Tag Archives: Cakes

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Loaf

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pumpkin_loafCurrently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Can one have too many pumpkin-chocolate recipes? I don’t think so, especially when there is a half of a can of pumpkin puree sitting the fridge begging to be used.

There’s nothing surprising about this recipe. You mix pumpkin puree, chocolate chips, vegetable oil, eggs and sugar with spices (cinnamon, allspice, ginger, nutmeg), flour and leavening. After baking for just over an hour, you end up with a fragrant cake, earthily sweet and moist, studded with chocolate chips.

This is an easy, simple, tea-time cake. It won’t knock your socks off, but it is a good recipe to have.

Lemon Lemon Loaf

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lemon_loafCurrently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Back in 2008, when this cookbook was published, the New York bakery by the same name was garnering all sorts of accolades. Oprah had declared their brownies “one of her favorite things,” and the owners had recently appeared on the Martha Stewart Show. I started hearing about this book when some of my favorite food bloggers started baking from it. One quick trip to the bookstore, and I was ready to join them. I tried a few recipes, but then other books caught my attention, and this one ended up stuck back into the bookshelf.

But here it is, a new year, and I’m ready to give this book another chance (as well as try those brownies!). At first glance, Baked looks like a fairly standard baking book. But take a closer look, and you’ll find some not-so-standard recipes, such as a rootbeer cake and peanut butter rice krispy treats.

The first recipe I chose was a lemon loaf cake, mainly because I had a ton of lemon juice sitting in the fridge. The cake is made mostly in the food processor, with the dry ingredients folded in at the end. This is a seriously lemony cake. It calls for lemon zest and juice in the batter, the hot cake is brushed with a lemon syrup after baking and the cooled cake is drizzled with a lemon glaze.

My cake didn’t dome like the picture in the book, but it was moist and tender with a nice lemon punch. The glaze is listed as optional, but I’d encourage you not to leave it out. It adds a burst of tartness that contrasts nicely with the slightly sweeter cake.

Dark Chocolate Fleur de Sel Cupcakes with Snappy Butterscotch Icing

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fleur_de_sel_cupcakesSalty sweets seem to be catching my eye lately. First there were those salty oatmeal cookies and now these dark chocolate cupcakes that are liberally sprinkled with coarse salt before baking and after frosting. The cupcakes were good, but the star of this recipe is the butterscotch icing. Oh my.

The recipe comes from a new book by Christie Matheson called Salty Sweets. I got the recipe here.  The first time I made these cupcakes, it was for a family dinner on Christmas Eve. They were easy enough to make, but I thought they could benefit from a few modifications.

First, I scaled down the amount of baking soda from 1 teaspoon to 1/2 teaspoon. I also added 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder to the batter. Second, and mostly importantly, I doubled the amount of butterscotch icing.

But that icing? Oh. My.

See, you really only need one batch of the icing to cover the cupcakes (unless you like a really thick layer of frosting), but you really should try this stuff drizzled over ice cream or straight from the fridge by the spoonful.

The icing is the only part of the recipe that gave me any trouble. You combine brown sugar, heavy cream, butter, water and coarse salt and cook it, on the stovetop, until it thickens. The first time I made the icing, I let it cook for the 15 minutes that the recipe calls for. Well, it never thickened enough that I could frost the cupcakes with it. I ended up beating the icing with a hand mixer to thicken it.

The second time I made the icing, I let it cook for almost 40 minutes. This time it thickened enough to stay put on the cupcakes, but it was pretty thin. In the end, I think I prefer the beaten version of the icing. It makes for a really nice mouth feel, you can mound it up like frosting, and it just looks better.

One Bowl Chocolate Mocha Cream Cake

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mocha_cake

I tore this recipe out of Cooking Light magazine almost two years ago, and I’m kicking myself for waiting so long to try it. Here’s the recipe from the Cooking Light website.

