Catalan Salt Pinch Cake

Don’t let the title fool you. The cake I made this past weekend, from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes, has nothing to do with salt. In fact, there’s no salt in it. There’s a lot of egg in it, but also a lot of almond, and a lot of air! I’d been ignoring this cake for a while (the rest of the Heavenly Cake Bakers baked it back in November 2009). My reluctance to bake it can be attributed to 2 things: The name, and the lack of frosting. I shouldn’t have passed it up. It’s easy to make (though time consuming) if you let your mixer do the work.

I figured it was time I made this cake, in my quest to bake my way through Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. I’m now only one cake away from completing the sponge cake chapter, and since the white gold passion génoise is on the menu for 2 weeks from now, I can finish at least one chapter this month!

Cooled, and a bit deflated, but delicious

Continue reading “Catalan Salt Pinch Cake” →

Plum Round Ingots

Or should I say Apricot round ingots? Plums aren’t quite in season yet here, so I swapped in apricots in their place for this week’s cake. I haven’t baked much of anything in a few weeks, unless you count bread or chocolate chip cookies. We’ve been busy with other things lately (pictures at the end of this post). My other excuse is that I’ve already baked most of the cakes that the group playing catch up was doing these past few weeks. Not to say those cakes wouldn’t be worth making again, I just haven’t had time. Here’s my link to the whipped cream cheesecake. Here’s the one for the Chocolate Tomato Cake. I think I already posted my link for the Lemon Canadian Crown in one of my previous posts.

Enough excuses, let’s bake.

Continue reading “Plum Round Ingots” →

Southern Coconut Cake

So, as some of you guessed by my “birthday pie” post, it was my birthday on Thursday. I brought the strawberry pie to a regular Thursday barbecue a group of us have at work during the summer, then we had some of the same people (plus a few others and spouses) over on Saturday night for what was supposed to be smores, beer, and the last fire in our old fire pit. It rained and thunder stormed Saturday night, so instead we sat around our dining room table and played 10 person Uno. Luckily, I had a backup plan for the smores, and made myself a birthday cake. This is it:

Southern Coconut Cake

I read the note preceding the recipe for the Southern (Manhattan) Coconut Cake, and decided to eliminate the “(Manhattan)” and go all the way Southern with seven minute frosting instead of buttercream. Hardly anything is “too sweet” for my tastes. 🙂 I used a recipe from the Pillsbury Cookbook. Everyone loved it. Even people who normally don’t go for cake finished off their pieces. I didn’t bother dusting it with grated coconut because of my own personal tastes. I like the flavour of coconut, but the texture isn’t my favourite, so this was perfect for me.

By the way, here’s my post for the Lemon Canadian Crown that the other heavenly cake bakers made this past weekend. Apologies for not posting on Monday, but we took a vacation day yesterday, so it felt more like Saturday than Monday, and I forgot to write up this post.

Continue reading “Southern Coconut Cake” →

Red Fruit Shortcake

This week, the heavenly cake bakers catch-up group is making the red fruit shortcake. I can kind of see where Mendy’s coming from when he says this isn’t much of a challenge, since it’s a genoise from another recipe, topped with fruit, and maybe some meringues crisps or whipped dairy of some sort. That being said, I made it anyway, since I have lots of strawberries in my garden, just looking for an excuse to be used. Plus, my shed’s finally finished, so I don’t have that as an excuse not to bake any more.

Strawberry Patch

Continue reading “Red Fruit Shortcake” →

Mud Turtle Cupcakes

Just a quick post with a link to my mud turtle cupcakes from back in February. No time to bake this weekend, as my immediate family was up from NB visiting my grandparents, so I headed out there for a visit, since otherwise I wouldn’t have seen them this trip. I was also busy filling my shed with gardening tools. Pictures of that and updates on the gardens coming soon. 🙂

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!

Continue reading “Chocolate Butter Cupcakes” →

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!

Continue reading “Chocolate Raspberry Trifle” →

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!