Groundhog Day Party

Our friends John and Laura had a Groundhog Day party on Saturday. I volunteered to bring a dessert. I opted to make something easy to eat and that I hoped kids would like: a batch of Banana Granola Cookies (from Jill Snider's Cookies) and a batch of Butterscotch Bars from Cook's Country.

I'd made the Banana Granola Cookies once before. This batch turned out a little flatter. I also added some chocolate chips to the batter, a nice touch. I also frosted them with cream-cheese icing. The Butterscotch Bars were new. I found them to be extremely sweet; I ended up feeling glad I'd cut them into small squares.

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.

A Tale of Two Orange Bundt Cakes

As I detailed in yesterday's post, "The Botched Effort," I had a rough time with Cook's Country's Orange Bundt Cake. Because I still had oranges to use up (I suspect they're multiplying like tribbles), I decided to make one more orange cake, but this time chose a recipe from Abby Dodge's The Weekend Baker. I like this cookbook and probably haven't used it nearly enough since I bought it a couple of years ago. (Note: Abby's dinner-roll recipe -- extremely fondly known at our house as The Bread of Death -- is awesome.)

Abby's recipe for Rich Orange Butter Cake is very similar to CC's Orange Bundt Cake, but there are some differences. I think the two crucial ones are that Abby uses 1/2 cup more flour in her cake, and she uses a lot more leavening (2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda vs. CC's 1 teaspoon powder and 1/2 teaspoon soda). If you factor sugar as a liquid ingredient, Abby's recipe uses less liquid overall than CC's.

The CC cake (bottom photo) has a gummy texture, although to be fair, that is probably a result of my use of glaze as a cake-reconstruction substance. I'll have to make that cake again just for comparison's sake. Abby's recipe (top photo) made a beautiful pound cake, with a tight crumb and nice appearance. And it came out of the pan with no undue coaxing. Thanks to The Weekend Baker, I had a respectable orange Bundt to share with some friends this evening.

Props are due to my sous chef, Claire, who assisted with the juicing of the oranges for the second cake.

Tropical Carrot Cake

Hi! Having failed at two attempts to keep a written record of my baking adventures, I've decided to try the electronic route to see if I can somehow keep track of my favorite cookbooks and recipes, and also keep a record of those less-than-successful cakes that get a second life as trifle components.

I'm not a professional baker, although I have a professional chef's degree from Connecticut Culinary Institute. At heart, I'm a passionate, eager, possibly (probably) obsessive amateur. I really enjoy trying new recipes and working on the process of baking. I love baking for my family, and they've been pretty amenable to trying most new things. For going on 13 years, I've commemorated birthdays at my office with some sort of baked good. I bring a dessert for "Lost Lunch Thursday," when we "Lost" fans at work get together to dissect the previous night's episode. I also like to bring along an assortment of treats when I'm meeting up with friends at a road race. Among the highlights of the baking year is the holiday-season Cookie Day, in which my running buddy Ryan and I bake Christmas cookies for 10 to 12 hours. It's a major throwdown and a huge amount of fun.

My first baking blog entry: Tropical Carrot Cake from the April/May 2007 issue of Cook's Country magazine. I confess that with each new food magazine that arrives in the mailbox, I immediately scan for the dessert recipes. The text accompanying the CC Tropical Carrot Cake made this one sound enormously appealing, so I put it on the agenda for this weekend. In preparation, the cake lived up to the description in the article, especially the pineappley, coconutty aroma that filled the house when the cake layers were in the oven. The final result: a very tall, flavorful carrot cake. This recipe uses a technique I first saw in a carrot cake recipe by Greg Case in Fine Cooking a few years ago. I love that recipe, which starts with an emulsion of oil, eggs, and sugar prepared in a food processor. The CC recipe also uses an emulsion, only this one includes coconut, which is processed with granulated white sugar. The pineapple flavor comes from a pudding prepared before the cake batter is made; a portion of the pudding goes in the cake, and part goes in the frosting.

Thoughts about this cake: I'm glad I used my deep 9-in. round cake pans instead of the usual Ecko nonstick layer pans; there's a lot of batter for a two-layer cake. I think I'll try this one again, but with a mango pudding. I guess that will tint the cake and especially the frosting an orangey color, but because the cake is coated with toasted coconut, I wonder how noticeable the color will be.

I took a couple of pictures that I will post later. I can't find the right plug to hook up the digital camera to the computer. Ugh.

Edit to add: Photos uploaded on 04 March. I apologize for my food-photography skills. Ha.