Yule Log

This month's challenge is brought to us by the adventurous Hilda from Saffron and Blueberry and Marion from Il en Faut Peu Pour Etre Heureux.
They have chosen a French Yule Log by Flore from Florilege Gourmand

I make Julia Child's traditional Bûche de Noël for Christmas every year, but this year I took a break to make this alternative "cream dessert" yule log. It's a terrifying assembly of six parts: dacquoise, ganache, praline, mousse, creme brulee, and icing. The individual parts weren't all that difficult to make, but I learned several important things:

1. parchment paper is not overrated
2. let things cool before you take them out of the pan
3. make sure you have milk before you start cooking

Despite these little mishaps, the end result was delicious and artfully strata-like (pardon the slightly fuzzy photo):


And since no yule log for me is complete without meringue mushrooms, I took the leftover egg whites and whipped up a batch of simple meringues--1 cup sugar to 4 egg whites. You just pipe mounds for the caps and rods for the stems, hollow out the tops a little and use some extra chocolate icing to stick them together. Perfect!


I made only one little modification to the recipe: hazelnut instead of almond dacquoise. You can find the recipe along with many variations here.

Caramel Cake

For November's Daring Bakers, I was back in my home territory of Cake. And as I have a particular fondness of caramelized sugar, I was thrilled at the prospect of making three different caramel things.


For the caramel cake and frosting, you make a caramel syrup, which you then add to what would otherwise be an ordinary butter cake and frosting. Well, the frosting uses brown butter, which is one of my favorite flavors, so perhaps not so ordinary. The result of all of this was an exquisitely colored and flavored cake with a fine crumb and a delicate texture, with a crisp, caramelized crust. The frosting tasted so rich and robust from the brown butter, and had a uniquely sticky texture from the addition of the caramel.

I also got to inaugurate my wonderful cake stand, birthday present from Allie!

The second, optional part of the challenge was to make vanilla bean caramels. But, without a candy thermometer, relying on the cold water tests, I ended up rather with vanilla bean toffee. It's delicious, but I had to break it up with a hammer. Oh well.

This fabulous recipe came to us from Shuna Fish Lydon and can be found here. Her DB blog can be found at http://eggbeater.typepad.com. The caramels came from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich.

This challenge was hosted by Dolores with help from Alex, Jenny, and Natalie.

DB Take Two

It’s time for another Daring Bakers challenge! For October, our challenge was to make pizza. Specifically, we had to toss the dough to stretch it out. I make pizza quite often, but I’ve never been one hundred percent happy with my dough, so I was excited to try a new recipe. The recipe we were given is interesting in that it is yeasted, but you don’t let the dough rise—just rest overnight in the fridge. It was super simple to make, didn’t take too much kneading, and seemed like it would be good with partially whole wheat flour, too. When I went to make the first pizza, I found the dough almost too stretchy. I was worried when tossing it that it would just break apart. But it actually worked pretty well, as you can see.

I decided to make a different sort of pizza, too—rosemary potato. First, I roasted ¼ inch slices of red potato with olive oil, garlic, and rosemary, until they were tender. Then I spread the pizza with a simple garlic cream sauce, topped it with the roasted potatoes and garlic, sprinkled it with mozzarella, parmesan, and a bit more rosemary. The result was fantastic. Allie often worries about such pizzas as not being flavorful enough, but this one, she assured me, was nothing like that.

The crust, too, was great. It wasn’t too thin in the middle, and it was perfectly crisp but not tough on the bottom and chewy on top. Though the Daring bakers encouraged us to use only three to four toppings including sauce and cheese, I didn’t feel that the crust was overwhelmed at all. Rather, the whole pizza seemed perfectly balanced.

I love to cook, as you all know, and I’m good at it, but there are times, and making this pizza was one of them, when I feel talented. It’s a little bit bizarre. I don’t mean to be falsely modest, or anything, but it really isn’t all the time when I feel like this is, I don’t know, a gift?

Anyway, self-praise aside, the second pizza I made was equally good. Well, I didn’t actually have any of it, since I made it for a late dinner for my roommates when I had already eaten, but they assured me that it was “basically the most delicious pizza ever.” A couple of days ago, I poured a can of whole tomatoes into a pan with a bunch of garlic and rosemary and roasted it in the oven for an hour or so. So I took that sauce and put it on the pizza along with mozzarella, parmesan, green peppers, red onion, and garlic (usually my favorite pizza combination).

