Stop 26: Hummingbird Cake

About a week after making the Cassata cake, my mother had a dinner party to go to for which she wanted to bring dessert.  She had some old bananas she wanted to use, and since I don't like bananas, and I wasn't going to this party, it seemed like a pretty good time to make one of the banana recipes from the book.  We decided to make the Hummingbird Cake from, well, to be honest, I can't remember which state it was, and I can't find the book.  I want to say it was South Carolina.

The hummingbird cake, which, by the way, has no given explanation for its name anywhere, except that it's super sweet, like the nectar a hummingbird drinks, was chock full of fruit.  It called for pineapple and bananas, as well as pecans.  A traditional hummingbird cake recipe calls for drained pineapple, but Brown switched his up to use dried pineapple.  I'm not really sure why, but dried pineapple is yummy.

This was another three-layer cake and it came together nicely.  The recipe called for a cream cheese frosting, and like many of the other icings I made over the summer, it didn't congeal quite the way we might have wanted it to.  It was a pretty hot, sticky summer, so that was probably weather-related.

I did not actually try this cake (because of it's banana-ness), but I was told it was good.  And very, very sweet.

I also have no pictures of it because I am currently failing miserably as a blogger.

Next Stop: Florida Key Lime Pie

DETOUR: Beer Cupcakes

Recently, three things happened in my life pretty much simultaneously.  My cousin was getting married at the same time that I discovered her future (and now) husband had a major thing for cupcakes at the same time that a friend sent me a recipe for beer cupcakes.  I had been aware before that my cousin and her fiance were beer people from some time we had spent together (and the fact that they just seem awesome), so the idea of creating something that combined two of their favorite things (and my favorite things) seemed like a great way to kick off their wedding weekend.

Now, most baking that includes beer involves chocolate flavors and stout beers.  These cupcakes included some IPA and honey.  The recipe called for a strong, flavorful IPA and I chose a beer called Hoppy Feet from the Clown Shoes Brewery.  It was described as a Black India Pale Ale and had a reasonably high percentage.  I figured that the higher the percentage, the stronger the beer, the more the flavor would come through in the cupcakes.

I guess I was right, though it was kind of hard to tell.  To be honest, the cupcakes kind of tasted like banana bread when they were cooked.  Not because of the banana flavor (of which there was none), but because of that moist and mildly slimy consistency.  As someone who does not like bananas and is mildly repulsed by the scent of baked bananas, this was not an altogether welcome turn of events.  Some people who tasted them said they could taste the beer flavor, but only if they'd already been made aware of the secret ingredient beforehand.  The flavor was fine, it just wasn't really beer-y, which I was disappointed about.  Come to think of it, I once made a beer bread that also wasn't really beer-y, so maybe it's just something about my expectations and beer in baking...

For the icing, the original recipe called for lavender honey icing.  I like flowery flavors in foods even less than I like banana bread (well, it might be a tie), so that didn't go over too well.  I made two ganaches.  I made a dark chocolate ganache with cinnamon and ginger, and a white chocolate ganache with chamomile, rose hips and mint.  I actually used a bag of Tazo Calm tea that I ripped open and let brew in the cream as I was heating it to pour over the chocolate.  The flavor of the white chocolate ganache was very good, but it didn't set up the way I hoped it would, so I ended up adding a bunch of powdered sugar that eventually helped it set.  It was very sweet.  The dark chocolate ganache was very tasty and went way quicker than the white chocolate, but isn't that always the case?

All in all, I might have been mildly disappointed in the outcome of the actual cupcake, but the bride and groom were quite pleased and all the cupcakes disappeared off the serving plate.  Now that I have been opened up to this idea of beer in baking, I have lots to experiment with.  I'm thinking that next time, the beer goes in the icing!

The bride and groom seemed to enjoy the cupcakes!

Here was the display of the amazingly delicious cupcakes they had at their wedding.
The Grasshopper ones were to die for!

