Well, the full title is “Marble in Reverse With Custom Rose Blend Ganache Glaze,” but I didn’t make the ganache glaze. So, it’s just Marble in Reverse cake. Or really, just marble cake, because it’s still a marble cake, even if most marble cakes are mostly vanilla, whereas this one is mostly chocolate. Why is that? Why are marble cakes vanilla with a little bit of chocolate thrown in? If you like chocolate, you probably prefer more chocolate over less, and if you don’t like chocolate, you probably want none of that chocolate business interfering with the purity of your vanilla. Then again, maybe you’re one of those indecisive types who just doesn’t have a favourite and doesn’t care that there’s more of one over the other, and just figure that variety is the spice of life, so stop with the philosophical discussions and just give me my damn cake so I can eat it!
Category: The Baking Bible
White Chocolate Bread & Cookie Strudel
Last weekend, Jay & I took our first trip to Las Vegas, taking advantage of the same seat sale that I used to go East back in September. 🙂 We celebrated our 9th anniversary on Tuesday at Cirque du Soleil, and we watched Penn and Teller from the second row, on Monday night. Sunday was the Grand Canyon.  So, this weekend was a fairly quiet weekend at home, and I caught up on my Rose’s Alpha Bakers baking.
Fudgy Pudgy Brownie Tart
First off, let me say a big Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canucks. Above is the view out the window above my baking counter – I really love this time of year. I hope you’ve been able to spend time with at least some of the people you love this weekend. 🙂 I had the chance to go home and visit my immediate family a couple of weeks ago, then friends had us over for turkey dinner yesterday, and I managed to have a good visit with my Grandma today. She hasn’t been doing so well lately, in a variety of ways, so I’m really grateful for the good days, right now.
I’m also really grateful for friends who were happy to share their Thanksgiving table with us. Yesterday afternoon, we went for a walk in the woods at an off-leash dog run area with our friends and their pup, then came back to their house full of wonderful holiday meal smells. My contribution to dinner was a batch of rolls (from The Bread Bible), along with a frozen lime meringue pie (from The Baking Bible). An aside: I realized while I was baking this weekend that I tend to keep (possibly creepily) close track of my friends’ tastes, because I really like planning and baking things for people that I know that they’ll enjoy. My friend Jimmy used to be part of the Thursday lunch BBQ crew at my office, before he went to work at another company. Every August, for the Thursday closest to his birthday, he used to bring in a couple of key lime pies that his mother made, because they were his absolute favourite. I offered to bring dessert yesterday, and was flipping through my mental inventory of what would be appreciated, and settled on the frozen lime meringue pie. It went over really well.
On to this week’s assigned baking from Rose’s Alpha Bakers… I sent a note to my friend Gilad the other day, pointing out that we were midway through October, and since this is the second-last month of his “year of desserts,” I let him make the choice of what he would get this month. He went for the one with brownie in the name, so this week’s dessert was his!
Banana Split Chiffon Cake
I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through this weekend’s Rose’s Alpha Bakers project, nor The Bread Bible bake-through assignment for the month. For one thing, I just got back late Friday night from visiting my parents back home in New Brunswick. For another, we had no “very ripe” bananas in the house, and the assigned recipes for the week each needed some “very ripe” banananana, and it’s pretty much impossible to buy bananananas ripe, let alone “very” ripe. Finally, I started getting a sore throat on Friday morning, and it had developed into a full blown cold by Saturday morning, along with full body aches, chills, and general misery. No fever, though, so, yay? I basically spent Saturday on the couch, got some reasonably good sleep on Saturday night, and felt marginally better by Sunday morning. Well better enough to bake, anyway, given that neither recipe was more than a couple of pages long, and neither involved a crazy number of components or anything super complicated. Continue reading “Banana Split Chiffon Cake”
Mud Turtle Pie
What’s a mud turtle pie, aside from this week’s recipe from Rose’s Alpha Bakers? It’s a pecan pie, with chocolate on top. Think a turtle candy, but the caramel’s a little less chewy. I went with the milk chocolate ganache, rather than the dark option. And I made the ganache long before making any of the rest of the pie. I also made 2 pies, since, as someone pointed out recently, it’s really not that much more work than one pie. I had some pie dough in the freezer, so I just doubled the other parts of the recipe, so that I could leave one at home for Jay while I’m away visiting family this week, and take one into work, sort of in part as a thank you for my co-worker bringing in a rhubarb custard pie on Friday.