I’m not sure if I’ve quite reached the amazing level of Rudy’s, in Bellingham, where we recently gorged ourselves on fantastic pizza and cheap beer (though unfortunately they’ve switched from Mr. Pibb to Dr. Pepper), but I’m getting really close. Next time, I’ll use this recipe with a little less than half whole wheat flour, and see if I can retain the perfect texture and stretchiness with the addition of some actual nutrients.

BASIC PIZZA DOUGH
Original recipe taken from “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” by Peter Reinhart.

Makes 6 pizza crusts (about 9-12 inches/23-30 cm in diameter).

Ingredients:
4 1/2 Cups Unbleached high-gluten (%14) bread flour or all purpose flour, chilled

1 3/4 Tsp Salt
1 Tsp Instant yeast
1/4 Cup Olive oil
1 3/4 Cups Water, ice cold (40° F/4.5° C)
1 Tb sugar
Semolina/durum flour or cornmeal for dusting

1. Mix together the flour, salt and instant yeast in a big bowl. Add the oil, sugar and cold water and mix well in order to form a sticky ball of dough. On a clean surface, knead for about 5-7 minutes, until the dough is smooth and the ingredients are homogeneously distributed. If it is too wet, add a little flour (not too much, though) and if it is too dry add 1 or 2 teaspoons extra water.

2. With the help of a metal or plastic dough scraper, cut the dough into 6 equal pieces (or fewer if you want to make larger pizzas). Make sure your hands are dry and then flour them. Gently round each piece into a ball. Line a jelly pan with baking paper/parchment. Lightly oil the paper. Transfer the dough balls to the lined jelly pan and mist them generously with spray oil. Slip the pan into plastic bag or enclose in plastic food wrap. Put the pan into the refrigerator and let the dough rest overnight or for up to three days.

3. On the day you plan to eat pizza, exactly 2 hours before you make it, remove the desired number of dough balls from the refrigerator. Dust the counter with flour and spray lightly with oil. Place the dough balls on a floured surface and sprinkle them with flour. Dust your hands with flour and delicately press the dough into disks about 1/2 inch/1.3 cm thick and 5 inches/12.7 cm in diameter. Sprinkle with flour and mist with oil. Loosely cover the dough rounds with plastic wrap and then allow to rest for 2 hours.

4. At least 45 minutes before making the pizza, place a baking stone on the lower third of the oven. Preheat the oven as hot as possible (500° F/260° C). if you don’t have a baking stone, just preheat the oven.

5. Generously sprinkle the back of a jelly pan with semolina/durum flour or cornmeal. Flour your hands (palms, backs and knuckles). Take 1 piece of dough by lifting it with a pastry scraper. Lay the dough across your fists in a very delicate way and carefully stretch it by bouncing it in a circular motion on your hands, and by giving it a little stretch with each bounce. Once the dough has expanded outward, move to a full toss.

6. When the dough has the shape you want (about 9-12 inches/23-30 cm in diameter - for a 6 ounces/180g piece of dough), place it on the back of the jelly pan, making sure there is enough semolina/durum flour or cornmeal to allow it to slide and not stick to the pan. Lightly top it with sweet or savory toppings of your choice.

7. Slide the garnished pizza onto the stone in the oven or bake directly on the jelly pan. Close the door and bake for about 10-12 minutes. Take the pizza out of the oven and transfer it to a cutting board or your plate. In order to allow the cheese to set a little, wait 3-5 minutes before slicing or serving.

Septemeber Daring Bakers

It is with much joy that I post for you my first ever Daring Bakers challenge. The Daring Bakers are a groovy online collection of bakers who all make the same recipe once per month. The challenge is issued at the beginning of the month, and a deadline is set so everyone can post and reveal the challenge on the same date. That date would be today.

This month's challenge was the first ever gluten-free challenge: lavash. Well, I didn't actually make the gluten-free version, as we were given a choice. Lavash is basically a slightly leavened flatbread, a little like a pita but less puffy. I had no troubles with the recipe, it was very straightforward and yielded delicious crackers--crispy around the edges but a bit soft and chewy, perfect for serving with hummus (see the second part of this entry).

