Sticky Toffee “Pudding”

This is a cake I’ve been looking forward to making for a while now, and it’s finally come up in the rotation in the Heavenly Cake Baker’s group. As a kid, I seriously disliked most Christmas “pudding” types of desserts, though I always loved the sauces that go with them. I think for me, it was a perceived association with fruitcake, which I still dislike to this day, though I’ve since gotten over my dislike for Christmas pudding. Friends of my parents who have become good friends of mine used to make Christmas pudding every year. They would even send it across 2 provinces in the mail to New Brunswick on occasion to get it to my family years when we couldn’t make it to Ontario for Christmas for whatever reason. Anyway, this week’s cake is “Sticky Toffee Pudding”. It’s made with pureed dates, so you don’t get any chunks of fruit in the cake (which is the part I used to dislike). Also, it contains beer, which is never a bad thing. 🙂

More specifically, mine contained Waterloo Dark beer. The recipe called for stout, but since we keep Waterloo Dark in stock, and we really like it, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

The Beer of Choice in our home

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Marble Velvet Cake

This week is free choice week with the heavenly cake bakers, and once again, I let my husband choose the cake. It’s a bit of a cop-out on my part, to be honest, because I just don’t like making decisions. I point him at the list of cakes and tell him to pick something that has a link on the left hand side, but no link next to it. This week, he picked the Marble Velvet Cake, which is one of the cakes Marie made before the rest of the group joined up. I also made the quail egg indulgence cake, only with chicken eggs… but it wasn’t very photogenic, and I don’t really have a lot to say about it. To me, it was just a basic pound cake, maybe a little more rich/moist, but otherwise nothing special.

Marble Velvet Cake

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Mud Turtle Cupcakes (and some catch-up)

Yes, that’s catch-up, not ketchup, thank goodness. I don’t think ketchup would be very good with mud turtle cupcakes. I had a single lonesome banana turning brown that I had to use up, so I took the opportunity to knock another cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes off my “to bake” list: Chocolate Banana (stud) Cake. The cake component turned out beautifully.

Isn't that cake gorgeous?

I almost feel like I ruined it a bit with my sloppy frosting job, but the taste of that ganache, with a touch of banana liqueur was so totally worth it.

Chocolate Banana (no) stud cake

I didn’t bother with the chocolate chip “studs” because I remembered a few of my fellow bakers saying the chips detracted from the soft texture of the cake. The rest of the Heavenly Cake Bakers’ group baked this cake last summer while I was in the middle of kitchen renovations.

Anyway, enough about catching up… What was this week’s cake selection? It was the mud turtle cupcakes. I asked my husband how he felt about turtle chocolates this weekend and he said “I don’t think I’ve ever had one. Remember, I didn’t really have a sweet tooth growing up.” Ah, well, we’ll fix that. 😉

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Cradle Cake

I just checked my “heavenly cakes” photo folder, and it looks like this is the 63rd cake I’ve made from Rose’s Heavenly cakes. That’s a lot of cake! This week’s selection was the “cradle cake”. I gather the name comes from the layer of dacquoise that lines the loaf pan, in a cradle shape, with a buttermilk butter cake batter nestled inside. My aunt and uncle were here for dinner and a visit on Friday night, so we took the opportunity to share this little cake with them. They made some commentary on the name, wondering aloud if it had a double meaning. Now that they’re grandparents, I think they want to be great-aunt and great-uncle, too. I think they’re already a pretty great set of aunt and uncle, and don’t need any help in that respect.

Yum!

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Génoise Très Café

Let me preface this post by saying: I can’t stand coffee. I like the smell (I have since I was a kid), but the taste is just awful. Even flavoured coffees just don’t do it for me. That being said, this week’s selection with the Heavenly Cake Bakers is a génoise with coffee three ways, and I’ll admit to having enjoyed it. There’s instant espresso powder in the génoise, then it’s brushed with a coffee liqueur syrup, and frosted with a whipped mocha ganache. Relatively simple ingredients, and a simple procedure, if you’ve been baking along. I think this is the 4th génoise we’ve made. It’s pretty similar to a chiffon, and we’ve made 3 of those, so far. Or at least, I have. Let’s bake!

