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 Great Cookies by Carole Walter

The thing about shortbread is that when it’s done well, it can be a thing of beauty. Done badly, though, one ends up with a mouthful of sand. Fortunately, these chocolate shortbread cookies are firmly in the good category, and they got better as they aged. They are the perfect little finger cookie.

Made primarily out of flour, butter, sugar and cocoa powder, these cookies are quick and easy to make. They deliver a deep chocolate punch, and a little piece goes a long way. The recipe recommends dipping the ends of the shortbread in melted chocolate. I was feeling lazy the day I made these and decided to skip that step. I’m glad I did. I don’t think these cookies needed any more chocolate. The only change I would make next time is to add some instant espresso powder to the dough to give the cookies a little more depth of flavor.

Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from Cooks Illustrated

Meet home run #84,612 from this book.

This one-pot dish features tender strips of steak and egg noodles in a flavorful sauce of onions, paprika, bell pepper, tomato paste, beef stock and sour cream. The sauce is mildly spicy from the paprika with a creamy tang from the sour cream. I had this on the table in less than 30 minutes after turning on the stove. And the leftovers were just as good as the first night’s meal. How can you beat that?

The dish starts of by browning a couple of strip steaks. Once they’ve gotten a nice crust on them, you set the steaks aside while you build the sauce in the same pan. An onion and a red bell pepper are sauteed until softened. Paprika and tomato paste are added and cooked briefly. Finally, beef stock and egg noodles are stirred into the pan and simmered until the noodles are tender. Just before serving, the steaks are thinly sliced and added to the pan, along with the sour cream.

After making eight or nine batches, here’s my spin on the recipe:

We like our salsa less liquidy, so I briefly drain the tomatoes, and then add in some of the tomato juice at the end.

I also dislike getting chunks of raw onion and jalapeno in my salsa, so I process them into very small pieces first

And finally, I like more lime juice than the original recipe calls for, so I use the juice of a whole lime.

My version of the recipe is after the jump.

Salsa
Adapted from The Pioneer Woman cooking website
Makes about 3 cups, give or take

1/4 cup chopped onion (I use about 1/4 of a medium onion)
1-2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1/2 jalapeno, seeded and chopped
1/4 cup cilantro
1 can (28 ounces) whole tomatoes with juice, drained and juice reserved
2 cans (10 ounces each) Rotel tomatoes, drained
1 Tbs sugar
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp cumin
Juice of one lime

In a food processor finely chop onions, garlic, jalapeno and cilantro. Add in whole tomatoes, Rotel tomatoes, sugar, salt, pepper, cumin and lime juice. Pulse until the salsa is the consistency you want, adding some of the reserved tomato juice if you feel it is a little dry. Taste and adjust for seasoning, then refrigerate for a couple of hours before eating.

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 Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Out of everything I’ve baked out of this book, these bars are by far my favorite. They are a little time consuming to make, but the finished product is pretty to look at and full of intensely tart key lime flavor.

There are two main components to this recipe. One is a graham cracker crust. The other is a key lime filling made out of key lime juice, sweetened condensed milk, lime zest and a couple of egg yolks. First you put down a layer of the graham cracker crust and bake it. Then you layer on part of the filling and bake it. Then another layer of graham cracker crust goes on and gets baked, followed by a top layer of the filling (which is also baked). Finally, toasted coconut is sprinkled on top, and the bars are left in the fridge for a few hours to firm up.

I could hardly wait to cut into these. The filling is tart but sweet and silky smooth. The graham cracker crusts soften up and lose their crunch, but they add a nice sweetness and a bit of texture to the bars. The bars are intense, so a little goes a long way. I’m already dreaming up ways to use the key lime filling in other desserts.

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 Great Cookies by Carole Walter

It’s become a bit of a chore to bake, lately. It seems that as the temperature rises, I get sluggish and tired, and all I want to eat is cantaloupe. And milkshakes. Why couldn’t I have picked an ice cream book to work out of?

And as for picking a cookie recipe? Forget it. Nothing sounds good. However, I did manage to produce these cookies, mostly because I was intrigued by the recipe. They’ve got yeast in them, like bread! But unlike bread, no rising. Also, I had some apricot preserves that I needed to use.

This is a pretty simple recipe. Yeast is dissolved in milk, butter is cut into flour (using a food processor), then the yeasty milk, an egg and vanilla are stirred into the flour, and the dough is kneaded briefly, then set aside to chill. Once chilled, the dough is rolled out and cut into squares. A dollop of apricot preserves is placed in the middle of the dough square and two opposite corners are folded over the middle. The cookies are baked right away, then sprinkled with powdered sugar before serving.

My cookies puffed up in the oven, and most of the corners refused to stay folded over. Those three cookies up there are the only ones that really looked like Walter’s, and even then, they look puffier than the picture in the book. I can only assume that I didn’t roll my dough out thin enough. Walter never says how thin the dough should be.

Looks aside, the cookies tasted pretty good. They had a definite yeasty flavor to them, along with a slightly bready texture. These aren’t sweet cookies, and without the apricot filling, they’d be quite bland.

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.

She may be right. This is certainly one of the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever made. The cookies baked up crunchy on the edges and chewy in the center. The dough itself has flavor (so many chocolate chip cookie doughs are tasteless, relying on the chocolate chips for flavor) due to three kinds of sugar. They baked up fat and round without much spread. And a sprinkle of salt on the tops contrasts nicely with the sweet cookie.

Skeptical? Click on that link up there for the recipe and try it yourself.