The finished crackers:

The recipe as I made it:

* 1 cup all-purpose flour
* 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
* 1/2 tsp salt
* 1/2 tsp instant yeast
* 1 Tb sugar
* 1 Tb vegetable oil
* 1/3 to 1/2 cup + 2 Tb (3 to 4 oz) water, at room temperature
* Sesame seeds

1. Dissolve the yeast with the sugar and salt in 2Tb of the water. In a mixing bowl, stir together the flours, make a well, and add the yeast mixture and just enough water to bring everything together into a ball. You may not need the full 1/2 cup of water, but be prepared to use it all if needed.

2. Sprinkle some flour on the counter and transfer the dough to the counter. Knead for about 10 minutes, or until the ingredients are evenly distributed. Lightly oil a bowl and transfer the dough to the bowl, rolling it around to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap.

3. Ferment at room temperature for 90 minutes, or until the dough doubles in size. (You can also retard the dough overnight in the refrigerator immediately after kneading or mixing).

4. Mist the counter lightly with spray oil and transfer the dough to the counter. Press the dough into a square with your hand and dust the top of the dough lightly with flour. Roll it out with a rolling pin into a paper thin sheet about 15 inches by 12 inches. You may have to stop from time to time so that the gluten can relax. At these times, lift the dough from the counter and wave it a little, and then lay it back down. Cover it with a towel or plastic wrap while it relaxes. When it is the desired thinness, let the dough relax for 5 minutes. Grease a baking sheet and transfer the dough to it. If it overlaps the edge of the pan, snip off the excess with scissors.

5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit with the oven rack on the middle shelf. Mist the top of the dough with water and sprinkle a covering of sesame seeds over the dough.

5. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the crackers begin to brown evenly across the top.

6. When the crackers are baked, remove the pan from the oven and let them cool in the pan for about 10 minutes. Snap off shards and serve.

The second part of the challenge was to make a topping for the crackers, something vegan and gluten-free. Now, one of my many flaws is that I don't really like condiments. Salad dressing, mayonnaise, most salsas and dips, many chutneys and relishes. I've been getting much better lately, but still, my go-to dip, which I will always enjoy, is hummus.

I wanted to do something a little different, a little more adventuresome, since this is supposed to be a challenge after all. So I decided to make SPROUTED hummus. For many of you, the word "sprouted" probably brings to mind some dank food co-op that smells of brewer's yeast and an excess of B.O. And while I certainly understand from whence that idea has arisen, I urge you all to rethink. Sprouts, to me, are a way to make totally insipid dried grains and pulses into delicious, nutty, fresh-tasting morsels.

I've never sprouted chickpeas before, so I just did what I do when I sprout anything else--soak them overnight, then drain them and leave them in a strainer covered by a damp paper towel. Make sure you redampen the towel a few times per day, and in a few days, they should have little srpouts. And lo and behold, they actual began to taste a bit like the most amazing food on earth (if you've never driven out to a garbanzo field in June and eaten green garbs off the vines, start planning your trip now).

The beans did something a little funny. They got soft, and then, they started getting hard again. I ended up peeling off the soft skins and was left with medium-hard beans and spouts. They ground up well, though, and with my normal additions (lemon, salt, oil, garlic) turned into a slightly "greener" tasting hummus.



As the final touch, I spread the hummus on a plate as is (I believe) traditional, topped it with za'atar and a sprinkling of sumac (a dried red berry that's kind of sour tasting). It matched the lavash perfectly. Success!

The finished products:


Angie's Sprouted Hummus

1/2 cup chickpeas
5 cloves garlic
1 tsp olive oil
juice from 1/2 a lemon
salt

Sprout and peel the chickpeas. Grind in a blender or food processor along with the olive oil, lemon, and garlic. Salt to taste. Serve drizzled with oil and sprinkled with za'atar and sumac.

Za'atar
Grind with a mortar and pestle equal quantities of thyme, oregano, sesame seeds, and kosher salt. The final mixture should be evenly combined but not ground to a paste.

Wrap-up

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.

