NBM, Day 6: Classic Birthday Cake

For day six of National Baking Month, I decided to try King Arthur Flour's 2019 recipe of the year, Classic Birthday Cake. Really a nice cake, all in all. I like that this cake is adaptable to both 8-inch and 9-inch pans (if I'd used the 8-inch pans, I'd have been tempted to halve the layers and fill them with a complementary flavor, maybe something peanut butter or raspberry). The cake is made with a combination of butter and oil, which gives it a great spongy texture. The frosting is a chocolate American buttercream made with cocoa powder. I added a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream to lighten the frosting; without the additional cream, I sensed that the frosting would be difficult to spread.

Banana Bread

According to a Facebook post from the fine folks at King Arthur Flour, yesterday was National Banana Bread Day. (Who thinks of these things, anyway?) Since I'd just purchased some dented and dinged bananas, I was ready to roll and made this recipe, which I found at the King Arthur website. I didn't have apricot jam or orange marmalade on hand, so I used pineapple preserves instead. Also, rather than walnuts, I used sliced almonds and some milk chocolate chips. All in all, a nice loaf of banana bread.

Another Chocolate Stout Cake

When I hear the word stout, I don't usually think of beer. First, I think of the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menominee, Wis. (I went to college in nearby Eau Claire.) Next, I think that stout describes the shape I have taken on since the beginning of the year. Eventually, I get around to stout as in the dark beer.

A couple of weeks ago, the King Arthur Flour email newsletter included a link to a blog post and recipe for a chocolate stout cake. I was intrigued because the cake looked pretty awesome; besides, I'd already bought a six-pack of Guinness for a chocolate stout Bundt cake. I decided to make the King Arthur cake for St. Patrick's Day.

The process mostly went well; I had only a couple of gripes. First, the cake layers baked with a bit of doming, which meant that I had to level two of them before assembling the cake. (I am thinking that is because I used my thinner cake pans instead of the heavier-duty ones.) Also, if you choose the three-layer option as I did, I think you don't get quite enough ganache to frost the cake. (My instinct tells me that even if you made the cake as two layers, you might want to split and fill them; otherwise, that is going to be two extremely thick layers of cake. In that case, of course, you would definitely need more ganache.)

That said, the cake is great: rich and very moist. (You might expect that, of course, when you get to the second ingredient in the recipe: 1 lb. of butter.) I think that this cake might be good enough to become a St. Patrick's Day tradition.

Brownies and Banana Cake

Yesterday, I had to get a couple of things ready for Lost Lunch Thursday and the PLTI class session. For Lost Lunch, I decided to try a brownie recipe that recently appeared at the King Arthur Flour blog. I'm pretty sure it's the same brownie recipe from their cookie cookbook, too. I'd always shied away from that recipe because it uses cocoa powder instead of unsweetened chocolate, and to me, that means a cakey brownie instead of a fudgy one. (Seriously, if I want chocolate cake, I'll make a cake, not a brownie.) I like some of the funkiness of the preparation technique for this recipe, namely melting the butter, then adding the sugar and heating up the combination to promote a thin crust on top of the brownie. I let the batter cool down for 20 minutes before I added the chocolate chips because I wanted them to retain their shape and not melt into the batter. When I spread the batter in the pan, I was encouraged by how thick it was, giving me hope for a fudgy brownie.

In the end, the whole thin-crust thing ended up not mattering for two reasons: 1. I sprinkled some of the chocolate chips for the dough on top of the brownie batter before I baked it; and 2. I made a chocolate glaze with chopped peanuts for the top of the brownie.

When all was said and done, I was surprised by how fudgy and, thus, acceptable these brownies are. They also got a big thumbs up from Claire, who enjoyed a couple of them. I guess she has gotten past the "I don't like nuts" phase.



The PLTI cake this week is Banana Toffee Crunch Bundt Cake with Chocolate Glaze from Quick Chocolate Fixes by Leslie Weiner and Barbara Albright. The recipe calls for 5 1.4-oz. Heath bars, chopped, but I used an 8-oz. bag of chopped Heath bits, and that seemed to work fine. (Yes, I am still making my way through the bag of dented-and-dinged bananas. Only a few left!)

Savory Scones

I don't often bake savory items, but when I saw the recipe for Bacon-Cheddar-Scallion Scones on the King Arthur Flour blog, I was intrigued. I could be completely vegetarian if it weren't for bacon. Put some bacon in a biscuit with cheddar cheese and scallions (I used chives in the scones I made)? Is it possible that this could be the perfect food? By all accounts, this scone might in fact be the perfect food.

Boston Cream Pie

All too often, my baking is motivated by the need to use perishables that are nearing the end of their shelf life. The other day, I realized that I had a half-gallon of whole milk that was perilously close to meeting its maker. Although I've tried using up milk in homemade pudding, those efforts usually end up with me using more ingredients in a final product that is ditched because I can't eat it all before it goes bad and because pudding doesn't seem like the sort of thing I can easily shuttle around the office.

One standby for using up milk, though, is Boston cream pie. I've tried various recipes and really like Lora Brody's in Chocolate American Style. At the same time, I enjoy the recipe from The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, mostly because the King Art folks offer so many ways to tweak pastry cream. (Courtesy of the King Art folks, my favorite Boston cream pie variation to date is one with peanut-butter pastry cream.)

So it was to King Art that I turned, both for cake and for pastry cream. The pastry cream recipe in the Baker's Companion makes an insane amount of filling, way more than is even irrationally necessary in a Boston cream pie, unless you want the top of the cake to float away on an oozy puddle of filling. The pastry cream is nice, however, a pretty firm pudding lightened with a cup of whipped cream. I ended up using only half of it for this Boston cream pie -- which means that I have a Tupperware half-filled with lightened chocolate pastry cream at home.

After I made the cake, I remembered that I'd had a problem with this recipe. I've made it twice now, and both times, the cake has sunk in the middle. How did I manage to get a level top for the cake in the photo? I mounded the pastry cream in the middle, then very gently placed the top cake layer on the filling. It was a bit sloppy to slice and serve, but it tasted fine. I guess that's my typical happy ending for a baking tale that doesn't quite all add up.