Next Stop:  Hummingbird Cake!

Stop 25: Ohio Cassata Cake

(Sorry for the extreme lacking of posts recently, I'm back now, with lots to update you on!)

You know how sometimes get an idea and you're really motivated to do it right then and there?  And then you start getting into it and you realize that it's a way bigger deal than you thought it was going to be?  That is what the Cassata Cake was.

I was going to a friend of the family's for dinner and thought, gosh, wouldn't it be nice if I made a cake as a dessert... I had been looking through the book with this friend the night before and we both marveled at the cassata cake, so it seemed like a good one to try out.  Here's what I learned:  The cassata cake is awesome.  It is also a cake that should not be started at 4pm for a casual weekday dinner.  I learned this when I was halfway through in the intricate (and time-consuming) baking process and again at the end when Brown described the cake as "extravagant."

The best part of this cake, though, was the karma.

The cake called for citrus oil and we searched far and wide to try to find some sort of citrus oil.  OK, we went to two stores, but we were on the Cape and there really weren't a lot of gourmet food stores in the area.  Except for one.  This fancy oil place that calls themselves a "tasting shop" and wants you go in and fill these little tiny cups with oils and vinegars that they normally charge somewhere between $12 and $15 for an enormous bottle and stick your finger in or drink them or something.  So we did that for a while and then, right when I was thinking about buying one of the overpriced bottles of oil my mother nudged me.  She nudged me kind of hard and in that, "don't pay that much for lemon-flavored oil, you silly girl!" kind of way.  So, I made our excuses and went on my way.  Once we left the store, I discovered that the reason for the nudge was not the price, but the fact that my mother had filled one of the little tasting cups with oil and left the store.  Now, officially, if you think about it, we hadn't done anything wrong.  I mean, we were going to TASTE the oil later, in the cake...  But anyway, that kind of set the tone for the cake and what happened to it later might have been retribution.

The cake actually came out quite well and the ricotta filling was super tasty.  Light, yet rich, very scrumptious.  We had some strawberries, sliced them up, whipped the cream, everything was good to go.  Time was going very quickly and the cake seemed to be cooling very slowly and we had to go to dinner.  When I went to assemble the cake, a few things happened.  

For one, I filled the cake with a layer of the ricotta filling and then a layer of strawberries, then I put the second layer on and it ended up a bit on the slippery side.  The second thing was the whipped cream, which I had whipped previously and then, for some unknown reason, left out on the counter.  Even when I was frosting the cake with the cream, I could tell that it needed to be rewhipped and wasn't really going to set correctly.  But, I was out of time and didn't have the energy to get the (now clean) mixer out again.  So I built the cake and we fashioned the ingenious little contraption to get it over to the place we were having dinner (otherwise known as a box).

And this is when the karma came around to bite me in the butt.  On the way to the friend's house for dinner, this happened:

Needless to say, the cake did not appear as beautifully as I hoped it would.  I am happy to say though, that it tasted really, really good.  I will definitely be trying this one again when I have more energy, more time and less bad karma coming my way.

And here is a picture, not of the finished cake, which was just plain ugly, but of the cake before the whipped cream fiasco.  Isn't it pretty?

Next Stop: Detour to beer cupcakes!

Stop 24: Texas Sheet Cake

A friend of mine who lives in Templeton, Mass. (wherever the heck that is) had a BBQ last week so we could all get together with another friend who was in town visiting.  For simplicity's sake, I will tell you their names.  Jenna is the one who lives in the middle of nowhere, and Sarah was the one visiting.  That's better.

Jenna, Sarah and I went to grad school together and are all school librarians.  It's a pretty wild time when we all get together.  Jenna and Sarah are both native Virginians, but last year, Jenna saw the light and moved back up here with her fiance (Adam), who I like.  Sarah was living in Virginia (which is for lovers), but in a few weeks is making a huge move to Texas.  She will be living in a town midway between Austin and San Antonio and now I have a reason to go to Austin to visit (I've always wanted to go to Austin).

