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!
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.”
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!
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.
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.
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 PlaceFinished 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? 🙂
This week’s heavenly cake bakers selection is from the “quick and easy” list, so this is going to be a “quick and easy” post for a “quick and easy” cake. It’s called chocolate velvet fudge cake, and I’d almost be inclined to call it a chocolate pound cake. Quite dense, not dry, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly moist either, and yes, kind of fudge like.
The “Lemon Canadian Crown” is a frozen lemon dessert. Its name apparently comes from the fact that the recipe is from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Canadian in-laws. I figured since it has “Canadian” in the name, it was my national duty to make this week’s cake, as the only Canadian participant that I’m aware of in the Heavenly Cake Bakers group.
The cake is somewhat similar to a baked Alaska, in the sense that it’s a frozen dessert, with a sponge cake base, topped with meringue and baked to brown the meringue. There, the similarities end.
Like many, I wondered how this week’s heavenly cake bakers selection would work. It seems an odd combination of flavours — chocolate, black raspberry liqueur, and peanut butter. Chocolate and peanut butter, I get, completely, but add black raspberry into the mix? That being said, when Marie, our host, likened it to a peanut butter and jam sandwich with chocolate bread, it clicked.
When I went looking for Chambord at the LCBO, I knew I only needed a couple of tablespoons of the stuff. There was no way I was about to pay $40+ for a big bottle of Chambord when I only needed two tablespoons. We looked around for anything that we figured would work well with peanut butter and chocolate. We determined that it pretty much had to be a berry flavour. My husband spotted this:
Framboise
At $15 a bottle, I was willing to give this Framboise (raspberry dessert wine) a shot. Plus, hey, it’s from just down the highway, instead of coming across the ocean, which I’m always in favour of. When the cashier asked if we’d tried it before, I replied that we hadn’t, and she informed me that it was really flavourful. “Perfect!”
Just a quick note to my fellow bakers: the deadline for the Movember manly cupcake challenge at C&C Cakery has been pushed back a day, so you have until end of day on Sunday to enter. Go see the post here. Someone go bake some bacon cupcakes. 🙂
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