As the summer is over, so is my biweekly cake experiment. I did pretty well, ending up short only one cake. In fact, one could say that I completed all the cakes, since I did make a cake for Jenn's birthday. It's a chocolate cake, hollowed out to form a bowl and filled with chocolate mousse. The crumbs from the middle are then toasted and sprinkled on top, and it's finished off with a chocolate glaze. So, no small feat, but I've made it a few times before and therefore figured it didn't really count.
My final cake, Boca Negra (also from Baking with Julia), doesn't have any pictures since we had to eat it in a hurry to get to The Dark Knight. It's basically an intense chocolate cake, nearly flourless, and laced with bourbon. It's baked in a water bath, and when it first came out of the oven the insides ran out like a lava cake. But chilled, it became dense and fudgy. It's served with a bourbon-white chocolate cream.
I found the bourbon taste a bit too harsh--which probably has more to do with my choice of Jim Beam (the cheapest) instead of something a bit more, well, delicious. The cake was still delicious though, but it's very intense (there's 3/4 lb of bittersweet in the cake and the same of white in the cream) so it's slow to get eaten. But I'd make it again, with classier booze, and a little time to sit out of the oven, for sure.
Now, this is the wrap up of the summer of the cake aspect of my blog. But I'm going to continue to write about my food adventures here, including any cakes I might make. There are a few exciting plans in the future--look forward to my fist installment as a Daring Baker at the end of this month.
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I love fancy cakes. I love baking in general, but there’s something about a beautiful layer cake that just makes my heart sing. I love to make cakes, and decorate them, and, of course, eat them. But it has seemed lately that every time I look at a new recipe, I’m required to have an array of fancy equipment I don’t, and don’t desire to, own. I don’t even own an electric mixer, handheld or not, which now seems to be a requirement even for mixing batter. But though my eggbeater died on the last buttercream I made, I do, however own two good-sized whisks, and a sufficient set of muscles in my whisking arm.
It’s not that I think that using an electric mixer is cheating. I have had enough days trying to cream cold butter or make Italian meringue to begin coveting others’ KitchenAids. But I also know, as do all of you who devoured your mother’s and grandmother’s patiently handbeaten cakes in the days before this kind of equipment became standard, that such tools are far from required to make delicious and beautiful food. Similarly, I’ve lately learned to live without a candy thermometer, pastry bags and decorating tips, an array of baking pans, a microwave, and other accessories that I am parted with now that I live away from home.
So as a little bit of a challenge to myself, and a small act of resistance against today’s mechanized baking establishment, I’m going to make one cake every two weeks for the whole summer of 2008. If it all goes well, I might continue when I’m back to school in the fall. These cakes must be cakes I have never made before, and they must require at least two parts: cake and frosting (or cake and mousse or whatnot). They must be layer cakes, not cupcakes or sheet cakes. And they must be beautiful.
Daring Bakers
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