Tag Archives: Cakes

Red Velvet Cake

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Currently cooking from The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen.

I didn’t think this was possible, but I found an America’s Test Kitchen/Cooks Illustrated recipe that I don’t like. I was so surprised I had to go back and retrace each step to see if I had messed up somewhere (I didn’t). So then I went online and looked for other opinions on this recipe. It turns out there are several people who have tried it and didn’t like it or liked another red velvet cake recipe better. Once the dizziness passed, I reverted to my tried and true red velvet cake.

I needed a red velvet cake because I wanted to do this:

And get this:

Let me recap. Two layers of red velvet cake sandwiching a layer of vanilla cheesecake and covered with cream cheese frosting. Was there anything in that previous sentence that didn’t sound good?

I made this for a friend, so I didn’t get to cut into it, but she was kind enough to snap a picture of it for me. It looks just as good as I thought it would. I may have to make one just for myself.

But back to that America’s Test Kitchen recipe. When my friend asked me to make her a cake, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to try this recipe. I was expecting another winner, and looking at the recipe, it seemed like it had all the right red velvet cake ingredients in it. Except for two big differences from my regular recipe—this one called for butter instead of oil and it had quite a bit more cocoa powder in it.

You start out by creaming the butter and sugar, then mix in the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda and salt) alternating with the wet ingredients (buttermilk, eggs, vinegar and vanilla). Finally, you make a paste of cocoa powder and red food coloring and mix that into the batter.

The cakes baked up tender and moist, with that trademark red brick color. But they just didn’t taste right. Have you ever tried to pin down the flavor of a red velvet cake? As I told Bryan, I can’t explain what it should taste like, but I know it when I taste it. This cake tasted more of chocolate and butter, and it didn’t have the tang that a red velvet cake should have. It was a good cake, but in my mind, it just wasn’t a red velvet cake.

Nectarine Ice Cream

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Currently cooking out of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

This is actually about two separate recipes, neither of which are from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream at Homes. Confused? Let me back up a bit.

Bryan and I have a tradition that every year around Labor Day, we drive 10 hours south to my parent’s house, spend a few days oohing and ahhing over nieces and nephew, baking up a storm and gorging on peaches and nectarines. Then we drive 10 hours back north with several boxes of peaches and nectarines, and I spend the next few days frantically freezing, jamming and baking before the fruit goes bad.

I grew up on Utah’s “Fruitway,” a stretch of the Wasatch Front famed for its roadside fruitstands. Every summer I picked raspberries, peaches, tomatoes and cherries and then helped sell them at one of the fruitstands. I loved having such an abundance of fresh fruit, especially the peaches. As much as I tout my chocolate addiction, peaches are one of my favorite foods. I can, and will, eat them until I get sick. Fortunately, my dad owns several acres of peach and nectarine trees, and he lets me have as many as I want.

This year I came back with five boxes and peaches and one box of nectarines. As of the last count, I’ve made 16 peach/nectarine galettes (a free-form pie) and a couple of peach crumble bars, all of which are frozen, waiting to be baked. I made something like 15 jars of peach freezer jam (runny, of course), and I’ve frozen six one-gallon Ziploc bags full of unsweetened sliced peaches. Finally, we made some peach shrub (remember this post?). We will not run out of peaches this year.

Along with all of that, we’ve been eating fresh peaches and yogurt for breakfast, peaches and nectarines for snacks and sliced peaches for dessert.

Back to the reason for this post. With all these peaches and nectarines, I had to try to adapt one of Bauer’s recipes into a peach and/or nectarine ice cream. The nectarines had to be used first, so nectarine ice cream it was.

I simply took Bauer’s ice cream recipe base and added a nectarine puree (except for a roasted strawberry and buttermilk ice cream, she doesn’t have many fruit ice cream recipes, so I kind of winged it). The ice cream is made the same way as all the other ice creams in the book: you boil milk, cream and sugar, add in a cornstarch slurry, boil, whisk in cream cheese, add nectarine puree, chill and churn.

Frankly, I was disappointed in this ice cream. Although it turned out a beautiful, pale yellow, the nectarine flavor is so washed out and faint, that you can’t really identify it. That glorious, sweet/tart nectarine flavor got lost somewhere. This ice cream froze up harder than the other ones I’ve made from this book. My gut feeling is that the extra water from the nectarines watered down the flavor and made the ice cream freeze harder. I suspect that’s why Bauer roasts her strawberries, to concentrate the flavor and evaporate excess water. If I had any extra nectarines left, I’d give this a try. Unfortunately, they are gone. I plan to make a peach ice cream using some of the peaches I’ve frozen,though, so it will be interesting to see what happens. If I run into the same problem, I’ll consider roasting the peaches first.

