Sweet Potato Pound Cake, Again

My fondness for Nancie McDermott's Sweet Potato Pound Cake recipe is well documented here. I can't think of much I'd do differently with that recipe -- except for add some crystallized ginger to it. In the end, it's a brilliant addition to this cake. For this version, I added a ginger-cream cheese frosting from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. I added some heavy cream to the icing to make it a little looser for a more glazelike consistency.

Boston Cream Pie, with a Twist

I really like the Boston Cream Pie recipe from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, mostly because that book contains a pastry-cream recipe with many, many variations. I've made nontraditional Boston Cream Pies with peanut-butter pastry-cream filling. This time, I tweaked the chocolate variation by adding some instant-coffee powder to make a mocha filling. I'm not sure exactly how much instant coffee I added, but I think it was around a tablespoon, or maybe a tablespoon and a half. It gave the pastry cream a really terrific mocha flavor. I should have been more mindful of paying attention to the amount of coffee I was adding.

One tweak here is that I didn't lighten the KA pastry cream with whipped cream, as their recipe specifies. When I've done that in the past, I've ended up with far more pastry cream than I can use. I can say for sure now that I prefer this pastry cream unlightened.

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.

Lemon Layer Cake

This cake turned out tasting far better than I thought I was going to.

The recipe is from Better Homes & Gardens's New Baking Book. The Lusty Lemon Cake is three layers of cake, filled with lemon curd, then coated with a lemon-cream cheese icing. I was prepared to be underwhelmed. The cake layers weren't too lemony. The lemon-curd filling uses the weirdest lemon-curd technique I've ever seen. And the frosting lacked zip.

Somehow, though, when the parts came together, the cake tasted really good. I credit the lemon curd. No matter how weird the process for making it, the curd punched up the flavor of the cake. I think the cake layers and frosting can be tweaked for the better, too, but in the end this time, the final result was admirably serviceable.

Lemon-Cranberry Cupcakes

These cupcakes are another recipe from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. Pretty good, although I would be tempted to bump up the lemon flavor a bit with some extract or lemon oil. They are topped with a ginger-cream cheese frosting.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day means baking. This year, I made two special things for Valentine's Day. First, there was a batch of Sprinkle Cookies from Mom's Big Book of Baking by Lauren Chattman. This is a pretty simple sugar cookie, with the dough rolled in a ball, then dipped in sprinkles before it's baked.

Then I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes. Having enjoyed Jill O'Connor's banana rum cake so much, I decided to try the Chocolate-Mayonnaise Cupcakes from her book Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey. These cupcakes are awesome. The batter baked beautifully without oozing onto the top of the cupcake pan. I made a batch of plain buttercream tinted pink to frost them, then added some holiday sprinkles for the top.

Peanut Blossoms

I love Mom's Big Book of Baking. It's a Lauren Chattman book, and I don't think I've made anything questionable from it. Claire and I decided to make a batch of Peanut Butter Thumbprints from the book; instead of filling them with jelly, we used chocolate stars and kisses.

The dough is extra peanutty: It uses natural peanut butter, for one thing, and also contains a cup of finely chopped salted peanuts. I especially liked the ones we made with dark-chocolate stars.