Category: Baking

Chocolate Butter Cupcakes

It’s free choice time with the Heavenly Cake Bakers catch-up group. This week I decided on Chocolate cupcakes, with the golden neoclassic buttercream. One of my teammates at work mentioned something related to cupcakes on Friday, so I figured that would be a good choice for something to bring in to work on Monday (today). The buttercream was chosen because I ran into the Lyle’s golden syrup at the grocery store a little while back, and I haven’t had a good opportunity to try out the golden neoclassic buttercream since purchasing it. I’ve always just used corn syrup.

Let’s bake!

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Swedish Pear and Almond Cream Cake

Just a quick note to give my fellow heavenly cake bakers the link to my Swedish pear and almond cream cake, from last fall. I skipped baking this weekend, since there’s a free choice coming up, and I spent much of the weekend up a ladder or on a roof, working on finishing up the main components of our shed. I did my first roofing job!

Chocolate Raspberry Trifle

Hello? Is anyone out there? I’m usually on the tail end of the weekly posters for the heavenly cake bakers group, but it looks like I’m only the second one to post this week’s cake. I guess I’ll chalk it up to Memorial day festivities in the US, since the only other poster so far also lives outside the US, in Canberra. This week, we’re working on the Chocolate Raspberry Trifle, leaving only a handful of cakes from the sponge cake chapter unbaked. For me, they are White Gold Passion Génoise, Red Fruit Shortcake, and Catalan Salt Pinch cake, which I skipped the first time around. I decided to make this trifle in a casserole dish, for several reasons. The first is the most important: I don’t own a trifle dish (shock! horror!). The second reason is because I thought it would be a pretty convenient way to carry it to work.

Mmm.. so pink!

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Barcelona Brownie Bars

Since, aside from Marie, the host of the Heavenly Cake Bake-along, only one of Rose’s Heavenly Cake Bakers (congratulations, NancyB!) managed to bake their way through every recipe in Rose’s Heavenly Cakes, several of the group are continuing through to completion, with Jenn of “Knitty Baker” taking up the role of host. This week’s ‘cake’ is the Barcelona Brownie Bars. I think this was the first recipe I baked as part of the bake along, if memory serves. For nostalgia’s sake, here’s the link to my Barcelona Brownie Bars (though I’m not sure how anyone could be nostalgic for that kitchen!).

I didn’t manage to bake anything new this weekend. Instead, I made Cordon Rose Cheesecake from The Cake Bible (my standard go-to cheesecake), then drizzled it with chocolate lacquer glaze, leftover from Zach’s La Bomba. It was my husband’s birthday yesterday, so he got to choose the cake. 😉 Happily, he’s getting around much better this weekend than he was a week ago, and he’s scheduled for physio tomorrow. We event managed to frame out a new garden shed this past weekend. Roof’s next!

Zach’s La Bomba

Well, it’s finally here. The last cake of the official heavenly cake bakers project. Despite the weekend* we had around here, I just didn’t feel right missing out on baking this one with the rest of my baking buddies. We picked up some black currant herbal tea at Teaopia. The rest of the ingredients were easy: chocolate, cream and regular pantry items. The cake has a lot of components, but none struck me as particularly challenging (ok, my arm got a bit tired with the Sabayon). I tried to clean up the dishes as I went, but by the end of it, I still had just about a full load in the dishwasher, and several big bowls on the counter. Oh well. Let’s bake!

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Catch up time with the Heavenly Cake Bakers

Ok, so I’ve missed a few weeks. Sorry, I’ve been a bad blogger. I’ve missed some baking too. Instead of making a southern (Manhatten) coconut cake, I made a buttermilk country cake with Seville orange curd (from orange juice I had frozen last spring), for my grandfather’s 90th birthday. Instead of a free choice cake from Rose’s heavenly cakes, last weekend, I made this for a friend (who’s in her mid-twenties, but never mind that):

K's Birthday Cake

Now granted, this particular cake used the white velvet butter (cup) cakes for the feet, a white velvet bowl cake for the head, and the marble velvet cake for the body, but since I’ve already made those previously, I don’t get to cross something extra off the list.

This week, however, I made Tiramisù, so I do get to cross that off my list. Like most free choice weeks, this was Jay’s choice. 🙂 I don’t like coffee (he does), but I kept an open mind, and actually really enjoyed this one.

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Karmel Cake

Apologies to my fellow Heavenly Cake Bakers. I got behind in my reading of your blogs when I was away for a week, and I still haven’t managed to find the time to catch up. I’m still baking with you, though!

This week’s cake was Karmel cake, which was named for a friend of Rose Levy Beranbaum. It’s also a bit of a play on words, as it’s made with caramel sauce instead of using sugar directly. My picture of the cake looks pretty much the same as everyone else’s, except Marie’s, which Hanaâ turned into a birthday cake for Rose! I didn’t adorn mine with anything, but it was tasty nonetheless. Mine had a couple of tunnels in it, just like Marie’s.

My husband and I each had a piece Sunday night after supper, and I asked Jay what he thought. “It’s really good.” “Keep at home good, or take to work good?” “Take it to work. If you keep it here, I’ll eat it and get fat.” So, there you go. This one’s a keeper, which means it had to go to work. 😉

Orange Glow Chiffon (not Layer) cake

I feel like I’ve been gone forever, but in reality, I’ve only missed two weeks of baking with the Heavenly Cake Bakers. I skipped the <a href="http://heavenlycakeplace.blogspot.com/2011/03/devils-food-cake-with-midnight-ganache.html"Devil's food cake because we were on chocolate overdose in our house. I also skipped last weekend’s free choice because I was away in San Francisco for EclipseCon from Sunday to Friday. Somehow, having skipped only two weeks, I managed to forget how to take pictures for the blog. 😉 I only got three this time.

First, Mise en Place

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Moist Chocolate Raspberry Génoise

I’m feeling less than talkative today, so I’m going to do one of my infamous “let the pictures do the talking” posts. I’ve got a cold, and it seems the more stuffed up my head is, the less my brain functions. Strange, no? Makes trying to debug code at work rather challenging. Anyway, this week’s choice from Rose’s heavenly cakes is the moist chocolate raspberry génoise. As I was sitting frosting it, my husband pointed out that this shouldn’t be a cake book, it should be a chocolate book. He’s right, there is a lot of chocolate in this book, but there’s a goodly amount of non-chocolate too. I wonder if maybe I’m just biased towards chocolate cakes. I don’t think I’ve missed one yet, but I have missed some others. 😉

Moist Chocolate Raspberry Génoise

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