Onto the other part of this post, that nectarine cake up there. I remembered reading about this cake here, but at the time, the nectarines in the store were sad, hard little blobs. Flash forward two years, and I’m sitting on a half of a box of nectarines that are ripening too fast for me to keep up. A little butter and sugar here, with some eggs and flour there, and I had the little black dresses of cakes. It took me all of 10 minutes to make, but tasted great. You can dress this cake up with whipped cream or ice cream, or simply sprinkle powdered sugar on it. It tasted just as good on the second day. If you don’t have nectarines, I think just about any fruit will work, except maybe apples or pears, unless you sliced them very thinly.

Chocolate Pudding Cake

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Currently cooking out of Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen

One of my favorite desserts is Cook’s Illustrated chocolate pudding cake. It’s cake, it’s pudding, it’s both! Oh, and it is just a little bit chocolatey. Served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, this dessert is heaven.

Enter Cook’s Illustrated slow cooker chocolate pudding cake. It isn’t quite as good as the original version, but during the summer when you don’t want to heat up the house, this will do, quite adequately. Especially with that scoop of vanilla ice cream melting along side of it.

Chocolate cake in a slow cooker. Who knew?

This recipe is really simple. You mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt) with the wet ingredients (milk, butter, egg yolk and vanilla) and then stir in some chocolate chips. The thick batter is spread in the bottom of the slow cooker and sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and cocoa powder. Finally, boiling water is poured over the whole thing and left to cook for about 90 minutes on high.

As the cake cooks, the boiling water mixes with the sugar and cocoa powder and moves through the batter to form a pudding on the bottom. The cake cooks up dark, dense and moist. With two kinds of chocolate (cocoa powder and chocolate chips), this dessert is not for the faint of heart. It is comfort food of the highest order. And it came out of the slow cooker! This was a nice change from stews and chilis.

Sunday Night Cake

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Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

This is like the little black dresses of cakes. Simple but elegant. Easy to make, but elegant enough for guests. It is also endlessly adaptable. Don’t like cinnamon? Leave it out. Add vanilla or lemon zest. Don’t like the chocolate frosting? Leave it off or use fresh fruit.

The cake is a standard butter/sour cream cake that uses cake flour and a bit of cinnamon for flavor. The frosting is a little unusual. You make a chocolate pudding (with water), beat the pudding until it is cool, then add butter and beat it some more. Depending on how long you beat the pudding, it can be more pudding-like or more spreadable. I got a little distracted and ended up with frosting that was more on the spreadable side.

My only quibble with this recipe is that I found the frosting to be too sweet. I ended up adding some salt to it, which helped, but next time I’ll use less sugar.

This is the last recipe, for now, out of Baked Explorations. I really enjoyed this book, even more so than the original Baked cookbook. The recipes seemed to be more geared towards the home baker and less bakery-ish. The burnt sugar cake and the nutella scones were standout recipes, while the Mississippi Mud Pie was good, but a lot of work. At some point, I’d like to try one of the more fancy cakes, but right now, I’m ready for recipes that don’t call for butter and sugar.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cake

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Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

This cake is dangerous. Really, really dangerous. Like, even though I didn’t cook it long enough and it was gooey in the middle, we still ate most of it dangerous.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This cake is the love child of an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie and a cinnamon coffee cake. This recipe is simple to make, as it calls for pantry ingredients, and the just-baked cake is hearty and warming, filled with chewy bits of oatmeal and pockets of melted chocolate. Let the cake cool for a bit, and the brown sugar and cinnamon start to make more of an appearance, and the cake starts to taste a little more oaty (and I mean that in the best possible way). You can dress this cake up with a cream cheese frosting, or leave it plain, like I did, and pretend that it is almost healthy. Either way, you will eat far too many pieces of it.

The recipe starts by having you soak old-fashioned rolled oats in boiling water. As the oats soak, you whisk together a couple of eggs, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, leavening an cinnamon. Next you fold in the soaked oats and some flour. Finally, chocolate chips are stirred into the batter, and the whole thing bakes for about 45 minutes. Easy peasy.