Eggs, clarified butter, vanilla, sugar, flour, espresso powder, and a prepared pan. The eggs are from my aunt’s hens. I love baking with these!

Mise en Place

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Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake

It’s another Free Choice week with Rose’s Heavenly Cake bakers. Jay stayed home from work sick on Friday, and still wasn’t feeling like himself on Saturday, so I let him pick the cake for the week. I gave him a few choices from the list of cakes I have left to bake. Heavenly Coconut Seduction, Red Velvet, Apple Cinnamon Crumb Coffee cake and Sicilian Pistachio cake were all on the list. He stopped me at the Coffee Cake and said “That’s it. Don’t bother going any further.”

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White Velvet Butter Cake with Milk Chocolate Ganache

I decided to do like Faithy and make this week’s Heavenly Cake Bakers‘ selection from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes as cupcakes. It’s a white cake recipe that I’ve made many times before, and I absolutely love it. In fact, I made it for my cousin’s wedding cake a year and a half ago. It’s in The Cake Bible, as one of the handful of recipes that have the “Rose Factor” charts for scaling to just about any size and of pan. I’d never made a milk chocolate ganache though, so I was more than happy to bake this recipe again!

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Chocolate Bulls Eye

I’ve got another confession to make. Unfortunately, this one isn’t a tasty tip like IKEA chocolate. This one is that I had last week off work, and I still managed not to find the time to write up last week’s cake, from the Heavenly Cake Baker’s group. Last week’s cake was the cranberry crown cheesecake. After all my angst about trying to figure out what should be used for the base, I neglected to post about it after it was baked. In fact, after checking all of my ingredients for their sodium content, picking the lowest sodium cream cheese, lowest sodium sour cream, leaving out the salt, and calculating what the max sodium content might be if I cut it into 12 pieces (about 250 mg, if I did the math right), I neglected to take the cheesecake to my family’s Christmas celebration up at my uncle’s house (about a 1.5 hr drive from our place).

Some of you may remember that my grandfather’s been having health issues off and on over the last year, and the doctors have finally made it known that he should be on a very-low-to-no-sodium diet. Congestive heart failure can apparently be mitigated by eliminating sodium. Who knew? Anyway, he’s been turning down food left and right because “nothing tastes very good”, so I thought this cheesecake might go down well. Well, Christmas morning, at about 9ish, we were about an hour from home, and I said to my husband, “I forgot the cheesecake.” He offered to drop me off at the farm (my grandparents’ home – adjacent farm to my uncle’s) and turn around and go home for it, but that just didn’t seem worth it. When we walked in at my uncle’s place, after I greeted my cousins and removed boots, etc, my husband asked my aunt if I’d told her my sad news. She looked quite concerned, and when I told her I’d forgotten the cheesecake, her face dropped. “I only stayed awake all night thinking about cranberry cheesecake.”

Oh well. Here it is, before I forgot it in the fridge.

Cranberry Crown Cheesecake

Now let’s talk about this week’s cake.

Chocolate Bulls Eyes

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Chocolate Featherbed

This week is another free choice week, with the Heavenly Cake Bakers group. I’ve been using some of these free choice weeks to catch up with cakes I missed while our kitchen was out of commission. This week is one of those. The chocolate featherbed cake looks really fussy, and not at all like the sort of cake I normally expect to enjoy (not the sort of thing I’d order at a restaurant, for example), but when I looked at the components, and Rose’s description of it, I couldn’t imagine it not being good. And it is. Good, that is. Not not good.

Chocolate Featherbed

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Vanilla Bean Pound Cake Bites

This week’s selection from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes brings out the financier pan again. Given that I don’t have one of those, I use my trusty Wilton silicone brownie pan.

The recipe couldn’t be simpler, and since I refuse to spend longer typing it up than I did making it, here you go.

Mise en Place
Finished Cakelets!

As mentioned in the recipe, the batter curdled when mixing in the last of the egg white mixture, but it baked out to a tender even crumb in the end. These are full of little vanilla seeds, and full of vanilla and buttery flavours. I enjoyed them, though I think I’d prefer them with frosting. What’s cake without frosting? 🙂