Now that you have the backstory, I should probably get on to the cake.  Since Sarah is moving to Texas, it seemed like a perfect time to make a Texas sheet cake.  I had had a Texas sheet cake once before when a coworker brought one in and knew it was a good cake for feeding a lot of people.  It was a good sized BBQ too, which was good because now that I've been to Templeton and know where Templeton is and know I will never be returning to Templeton, it was nice to be able to bring a cake that would feed all of Jenna and Adam's friends, who were nice.

Texas sheet cake is a chocolate cake with chocolate icing that is big and sweet and Brown says, a good way to feed a crowd.  Brown says that the recipe is sometimes attributed to Lady Bird Johnson, but he couldn't find any record of a recipe of her's for it, so I'm not sure where it came from.

The recipe itself calls for pretty traditional ingredients.  It's a buttermilk cake, and calls for brandy, which I subbed bourbon for because I had bourbon and not brandy and it was only a tablespoon.  I made the chocolate pecan icing, which I used walnuts for instead because the mediocre Star Market next to my house had no pecans at all.  I used walnuts for the icing and the candied nuts that went on top.  Those were yummy.  I wasn't super impressed with the icing because I didn't feel like it ever really set, which was the same issue I had with the icing for the sauerkraut cake.  I might not be beating it long enough, or it might have to do with the humidity, which has been rampant recently.

The cake itself baked up nicely and was very moist.  It combined with the icing and candied nuts was very, very sweet, but that's what a dessert is for, right?  I thought it came out well and was tasty, though, as I mentioned above, I was disappointed with the icing and might try a different one if I did it again.  All the people who actually eat dessert seemed very pleased with it.

Pictures!

candied walnuts

Sarah and her Texas cake 

Clayton, Jenna and Sarah looking creepily salaciously at the cake 

and now with looks of deep admiration 

Next Stop: Ohio Cassata Cake

Stop 23: St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake

So, all I know about St. Louis is that it is in Missouri, there is an arch there, beer is cheaper than it is here, and I'm pretty sure the Mississippi River is involved, though I'm not 100% sure on that one.  Missouri is one of those strange "middle-of-the-country" states that awes me because even though I've seen them on maps and met people "from" them, I'm really not completely convinced in their reality.  What I do believe in though, is gooey butter cake.

My friend Anne, who is from the aforementioned "St. Louis," recently got married (to a guy from Pennsylvania, but I believe in Pennsylvania - they have airport hubs there), and at the wedding, they gave away St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake as a thank you gift.  When Anne first told me this I imagined all her mom's friends slaving over hot ovens in July and then delicately transporting hundreds of ooey, gooey cakes from the midwest to Massachusetts and putting them into our greedy hands.  What actually happened is that somebody bought a bunch of Gooey Louie cakes in bulk and put them in pretty boxes for us.  So now I know one more thing about St. Louis: they have prepackaged gooey butter cakes so you can take them home from 7/11 with you after a long day at work.  And the St. Louis area code is 314.

Brown presents gooey butter cake as one of the two Missouri cakes (the other is 7-Up Pound Cake).  He explains that what makes it so gooey is that it's basically a butter cake with a cheesecake poured on top and then baked together.  Because of this, the cheesecake topping seeps in and down the sides and makes the rest of the cake, which is already rich and delicious, pretty gooey.

I guess the gooey butter cake was first invented by a guy named Johnny Hoffman who accidentally added the wrong proportion of ingredients to a cake and ended up with baked, but gooey cakes.  The problem wasn't the gooey-ness, it was that he liked them so much that he wanted to be able to recreate them, but didn't know what he had done.  He called in his friend Richard Danzer and together they came up with what is now known as St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake. And we thank them.

I baked these last week in honor of a BBQ I was going to be attending with some cousins.  Who else to inundate with overly sugary, fatty goodness than family?!

