Board Meeting

For today's skating-club board meeting, I made a couple of things. First, I made Crumb-Topped Coffee Cake from Abby Johnson Dodge's The Weekend Baker. It is brilliant, especially on those pieces where the crumb:cake ratio works in favor of the crumbs.

The scones are from Elinor Klivan's Fearless Baking. I'm not sure if it was the recipe or the weather (it has been pretty damp here), the scones had a relatively cakey texture, not very sconelike at all. However, everybody seemed to like them, so what do I know?

Banana Bars

I wonder how many times I've started a blog post with this comment: I had a few ripe bananas to get rid of, so ...

This time, I had enough bananas to make two things. First, I made Chocolate Chip-Banana Snack Cake from Nicole Rees's Baking Unplugged. Although this recipe is designed to be made, well, unplugged, I confess that I used a mixer. (I'm lazy. What can I say?) I had a little vanilla frosting left over from the Cookies & Cream Cupcakes I made last week, so I put that on the cake. It's a nice little cake: not fussy, and it came together pretty quickly. Definitely one to add to the ripe-banana repertoire.

The other bars are Banana Caramel Brownies from Elinor Klivans's 125 Cookies to Bake, Nibble, and Savor. They are a cakey banana bar cookie with a bit of caramel sauce in them. Then after the batter is in the pan, more caramel sauce is drizzled over and lightly swirled in, and chopped pecans are sprinkled onto the exposed caramel. I'd made these bars once before, seven years ago, in fact. I made a note in the book and dated it: "3/20/02 Extraordinary. Butter + flour pan." (I recall that I brought some to share with my pals Brooke and Bill, and remember that Brooke loved them.) I think I won't let seven years pass before I make these bars again.

Banana Crunch Cake

Whenever I succumb to the dented-and-dinged banana challenge, I end up racking my brain to remember good banana recipes. One favorite I hadn't made for a while is Banana Crunch Cake from Elinor Klivans's Bake and Freeze Desserts. It's a pretty straightforward banana coffee cake; the crunch comes from a streusel sprinkled in the middle of the cake (applied after half the batter is in the pan) and then on top of the cake. The streusel contains butter, brown sugar, toasted pecans, and crushed dried-banana chips.

While the cake is good as it is, I like to add 3/4 cup of miniature chocolate chips because, really, you usually can't go wrong adding a bit of chocolate to a banana cake.

Milky Way Cake

I've made this recipe before, and it's a good one. I'm still amused that somehow, someone thought it would be a nifty idea to melt some Milky Way candy bars and use them as the ingredient in a pound cake. I guess it was someone who simply didn't want to make their own batch of chocolate caramel. This time, I added some toasted pecan and coconut mixture left over from one of the Junior's cakes that I've made recently. The glaze is from Elinor Klivan's Fearless Baking.

Weekend Baking

Once more, with pictures: the blueberry-lime pound cake from Fine Cooking. It is perfect the day after it's baked. After a few days, especially in hot, humid weather, the glaze starts to disintegrate and be absorbed into the cake. Also, after making this cake a couple of times, I can say that I think the glaze recipe as published is a little too thin. I've taken to adding a little more powdered sugar to get a glaze that pours nicely onto the cake.

Not really seasonally appropriate but tasty nonetheless, Apple Crumble Bars, from Elinor Klivans's Fearless Baking. They were quite good, although again, not totally compatible with hot, humid weather. I'll definitely try them again in the fall during apple season.

An Early Birthday

My running buddy Brendan is getting married in a couple of weeks, and his birthday falls roughly the week after the wedding. In other words, he'll be away when we would otherwise celebrate his birthday after a Sunday-morning run and then breakfast. I decided that it would be OK for us to celebrate a few weeks early.

Knowing that we would be in for some too-early-in-the-season-for-it-to-be-this-disgusting weather, I looked around for a cake I thought would be sturdy enough to be in the car for a couple of early-morning hours while we ran. With a couple of extralarge eggs to be used up from a dozen I'd bought for the Lost lunch season finale cake, I centered my focus on a book whose recipes are formulated with extralarge eggs: Chocolate American Style by Lora Brody.

Perusing the cake listing in the index, I saw a chocolate pound cake. That would fit the definition of sturdy, so I went with it. Blessedly, the cake is formulated for a 9.5-in. Bundt pan, which meant I didn't have to use the big same-old Bundt pan; I used my star-shaped Bundt for this cake. I zested a couple of oranges into the batter for an extra bit of flavor, and I glazed it with a tried-and-true glaze from Elinor Klivans's Fearless Baking.

Because it was so hideous even today even at 8 in the morning, I brought the cake into our usual Sunday-breakfast site, and we ate it there after breakfast. There's nothing like chocolate cake before noon, much less a good celebratory reason for having it.

Cupcakes to Go

In early April, we went along with the Girl Scout troop for Scouts' Day at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. To make the drive home a bit more pleasant, I brought along a few batches of cupcakes. I made a batch of the Pretty in Pink strawberry cupcakes from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. Also from that book, I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream. Finally, there was a batch of Banana-Butterscotch Cupcakes from Elinor Klivans's Cupcakes!. Good choices all.

Lemon Pound Cake

I decided to try one more lemon pound cake from Elinor Klivans's Fearless Baking. This one turned out great. It has a tight crumb and is wonderfully dense. The lemon glaze on this cake is a great complement.

Lemon Cream Swirl Pound Cake

This cake is from Elinor Klivans's Fearless Baking. The idea is really appealing: a lemon pound cake with a creamy lemon swirl wafting through the cake batter, topped with a coating of streusel crumbs. A portion of the cake batter is put in a tube pan; then the lemon-swirl filling is drizzled on top of the batter. Then the remainder of the batter is poured into the pan over the filling. After the cake bakes for 40 minutes, the pan is removed from the oven, and the streusel topping is sprinkled on. I assumed that was to allow the top to firm up and prevent the streusel from sinking to the bottom of the pan. The end result was less than stellar.

In the end, as can be seen in the photo, the creamy lemon filling sunk to the bottom of the pan (it took on a cheesecake-like texture). As can't be seen in the photo, so did most of the streusel. Don't know what to think about this one, other than that I wish it would have turned out better. (I so wanted a good lemon pound cake, though, that I tried another recipe from Fearless Baking and had much more success with it.)

Banana Cream Pie With Graham Cracker Crunch

Another fun recipe from Elinor Klivans's new Essential Chocolate Chip Cookbook is this banana cream pie. The formula for the graham-cracker crust is set up for excess. Most of the crust mixture (graham-cracker crumbs, sugar, cinnamon, butter, miniature chocolate chips) is pressed into a 9-in.-dia. pie pan. The remainder is shaped into a 8-in. round on a baking sheet, then baked alongside the crust. The bonus crust crisps up into a cookielike treat that is crumbled over the whipped-cream topping that covers the pie's banana-vanilla pudding filling. Completely over the top, totally excessive, and lots of fun.

Lemon and Chocolate Chip Loaf Cake

To commemorate the start of this year's quest to run the five New York City borough half-marathons, a race series sponsored by the New York Road Runners Club, I made Lemon and Chocolate Chip Loaf Cake from Elinor Klivans's new book, The Essential Chocolate Chip Cookbook. I packed the cake, brought it to Central Park, and shared it with friends who'd also run the Manhattan half-marathon.

This cake is excellent. Lemon and chocolate are an unusual but great partnership. Lemon zest goes in the cake batter; then the finished cake is brushed with lemon syrup while still warm from the oven.