Birthday Cake

For her birthday this year, Claire requested a repeat of a cake I'd made previously but didn't like that much. Fortunately, I was inspired to make this chocolate cake, which appeared in an issue of Everyday Food. I was missing an ingredient for the ganache that was used to ice the cake, so I used to the lighter, fluffier chocolate frosting from the Magnolia Bakery cookbooks. The cake tasted great, but I guess I should have cleaned up the frosting smears on the cake-dome platter!

Leap Cakes

In celebration of Leap Day, I made a couple of cakes. For PLTI this week, I doctored beyond the Cake Mix Doctor. I jazzed up this cake (bottom photo) with rum, banana liqueur, and coconut. (No reports on how it tasted, although it smelled pretty good.)

Then I decided to try the Lemon-Ginger Bundt Cake (top photo) from the new issue of Everyday Food. All in all, I liked this cake, although the one I made baked with a weird air bubble that ran through two-thirds of the cake. Weird. I shared the recipe with a friend who has had no luck with it (twice, in fact). I need to make this one again to see if there's something amiss in the process.

Applesauce Cake

This cake came to be in a fairly roundabout way. I've been prowling the dented-and-dinged produce rack lately, and have gotten some great deals on bananas (there's a lot of banana-themed blog entries on the way), red peppers (which I used for stuffed peppers), and apples. I figured I'd use the apples (and a few pears) for a couple of batches of homemade applesauce. Since I didn't add any sugar -- I just cooked down the fruit with a little apple cider and a couple of cinnamon sticks -- I had unsweetened applesauce, perfect for a cake.

While browsing through the Holiday Baking special edition of Everyday Food, I saw this recipe for Applesauce Cake. This cake is spicy and moist, but there was a bit of a problem removing the cake from the pan. My gut instinct told me to line the bottom of the tube pan with parchment paper, and I didn't. I went with just the usual shortening-flour pan release. It was not adequate -- hence the coating of cream-cheese frosting on the cake. (In case you were wondering, yes, I had to serve it upside down.)