Birthday Cake

Last Saturday was Karen's birthday. Chocolate cake was required, so I relied on a tried-and-true favorite recipe from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style. I'm dismayed by my sloppy frosting job here!

Valentine's Day

A variety of treats for Valentine's Day. The sugar cookies are from a recipe in Dede Wilson's Baker's Field Guide to Christmas Cookies. (That book is far too good to reserve for holiday-season use only.) The Nutella truffles and chocolate-chip cookie dough cheesecake bars are from the blog My Baking Addiction.

Brownies

I thought I had a favorite brownie recipe ever. (That one, by the way, is also available in a nifty smart-phone app that lets you customize the brownie in a multitude of ways.) Then a friend emailed me this link, which was intriguing enough for me to test right away. I tried the new recipe with toasted pecans and really like the undertone that the ground pecans give the brownie. I'm now thinking how much fun it will be to try the recipe with different nut varieties (even with ground salted nuts to increase the salty-sweet contrast).

Red-Velvet Cupcakes

As I did a couple of years ago, I've been baking for the local class taking PLTI. Tonight for their snack, it'll be red-velvet cupcakes. I used this recipe for the cupcakes and this recipe for the frosting. To be honest, I don't get the passion for red velvet, but that might be because I've poured a small bottle of red food dye into an otherwise nice cake batter. I will say that these cupcakes turned out surprisingly good. While the batter was fairly thick, the cupcakes themselves are light and moist. The frosting is a little underwhelming, but I think that represents how I feel about cream-cheese frosting in general.

Buttermilk Pancake Cupcakes

A couple of months ago, I downloaded a cupcake e-book and finally got around to trying this recipe from it. These cupcakes started with a batch of blueberry preserves, which I made for the filling. Next, the batter for the Buttermilk Pancake Cupcakes, which is in fact like pancake batter, very lean and light. Finally, the cupcakes are topped with a maple buttercream. I suppose that these cupcakes are like dessert for breakfast. All they need is a side of bacon.

All in all, despite some enthusiastic commentary about them, I'm not sure I'm 100% sold on them, probably because the cupcake texture wasn't too cakelike. Still, the combination of flavors and textures is pretty good.

Tuesdays With Dorie: White Loaves

So I had the best intentions when I started this blog, but as with many well-intended things (at least in my life), my blog has languished while I've been working, baking, running, skating, reading, and doing everything else I do. A couple of weeks ago, while reading another baking blog, I saw a reference to the Tuesdays With Dorie project, which was starting a new go-round of baking bloggers who'd be working from Baking With Julia. After thinking it over for a couple of days, I decided I'd give it a go and see if I could manage at least to keep my blog going by participating in this endeavor.

The first recipe from Baking With Julia is White Loaves, a yeasted bread. I've made plenty of bread, but to be honest, I'm pretty lazy about it these days. When I make bread, I tend to throw the ingredients in the bread machine, then dump the dough in a pan after the first rise, then let it rise again, then bake it off in the oven. Not someone to totally relinquish the lazy, I allowed my trusty nearly 21-year-old 5-qt. KitchenAid to mix and knead the dough. Based on the heat it generated, the KA has not had a workout like that in a while. Since I didn't have regular active dry yeast, I substituted rapid-rise bread machine yeast. I also used a blend of all-purpose and bread flours. Otherwise, I followed the recipe pretty much as directed.

For the first rise, I ended up with a nice blob of dough:


After the first rise, I shaped the dough. Shaping dough is something I've gotten -- surprise! -- really lazy about, so it was a good exercise to pay attention to what I was doing. I got a couple of nicely shaped loaves in the pans:


Because it was a little cool Saturday when I made the bread, I needed to let the dough rise a bit longer than the recommended 45 minutes. Although the recipe didn't offer this bit of direction, I slashed the top of each loaf so that the loaves wouldn't burst open as they rose in the oven.


Apparently, taking a moment to shape loaves properly is a good thing. These two loaves are about the nicest looking ones I've made in ages.


For an upcoming cupcake recipe, I made some blueberry jam today. Actually, I made a double batch, figuring that it would taste pretty good on a toasted slice of fresh bread.

Chocolate Ice Cream

Since I've made the household endure multiple batches of ice cream with not-their-first-choice flavors, I agreed to make a batch of regular, plain old chocolate ice cream. I used a recipe from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. The base for this ice cream came out silky smooth, and it churned beautifully. It's ripening in the freezer now, and it was not a hardship to scrape out the canister of the ice cream maker to test the final product for quality control.