Except (you knew that was coming), I did have a few problems. Even though the recipe has you toss the chocolate chips with some flour to stop them from sinking to the bottom of the cake, all my chocolate chips ended up at the bottom of the cake. Not a deal breaker, but it would have been nice to have the chips more evenly distributed throughout the cake.

I suspect the amount of leavening is slightly off. Next time, I’ll back off on the baking soda. And finally, as I mentioned above, I didn’t completely bake the cake. After 45 minutes, my edges were done and pulling away from the pan, but the middle of my cake was still quite wet. I went ahead and took the cake out, which was a mistake. However, if I had cooked it longer, the edges would have begun to dry out. This is a tricky one. Perhaps baking the cake at 350 degrees, instead of 375 degrees, would work. I’ll just have to practice, I guess.

Burnt Sugar Bundt Cake

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Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

I love this cake.

No, I hate this cake.

Well, I love this cake.

Wait. I really hate this cake.

That was what was going through my mind as I made this cake. Three times. In three days. You see, the first time I tried this recipe, the cake fell. Badly. But I assumed that it was my fault because I had to move the cake to a lower oven rack midway through the baking. So I made the cake again, but this time, I didn’t touch the cake while it was baking. It fell again. Badly.

I was perturbed.

Mind you, the cake still tasted fantastic. In fact, Bryan and I managed eat most of the first cake in a day. The second cake didn’t last much longer, although we did give some away. So, on my third attempt, I modified the recipe a bit. I cut down the butter and increased the oven temperature. This cake (this is the cake I took pictures of) didn’t fall. It was beautiful. But it didn’t taste as good as the first two.

I am still perturbed.

The cake gets its name because you make a very dark, almost burnt, caramel sauce. This sauce is the liquid for the cake as well as a major part of the optional frosting. Flour, leavening, vanilla, eggs, 2 1/2 cups of butter and two cups of sugar make up the rest of the batter. Because there is so much sugar and butter in the batter, the cake gets really dark, and the outside caramelizes and gets crusty and sugary and crunchy. It was my favorite part of the cake.

The inside of the cake is dense and moist with a very light caramel flavor. Because of all the butter, though, I thought the cake was slightly greasy. On the first day, I didn’t care much for that. But as the cake aged, it stayed moist and continued to develop that caramelly flavor.

Unfortunately, my third cake didn’t age as well. By day two, it was beginning to dry out. It also didn’t have the depth of flavor that the first two cakes had. I’m determined to get this one right, as it just may be my most favorite cake. Ever.

This recipe is all over the internet,, but you can find it here.

If you make this recipe, here are a couple of tips. Caramelize the sugar as deeply as you can. The darker your sugar, the more flavorful the cake will be. I cooked my sugar until it started to smell burnt. It wasn’t black, but it was close.

The frosting looks good, but I don’t think this cake needs it. I simply dusted mine with powdered sugar.

Banana Walnut Cake

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Currently cooking from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce

If you’ve ever taken a big sniff from a bag of quinoa (grain or flour), there’ll be no doubt as to what you are smelling. To some people it smells like grass or hay or dirt. To me, quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wa) smells like freshly pulled weeds. Appetizing, no? Fortunately, when cooked, that smell is toned down. Still, quinoa does take some getting used to.

So I had my doubts when making this banana walnut cake that uses a mix of quinoa and all-purpose flour. There are some strong flavors going on here. Fortunately, they all work together, with the quinoa and walnut flavors toning down the banana flavor and sour cream adding some sourness. The end result is a moist, homely little cake with big flavor.

The recipe starts off by toasting several cups of walnuts. Some of these walnuts are ground into a coarse meal, while the rest of them get finely chopped to use as a topping on the cake. After the walnuts are toasted, butter and sugar (both granulated and brown sugars) are creamed together. Ripe bananas, eggs, sour cream and vanilla are added to the bowl, followed by the flours, walnut meal, salt and leavening. The thick batter is spread into a nine-inch round cake pan and the chopped walnuts are sprinkled over the top. The cake bakes for 50-60 minutes, then cooled before cutting.

This cake is a great alternative to banana bread. I really liked the quinoa flour in it and thought it added an unusual flavor; the weedy smell completely disappeared. Now, if I could only get the weeds in my yard to disappear as well.

Peach Melba Cake with Raspberry Cream

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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.

Ice Cream Birthday Cake

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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.

Marbled Lemon-Blueberry Butter Cake

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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.