The chocolate cake part is a simple, lower-fat chocolate cake that uses reduced-fat mayo to make it moist. A cup of strong coffee gives a kick to the chocolate flavor, and chocolate chips add some texture to the cake. Don’t fool yourself, though. This cake might be lower in fat than others, but it isn’t low calorie or low sugar.

Once the cake is baked and cooled, you spread it with a topping of marshmallow creme and light whipped topping, flavored with more coffee, and drizzled with chocolate syrup.

Like many of the other reviewers, I found the drizzle of chocolate syrup unnecessary and too sweet. As I nibbled on the cake, I found myself scrapping most of the topping off to the side; there was just too much of it for my taste. Next time, I don’t think I’ll use all the topping. I also didn’t like the chocolate chips in the cake. Because you store this cake in the fridge, the chocolate chips get hard, and I nearly broke a tooth every time I bit one.

But having said all that, I liked the moistness of the cake and the strong mocha flavor. It is an easy cake to make and looks impressive.

Chocolate Sheet Cake

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choc_sheet_cake2choc_sheet_cake

This cake has been making the rounds in the food blogging world. The recipe comes from thepioneerwoman.com, a website by Ree Drummond, chronicling her life on a ranch. She’s witty, funny and irreverent, and I’m insanely jealous of her kitchen.

Anyway, back to the cake. It’s your typical sheet cake, you know, like the ones that showed up at every neighborhood potluck. Mormons may be known for weird jello salads and odd female names, but sheet cakes come in a close third. So when I saw this recipe, I started having flashbacks to past birthdays and ward suppers, and I knew I’d be obsessed with this cake until I made it.

It’s an easy, two-bowl recipe made with pantry staples. The cake is moist, chocolatey and sweet, thanks to two sticks of butter and two cups of sugar. The chocolate frosting for the cake is made with more butter and a pound of powdered sugar. You can add nuts to the frosting (or not) which contribute a nice crunchy texture.

I found the whole thing sweet and one dimensional. I used to love these kind of cakes as a kid, but now I prefer my chocolate darker and more bitter. That being said, as the cake sat, the frosting melded with the cake, and the whole thing sort of grew on me. Sort of.

Lemon Butter Cake

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Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

fallen_cakeWhat to do when the baking gods give you a cake that looks like this?

You make trifles. You take the lovely, lemon butter cake that showed such promise as a batter but then bombed in the oven and cut it into cubes. You take the lovely lemon syrup you made and soak the cubes. Then you take the lemon frosting you made that turned into a runny pudding, along with some homemade raspberry jam, and you layer the whole thing into plastic cups so you can give them away to your husband’s softball players. They’ll eat just about anything.

Yeah. The baking gods didn’t like me on this day.

trifle

Lemon-Sour Cherry Coffee Cake

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lemon_cranberry_coffee_cakeCurrently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Here’s another cake where I liked the batter better than I did the baked version. The recipe starts off by combining butter, sugar and lemon zest and beating the heck out of them. Eggs, lemon juice, yogurt and dry ingredients are then added. At the end, plumped sour cherries are folded into the batter. The whole thing is baked in a bundt pan for just over an hour. To up the lemon flavor, a glaze of powdered sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice is poured over the cooled cake.

I had to make a few changes. I couldn’t find any sour cherries, so I used cranberries instead. Also, when I went to get my yogurt from the fridge, it was, uh, slightly past it’s due date. I’m pretty sure I had a good crop of penicillin growing in there. I ended up using the same amount of sour cream instead.

The cake was moist and tender and it had a really good lemon flavor. I found the cranberries to be somewhat intrusive, even though I had chopped them a bit. I think I’d actually like the cake better plain, or with the add-ins sprinkled on top, with the glaze. Speaking of the glaze, it really added a nice lemon burst to the cake, and it’s worth the extra effort.

