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!

Birthday Cake

For Claire's birthday this year, I knew it had to be chocolate cake, so I went with a tried-and-true favorite (Best Birthday Cake) from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Last weekend, we were obliged to attend a skating competition in Burlington, Vermont. The theater-on-ice team debuted this season's long program, based on the story of the Rainbow Fish, and they looked pretty good, especially in their awesome costumes. (Did I leave the camera in the hotel room when we went to the rink for the performance? Why, yes I did. Fortunately, they have a few upcoming performances.)

Anyway, to celebrate the successful performance, I brought along a batch of chocolate chip cookies with orange zest and pistachios. The recipe is from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style, but it's pretty much a straightforward Toll House cookie recipe with a few tweaks (pistachios, milk chocolate chips, orange zest, almond extract). I made the dough several days before I actually baked it, hoping to capitalize on the resting time to get a thicker, chewier cookie. Worked like a charm.

Lemon Anise Bread

The subtitle of this post could be "When things go wrong."

This recipe follows the banana bread recipe in Lora Brody's Baking Basics, and basically follows the same formula and technique. I knew I'd never made this bread before and was kind of surprised I hadn't. The flavor combination seemed really intriguing. In addition to the lemon and the anise, the bread contains a cup of chopped toasted slivered almonds.

As with the banana bread, the batter assembled well. When I took it out of the oven, though, the center of the bread had collapsed. The loaf also had the same coarse top texture that the banana bread had. Remembering something I read in Shirley Corriher's BakeWise, I have come to think that this bread is overleavened. It contains 2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, which is maybe too much for 1-1/2 cups of flour and a cup of chopped nuts. The flavor is pretty awesome, though, so I think I'll try it again, but will dial back on the baking powder. Even if it baked out to a more pound-cake-like texture, it would still be pretty good.

Two Banana Breads

It was a race to the wire, but I finally managed to use up an entire bag of dented-and-dinged bananas. This coup was completed with these two banana breads. For the first one, I used a recipe from Lisa Yockelson's Baking by Flavor. This Banana-Cranberry Tea Bread has dried cranberries in a sour-cream enriched batter. I zested an orange into the batter, figuring that it would go pretty well with the cranberry flavor.

The second loaf is from Lora Brody's Basic Baking. For this loaf, I added the zest of a couple of limes and 1/4 cup of lime juice instead of the lemon zest and juice the original recipe called for, plus some toasted coconut. While I was relatively happy with how the recipe came together, but I was a little disappointed with the coarse texture of the top of the loaf. Also, although the recipe called for an 8x4 loaf pan, the batter was plenty enough for a 9x5 loaf pan. I'm glad I went with my gut instinct on that one, or I'd have been scraping up burned batter from the oven floor.

Both of these breads have been sliced and will go to this week's PLTI class.

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.

Birthday Cake

Now the truth can be told. I once again had a mishap with my wife's birthday cake.

Despite the many good birthday cakes I've made for Karen, the ones that are remembered are the disasters, perhaps most famously the chocolate cake with a marshmallowy seven-minute icing. While stored in the fridge overnight, the icing (which perhaps hadn't set up properly during its seven minutes of whipping) melted. Holding the final result, the cake dome was like a bakery aquarium, with chocolate cake layers wallowing amid a sea of white goo.

I decided this year to rely on tried-and-true Best Birthday Cake from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style. I've been making this cake as a three-layer event, but this time followed the recipe and made two deep layers that would be split to make four layers of cake.

Although I've made this cake a number of times, the bad birthday mojo struck. When I took the cake layers out of the oven, one collapsed entirely, and the other crumbled a bit coming out of the pan. Not happy.

What to do? Frosting corrects a multitude of sins, and this cake has a great white chocolate-cream cheese frosting. I patched it up, put some sprinkles on the outside and on top, and all was fine.

From now on, this is a three-layer cake.

Baking (With) Soda

For reasons that defy easy explanation, we have various 2-liter bottles of soda in our house that no one will ever drink, including regular Coke and Sierra Mist. Because I'm too cheap just to dump them down the drain, I figured that now would be a good time to try a couple of recipes I'd seen while browsing cookbooks.

First off, there's Coke Cake. I gather that this is a Southern thing, although if it is, I'm puzzled by how it didn't end up in Nancie McDermott's Southern Cakes. I decided to try a recipe from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style. The cake batter contains not only a cup of Coke but also marshmallows. I'm still slightly befuddled about this formula. I mean, honestly, who starts off with Coke as the liquid in a cake, then says, "Hey, I know! Let's add three-quarters of a cup of marshmallows to this batter, too!"

To deal with the Sierra Mist, I am going to try 7UP Cake from the new America's Best Lost Recipes, from the folks at Cook's Country.

Updated 29 October 2007: The 7UP Cake is terrific. It's a dense pound cake, extremely moist, not terribly sweet, with a nice lemon glaze.

