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!
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):
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.
Continue reading “Catch up time with the Heavenly Cake Bakers”
Miette’s Tomboy
This is one of those cakes I’ve been looking forward to tasting since I received Rose’s Heavenly Cakes in the mail way back when. I always love the combination of vanilla and chocolate, and this cake certainly doesn’t disappoint.
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.
Continue reading “Orange Glow Chiffon (not Layer) cake”
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. 😉
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😉
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.
eatsndrinks.ca 