As mentioned above, these are literally made with two separate batters.  First you make a butter cake recipe with butter, shortening, buttermilk, vanilla bean seeds, some flour, sugar, milk, eggs, baking powder and salt.  Once that is mixed up and in the cups (I made cupcakes), you then mix together cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla, eggs, and milk.  Brown also gave variations to add to the cheesecake mixture.  I did half chocolate (which involved adding melted bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate, and some more butter), and half with peanut butter (for that you just added peanut butter).

Brown said the recipe would yield 18 cupcakes, but I got about 26 out of it.  I assume either I was using smaller cupcake tins than he was, or I did something wrong (either option is a possibility).  The cheesecake topping was also really soupy, almost pure liquid, which was a bit weird, and I ended up with a lot more of it leftover than I expected.  Basically, by the time I put these things in the oven, I was pretty sure they were going to be a bust and I was going to be showing up to the BBQ with a store-bought cake and a scowl.

I was wrong though!  They came out awesome.  The top set right at the same time that the bottoms were cooked through and the result was literally a gooey cake that was rich and sweet and delicious.  The peanut butter version were definitely the better option of the two, but I had no problem moving either flavor.  In fact, there were about eight of us at this BBQ, and I came home with two cupcakes, and those were mostly because I ran away with them before they were absconded with.

The pictures are subpar because they were taken outside at night with an iPhone, but you should get the idea.

Yum.

Next Stop:  Texas sheet cake!

A Summer Dinner

In my world summer equals grilling.  It hasn't always been that way; growing up we had an old gas grill which did its duty once or twice a summer.  Through the years though, summer cooking has become synonymous with firing up the grill and using it to its fullest.  Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while are familiar with the my grilled apple cake , my niece's second birthday cake, and of course we've been known to whip out the grill at odd times of year to create a plethora of grilled Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas roasts (most of which have caught the grill on fire at one point or another).  I think the grill fascination came mostly when my mother retired from a job she'd been at for many, many years and as a gift they gave her a beautiful six-burner Weber gas grill which was installed on the deck at the house on the Cape with a direct line to the gas in the house.  All of a sudden having access to a grill whenever you needed it, and with very little difficulty involving making it go, made the idea of grilling far more appealing and accessible.  Thus was born the summer=grill phenomenon in my world.  It kills me because I don't have a grill at home.  Of course, I don't have the beach three miles away at home either, so there are lots of things bringing me down here.

Anyway, the dinner we've created today is an example of the perfect summer meal in my eyes.  Fresh ingredients, some of them even local (I try!), turned into dishes made from scratch.  We did use the oven a bit for this one, but mostly, the grill was used to its fullest to make a meal of new and delicious delicacies!

Dinner tonight was brought to us by the color green (you know, like on Sesame Street, the numbers and the Count, you know what I'm talking about...).  July brought the grilling issue of Bon Appetit and everything in it looked amazing.

For this meal, we made three recipes from the magazine:
Green Shawarma Salmon,
Celery, Apple and Fennel Slaw,
and Cilantro-Scallion Bread

For dessert, a blueberry cake on the grill.

The cilantro scallion bread is a funny recipe.  It's a yeast dough that you make like a pastry dough.  You start by proofing the yeast with sugar and water, but while you're doing that, you cut butter into flour.  It was a bit counterintuitive.  After it had risen for an hour, you rolled the dough out and filled it with a mixture of cilantro, scallions, sesame seeds (it called for white and black, but I could only find white, so I did white and some toasted), and olive oil.  Then you rolled it up, cut it into 3/4" slices and laid them flat on a baking sheet where they were brushed with even more oil and then baked.  They were really good. Needed a bit more salt, but were really good.