That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles

Just in case you have some prepackaged cookies sitting around, here are a couple of nifty recipes to try because what else would you do with a dozen Oreos or a bag of Milanos other than chop them up and use them as an ingredient in a cake, right?

Since I'd picked up Maida Heatter's Cakes book a couple of weeks ago, I'd been carrying it around, reading recipes and feeling inspired. I ended up trying her Oreo Cookie Cake. On its own, this cake would be a lovely, moist white sour-cream pound cake. With chopped up Oreos, it's got a little something extra. The Oreos didn't become soggy as I figured they would; instead, they stayed crunchy. I'm glad I chopped them fairly small.

Then there's the Milano Coffee Cake from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style. In the intro to this recipe, Lora relates an anecdote about the origin of this recipe, in which an unfortunate bag of Pepperidge Farms Milanos sadly becomes a bag of crumbs. This misfortune led her to use the Milano crumbs as a streusel topping for a marbled chocolate and vanilla coffee cake. When I first read this recipe eons ago, I couldn't get past the idea that someone could possibly allow a bag of Milanos to become crumbs. Then I dropped a can of tomatoes on a bag of mint Milanos a few weeks ago. Sigh. The Milanos make a pretty good topping for the cake, although I suspect I overbaked this cake a bit even though I took it out of the oven five minutes before the recommended baking time. I think this cake would be nifty with a drizzle of chocolate glaze. Maybe I can try that the next time I have a Milano accident.

Birthday Cake, Part II

In June, my colleague Rodney asked if I ever took commissions for cakes and, if so, would I be interested in making a birthday cake for his wife. He gave me her description of her ideal birthday cake, and Lora Brody's buttermilk chocolate cake (the one I'd recently made for my buddy Brendan) from Chocolate American Style was a perfect fit.

We had a nice bit of cool weather in early July, but then things turned -- right when I needed to be making this cake. Rodney needed the cake for July 10, and we were in the midst of a spell of brutal heat and humidity. I made the cake batter and portioned it for three layers. After the layers were baked off, I wrapped them and set them in the freezer for a day. The next evening, I made the white chocolate cream cheese frosting. In the late-day 90°F temps, the frosting wasn't even in the neighborhood of setting up to be spreadable. I popped it in the fridge, then went off to buy a nice box, a cardboard cake circle, and some doilies. I figured I'd assemble the whole thing the next morning.

The next day -- July 10 -- I took the cake layers out of the freezer before I went running, and I checked the frosting, which had thickened somewhat. I figured I was good to go. However, it didn't take more than 5 minutes out of the fridge for the frosting to become unworkable. I frosted between the layers, stacked them, then took off for work with the semi-assembled cake, the remainder of the frosting, and a small offset spatula. I put everything in the fridge there and let it sit for an entire day. Rodney needed the cake done by 5:30, so at 4:30, I zipped out to the kitchen and did a quick crumb coat, put the cake back in the fridge for a bit, then at 4:45, finished frosting it. I boxed it up and tucked it back in the fridge. (I very stupidly forgot to take a picture of it, but it looked fantastic.)

Before Rodney left the office for the day, I reminded him to keep the AC on full blast in the car and to put the cake in the fridge when he got home ASAP.

I have to admit that I thought this one was a lost cause, but it had a magically happy ending. Whew. By all accounts, Rodney's wife very much enjoyed the cake. As for me, I love this cake and this recipe, and I think that from now on, I'll save it for cooler weather.

Birthday Cake

Today after our Sunday long training run at the lake, we (and our special guest, Ryan) had breakfast as usual, then celebrated Brendan's birthday, which is actually tomorrow (although cake doesn't know from dates).

For today's birthday cake, I made Best Birthday Cake from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style. This cake was what I made for Karen's birthday this year, and I loved everything about it. The cake is incredibly moist, and the smooth ivory frosting is a perfect counterpoint to the deep chocolate richness of the cake.

The recipe calls for two 9-in. round pans for the batter. The first time I made the cake, I had to scramble to prepare a third pan because there was so much batter. I'd grabbed the regular thin nonstick cake pans instead of the heavier, taller aluminum cake pans, not realizing how much batter I'd be dealing with. I even made a note with the recipe that it required three pans. This time, I opted to use two deeper pans, which would allow me to split the cakes and to serve a four-layer cake.

The baking went just fine, but I think that the frosting recipe makes not quite enough to fill and cover four layers of cake. I ended up feeling that I had to make a half-batch of frosting to finish off the cake. There also were a couple of, um, structural mishaps in which portions on the edge of the top layer tore off the cake (I must have misjudged the halving of the top layer). Unfortunately, the frosting also became a bit slack from being in the car until after breakfast.

In the end, I think that henceforth, I will make this cake as a three-layer cake. I think I prefer slightly thicker, sturdier layers. I also suspect that the frosting recipe is better suited to three layers rather than four.

Regardless, this cake is really something special: rich, chocolaty, and (under ideal circumstances) great-looking.

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.