Honey Cake
Happy Rosh Hashanah! Apologies that I’m a little late on that wish. 🙂 I thought that this week’s scheduled recipe from the “Rose’s Alpha Bakers” project would be a good one to give to Gilad for this month’s baked treat from last year’s Movember charity auction. I sent him a quick note, and asked how he would feel about honey cake. The answer was “Sounds good. Just in time for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year) ;)” Perfect, I figure. After a little help from Evil Cake Lady, I figured out that the only thing I didn’t have on hand was oranges for juicing, so I picked those up on the way home after the gym on Thursday night, then baked this on Friday morning. This is a super quick and easy recipe, and it smelled amazing.
Pepparkakors
This week, the Baking Bible bake-through project is working on something that sounds (to me) Dutch, but tastes like a gingersnap. It’s definitely not pepernoten. It’s definitely not speculaas. It’s definitely not gingerbread. Â Quite gingery, with the other spices fading a bit into the background as supporting actors.
Luscious Apple Pie & Basic Hearth Bread
What was it I was supposed to be blogging about again? Was it one of the two pecan pies I made yesterday (one of which is for a friend’s son’s birthday, and the other because Jay wanted it)?
The grape pie I made on Sunday?
No, wait, it was the apple pie that I made on Saturday, and the “basic hearth bread” that I started on Friday and finished on Saturday.
Flaky Cream Cheese Scones
I loaded up this page to write up the post, then went to my google photos account to download my pictures, because my computer is refusing to recognize that I’ve plugged in my phone tonight. Then Google photos asked me if I wanted it to show me memories from this week in past years, and I clicked on it, and that was a mistake, because now I’m looking at pictures of Grandpa, who passed away two years ago last Thursday.
Um. Scones. I made them. They were, in fact, quick and easy. I skipped the dried fruit (cranberries or blueberries) because I was feeling lazy and didn’t have any on hand. There were 8 of them. Sometime between Friday’s lunch and Monday morning’s breakfast, they all disappeared. I can’t fathom where they might have gone. Jay managed to get one of them before they all disappeared. He said they were biscuit-like. I guess that’s good?
Buttered scones for tea. Or maybe just buttered scones for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. I guess mid-afternoon snack could otherwise be known as “tea”. Yup, I’m a lumberjack, and I’m ok.
Woody’s Black and White Brownies
Busy weekend! I actually made these brownies twice – once on Friday morning, minus the toppings (and without the cream cheese — oops!) and once on Sunday afternoon (today). As I write, the second batch is on its last round of cooling in the fridge. Hopefully I’ll write this up quickly enough that I can go grab a piece before it’s time for bed. On Thursday, I made a vague plan to make these brownies on Friday, for my monthly baking delivery to my friend Gilad. Trouble was, I was meeting my husband for lunch, near where Gilad now works, and I didn’t have all the ingredients I needed. I was primarily missing chocolate. You know, the important part of a brownie. Anyway, long story short, after I got home from a grocery run, and looked more closely at the recipe, I knew there was no way I’d get all the components made in one morning. I was lucky to have just the brownies cool enough to put in a container by lunch! I figured it wouldn’t make any difference to my friend, though, and he’d be happy with the brownies on their own. So, this post is a combination of pictures from the first batch, which I made on Friday, and the second batch, which was made today.
What did I do in between? Super mini 16 year high school reunion, after attending a concert at the Jackson-Triggs winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
eatsndrinks.ca 