Chocolate Cherry Pound Cake

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choc_cherry_cakeCurrently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

I don’t really know what to say about this cake. It took three (three!) sticks of butter, 2 cups of cocoa powder and more than 3 cups of sugar. It baked for almost two hours and weighed more than any decent cake should. It was dark, chocolatey and rich and had a texture more fudgy than cake-like.

And yet, I didn’t really like it all that much. As the cake cooled down, the texture became dry, almost chalky, and I didn’t like the cherries in it. I didn’t make the chocolate glaze (I forgot to get the cream at the grocery store), but I don’t think that would have made much difference.

But the batter. Oh my. I could have eaten THAT by the spoonful. The batter had a lot of promise and I’m wondering how it would do as cupcakes with some sort of filling (raspberry? orange? vanilla whipped cream?). Here’s another recipe that is just begging to be tweaked.

Chocolate Whipped Cream Cake and Chocolate Pudding

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Currently cooking from Tasty by Roy Finamore

Here’s the story of the dessert that almost wasn’t . . .

Once upon a time, I offered to provide dinner (with dessert, of course) to Bryan’s niece who just had a baby. Along with a huge pan of lasagna, I planned on wowing her with Finamore’s Chocolate Whipped Cream Cake filled with whipped cream and raspberries. It is elegant, but simple (and very pretty, judging by the picture in Tasty).

choc_cakeAs I was reading through the ingredient list, something caught my eye. The recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of baking soda. Now, according to author Shirley O. Corriher (in her most recent book, Bakewise, she talks about how baking soda/baking powder works and the proper proportions one should use), 2 teaspoons of baking soda is the amount of leavening needed for 8 cups of flour. This recipe has less than 2 cups. So, I anticipated that the cakes would fall, and in the recipe, Finamore says that the cakes will fall a little. Uh, yeah. Take another look at that picture. I’d say my cakes fell *a little*.

So, with visions of a perfect black and white cake crumpling around me, I decided to turn the cake (which tasted fine, by the way) into a chocolate trifle by making Finamore’s version of chocolate pudding (and knocking out another recipe while I was at it).

Fortunately, the chocolate pudding recipe is pretty straightforward. You whisk together, egg yolks, cornstarch and unsweetened cocoa. You temper this with hot milk/cream, then the whole thing goes back on the stovetop to cook. Once it has come to a boil, you take it off the heat and stir in bittersweet chocolate, butter and some vanilla.

I wondered about the lack of sugar in the recipe, but figured that the bittersweet chocolate would provide the sweetening. Wrong! The dry bitterness of the cocoa powder came through loud and clear. Fortunately, the pudding was still liquidy and hot enough that I was able to stir in about 1/4 cup of sugar with no problems (I halved the recipe, so if making a full recipe, you’d need more sugar).

In the end, I got my chocolate trifle and it tasted fine, but I’m sorely disappointed in Finamore. I can’t believe that these two recipes passed muster as is. I did a quick search to see if there had been any corrections posted, but I didn’t find anything. The fix for the chocolate pudding is easy. I’d dissolve 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sugar in the milk/cream mixture as it is heating. For the chocolate cake, I’d reduce the baking soda down to 1/2 teaspoon or use 1 teaspoon baking powder along with 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda.choc_trifle

Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

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oreo_cupcakeI haven’t been doing much baking lately because it has been too hot. But we’ve cooled down over the last couple of days, and I started feeling the baking itch. During my internet surfing, I came across this recipe from the Food and Wine Magazine website. It looked pretty easy and I had all the ingredients, except for the Oreo cookies.

I followed the directions for the cupcakes as posted, but I made my own frosting. I wanted something that would let the flavor of the Oreo cookies come through, but that wasn’t super sweet. I ended up whipping about a cup of whipping cream with a tablespoon or so of powdered sugar. Once the cream was whipped, I folded in some crushed Oreos.

The cake part of these cupcakes was really soft and moist. The cupcakes fell a bit, though (next time I’ll reduce the baking soda to 1/2 teaspoon). The whipped cream softens the cookie pieces, and the whole thing melds together very nicely.