Cake 6: Hazelnut

Last February, I had a chance to make several visits to Dilettantes, a chocolate shop and dessert restaurant on Capitol Hill in Seattle. At least once when I was there, I got what they called a Japonaise. Usually, Japonaise refers to layers of buttercream sandwiched between discs of meringue. However, their Japonaise included a nut cake and dacquoise (nut meringue) sandwiched with buttercream. That is the cake I tried to recreate or reinvent in this installment.

I was also influenced by the Julia Child-Martha Stewart wedding cake in (the marvelous) Baking with Julia. It’s a dense almond cake with a rum buttercream and almond dacquoise between the layers. I chose to make my cake with hazelnuts, because it is the most delicious nut, and the most beloved of my roommates. For the cake, I used another recipe from Baking With Julia, the Hazelnut Baby Loaves, making whatever odd ratio of the recipe that I determined would make one stout 8-inch layer. I think I added some extra hazelnuts, too.

For the dacquoise, I simply substituted hazelnuts for almonds in the wedding cake recipe. I made three egg whites worth since I was using three yolks in the frosting. The recipe says to bake the meringues for seven hours. As mine were somewhat smaller, I figured it wouldn’t take nearly that long. But I really should have baked them for longer. I like my meringues on step shy of completely dry, so that there’s a bit of a chewy exterior. But for the disc, I really wanted a totally light and crisp layer. That I did not get. I also had trouble getting the disc off the sheet (which probably would have been easier had I baked it more) since I don’t use parchment paper.

In the end, the fragmented and chewy layer seemed to just meld into the layers of buttercream on either side. It wasn’t exactly the fantasy of contrasting textures I had imagined, but it was just fine. The buttercream itself was perfect—a custard made from milk that had been boiled and steeped with hazelnuts combined with soft butter. I didn’t use the full amount of butter from the recipe (substituting hazelnuts for the pistachios here), but rather stopped when I got to the point where I thought it tasted right. I probably used about 2/3 of the specified amount (this tends to be how much I use for most recipes).

The hazelnut taste was strong in each aspect, but not overwhelming. This is definitely a cake I will try again, with a few changes. I might want to strain the milk for the frosting once the hazelnut flavor has steeped for a smoother frosting, and of course next time I’ll go for a crisper meringue.

Cake 5: Dobostorte

I’m a bit behind on my cake making, but should get back on track in the next week. We’re up to Cake Number 5—I’ve begun to make half cakes in order to ensure they’re all eaten before the next cake is baked. So here is my splendid, seven-layer, half-a-dobostorte.

Dobostorte was always a mythical cake to me; something my mother learned how to make from a woman who had had four heart attacks. But now seemed as good a time as any to give it a try. It’s seven layers of white cake sandwiched with a rich chocolate cream, and topped with a layer of caramel.

I used a recipe from epicurious to make the filling. It consists to beaten egg yolks, a sugar syrup, butter, and chocolate. I’d never before made an icing like this, and I found that it yielded a much softer, creamier buttercream than egg whites do. I didn’t add quite the full amount of butter either, stopping when I felt the cream was just beginning to taste buttery. In my mind, the focus should be chocolate, not butter, and though I want the richness of butter, it shouldn’t be the main flavor.

I wasn’t quite as happy with the cake. I used the recipe form the Time Life Cooking of the Austrian Empire book, but I found the layers were too thin. I think dobostorte should be an impressive, towering cake—you feel a little cheated when your seven layers only give you a couple of inches. The layers weren’t leavened at all, not by baking powder or by beaten eggs; rather, the batter was like a sugar cookie dough. I spread the batter into 8” circles on a baking pan (expect for the last one, which was an 8” semi circle, to yield the requisite 7 layers). They came out more as thin, slightly crisp cookie-like layers, only about an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick, when I was hoping for around three-quarters.

The layers are assembled with the chocolate cream sandwiched in between, but the top layer is first glazed with caramel. I was a bit late in marking the cake into wedges while the caramel was still soft, so it tended to crack when the cake was cut. The top layer, being less flexible than the others, also tended to separate when you bit into the cake, but the flavors were perfect. Even the crispness of the layers worked well, though I would have preferred something a little lighter of offset the richness of the cream. Next time, I’ll try using the epicurious recipe for the cake as well.

