half and try beating the butter into the cream cheese and adding the maple syrup to that.

In the finished cake, the flavor was very rich and sweet. It really needs the cream cheese frosting to temper that sweetness. The maple syrup and brown sugar give the cake a caramelly flavor that goes really well with the walnuts. The cake reminded me of carrot cake without the carrots. I really liked using the maple syrup as a sweetener and want to experiement with it.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne

Bryan had never heard of a Boston Cream Pie, and he was pretty excited at the thought of getting a pie for dessert. You can imagine his surprise when I started putting it together. I think he was kind of disappointed.

A Boston Cream Pie is vanilla cake, filled with vanilla custard and covered with chocolate. I’ve heard that the dessert originated in Boston, but I don’t know why it is called a “pie” instead of a “cake.”

I was also a little disappointed in this cake. I had no problem with the vanilla custard or the chocolate glaze, but the cake itself was slightly dry. I would not have wanted to eat the cake on its own. All told, this cake was just okay. It is pretty easy to put together (no fancy filling or frosting), but I imagine there are better recipes for Boston Cream Pie out there.

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne

This cake looked like a cloud and tasted heavenly. Bryan, who doesn’t much like coconut, declared it is new favorite cake. I wouldn’t go that far, as I thought the coconut flavor needed to be stronger, but it was very, very good.

The cake itself is a light, white cake that uses egg whites and a bit of milk. The surprise ingredient is unsweetened coconut milk in place of either oil or butter. The coconut milk keeps the cake very moist while lending a very subtle coconut flavor. This is where I really would have liked to taste more of the coconut. Perhaps a little coconut extract?

The frosting and filling is a cream cheese buttercream. Cream cheese buttercream is the Bigfoot of the baking world. I’ve heard of this mysterious substance, people have taken pictures of it, but I’ve never actually found a recipe for it, until now. It’s pretty simple. Butter and cream cheese are mixed together and then added to a meringue made of egg whites and hot sugar. Unlike a standard buttercream, this frosting is more than just sweet. The cream cheese gives it a depth of flavor that beats regular buttercream hands down. The only downside is that the cream cheese buttercream doesn’t get nearly as hard as a regular buttercream. So what it lacks in structure, it more than makes up in flavor.

Once you have the cake filled and frosted, it is covered with sweetened, flaked coconut.

All the components really work together in this cake. The cake itself is moist and tender. The cream cheese buttercream sets off the coconut and helps keep the cake moist. This isn’t the easiest cake to make (boiling sugar for the buttercream), but the end result is worth the work.