(sorry about the sideways photo)

The next recipe was the Apple, Celery and Fennel Slaw.  BA advertised this as their updated version of Waldorf Salad, and while the thought (and crunch) was there, my father disagreed that it really took anything from the original Waldorf Salad.  That, for the most part though, is because my father loves all things mayonnaise and I think became fearful that we were going to start replacing all his mayo favorites with light olive oil vinaigrettes (we're not).  I would happily say this salad was inspired by the original, but maybe not a replacement of.  

This salad was also incredibly good and gave us a chance to use the brand spanking new mandoline to cut everything very, very thin.  The mandoline we still need to work on, but it did speed up the process significantly.  My only recommendation for the slaw off what they say in the recipe would definitely be to let it sit for at least a few hours before serving.  It didn't say anything about time in the recipe, so we made it just a half hour before and the leftovers definitely tasted better the next day.

It was pretty too (and green): 

The final BA recipe was the Green Shawarma salmon.  This also came out really well and much better than it happens to look in the picture below.  It basically involved blending a while bunch of cilantro with a whole bunch of olive oil and a whole bunch of spices (coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger).  Then you spred the marinade on the fish and let it rest for a few hours.  BA said that you were supposed to flip the fish while cooking which, I think, is why their picture looks so different from mine.  Either that or I did something wrong.  Either way, it was tasty.  And also super tasty the next day when cold.

Finally for the anomaly of the meal, the Blueberry Cake dessert.  The blueberry cake was the same recipe as the aforementioned grilled apple cake, but with blueberries rather than apples.  I don't know if it's the grill or it's just that some baking master is hanging out at the Weber kitchen writing recipes, but this cake is beyond good.  It's fluffy and dense and light and moist.  It has all thing going for it that a cake should have going for it.  If you have a grill, MAKE THIS CAKE, you will not be disappointed.  And if you are disappointed, please bring it to my house and I will eat it.  Thank you.

So that was our green-inspired, Bon Appetit and Weber discovered summer meal.  It was light, tasty and didn't heat up or stink up the house.  If I could eat like that every night, I would...

Stop 22: Colorado Apple-Banana-Walnut Nugget Cake

We had a potluck brunch on the last day of school.  I organized it and subsequently threw my back out at some point during the preparations.  I also promised all of my colleagues many more potluck-esq types of events in the future, but as that I am now planning my big escape to Belgium or Paris or somewhere in the middle, who knows how inspired I'll be to get people to bake.  On that note, does anyone want to pay me a bunch of money to go to Paris for a year and just kind of hang out?  I have been looking at jobs there and I think that that would be a far superior alternative.  Let me know...

Anyway, we had a potluck and it seemed like the perfect time to make a cake that I had no interest in eating.  This pretty much means either something with peaches or something with bananas.  I chose a banana recipe.

The Apple-Banana-Walnut Nugget Cake was created to honor Colorado because of Brown's association between a trip he took to Colorado as a child when he was shocked by all the small "nuggets" of rock were there (he was expecting large boulders and that's it) and Colorado's history relating to the gold rush. He chose apples, bananas and walnuts because they were good for holding the soft cake together.

I should acknowledge at this point that I don't have any pictures of this cake.  I forgot to take them before and then I went home all whimpery-like because of my back and forgot to take them half way eaten as well.  If you don't want to read anymore without the promise of visual stimulation, I completely understand.

The cake itself consisted of the normal cake ingredients plus some sour cream, heavy cream and brandy. There were also four eggs and three egg yolks thrown in for good measure and a bit of cholesterol.  The recipe called to leave all the fruit pieces pretty chunky, as to make it nugget-y.  Then you put on not one, not two, but three glazes.  First white - powdered sugar and milk, then tan - the white one mixed with some melted chocolate, then brown - just melted chocolate.  It truly was a sight to behold.  I was also told that it tasted good.  All I can tell you from personal experience is that I'm even more repulsed by the scent of baking bananas than I am of raw ones...

Next Stop: St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake.  I had a packaged one at a wedding and I want to see how it compares!