Cake 4: St. Honore Cake

My most recent cake was a bit of a departure from my usual layer cakes. I decided to make St. Honoré Cake, so named for the patron saint of bakers. It consists of puff pastry toped with circles of choux paste as a base, filled with a pastry cream and topped with caramel-dipped cream puffs and whipped cream.

The puff pastry takes the longest, but it’s not actually too difficult. A slab of butter is sealed in the pastry, then the packages is rolled out, folded, and chilled. This process is repeated several times so the butter is distributed in fine layers throughout the pastry, which is what makes is rise and have such a light, flaky texture. I enjoyed working with it, especially as I finally succeeded in rolling something out into a regular, rectangular shape. (The trick is to begin by pressing, not rolling, evenly along the length of the dough.)

The choux pastry and pastry cream both came together without much effort—it takes bit of elbow grease to beat the eggs into the choux pastry, but my puffs weren’t any the worse for the still slightly lumpy batter. When it came time to bake the cake, I made the mistake of pressing on the sides of the puff pastry round to make it more even, which glues the layers together and keep them from puffing up. My cake recovered admirably, though, and rose quite grandly, I thought.

The most difficult part of this cake was definitely the caramelized cream puffs. My first trouble came trying to fill them. Without an actually pastry bag and tip, my bag-with-the-corner-cut-off stand-in was too flaccid to force the cream into the tiny openings in the bottom of the puffs. I solved this by cutting larger holes in the bottoms, but this created another problem, that of the cream leaking out into the caramel as they were being dipped.

That, however, didn’t end up being a major problem. It two knives, two pots, a couple of burns, and quite a lot of time, but eventually they all got dipped. I stuck a skewer into the bottom, then tipped the pot with the other hand to pool the caramel, swirled the cream puff around and then plopped in on a pan to harden.

I made half of the recipe found here, to make 1 8” cake (and 8” circle is about half the area of an 11” circle). That was about twice the amount of puff pastry needed (the rest turned into tasty palmiers) and made 15 or so extra cream puffs. The pastry cream was the perfect amount to fill the cake and all the puffs, and the caramel was just right too.

And the finished product, was, well, fabulous. I’m a real sucker for contrasting textures, and this cake is perfect for that. The puff is so light and flaky and just falls apart in your mouth, whereas the choux pastry is a little springier, with a little more resistance. Top that with a perfectly smooth pastry cream, buoyed by gelatin so it’s not too runny—it doesn’t run off the sides of the slices, but it’s still absolutely creamy. And then finish that off with crisp, crackly caramel enrobing a dollop of the same cream encased in pastry, alternating with whipped cream. And that’s just the texture.

The flavors are wonderful too. Neither the choux pastry nor the puff pastry is at all sweetened, so the cream never seems cloying. The richness and depth of the caramel flavor tempers its sweetness, and the whipped cream is only lightly sweetened so it balances, rather than competes with, the pastry cream. The pastry cream is flavored only by vanilla, which again cuts its sweetness. This balance, of flavor and texture, makes the many part construction of the cake well worth all the effort.

Catch-Up

Well, it may have been a time since I’ve updated this blog, but I am nearly on schedule with making the cakes. For May 18-31, I made another foray into Southern baking. My original plan had been to do something a bit more exotic—there’s a cake on epicurious that blends chocolate with wasabi, and though it made my roommates cringe, I was up for the risks. However, I ended up perusing an old issue of Gourmet which focused on Southern cooking, and was taken by the Mile High Chocolate Cake.

It was superb. Relatively quick and simple; it’s the perfect birthday or celebration cake for someone who wants a very chocolatey cake but one that’s light enough so you eat an entire satisfying slice. The cake is rich but the texture is delicate. The sour cream makes it moist and but still sturdy enough to hold up to the rich frosting. The cake comes together easily, and doesn’t fall apart when you slice it into layers. The layers came out of the pans with little muffin tops, but were tall enough to split even with the tops cut off.

The frosting, another butter roux icing, was similarly delicious. It ended up quite different from the vanilla frosting from the red velvet cake. In this frosting, the sugar is cooked with the milk, rather than being creamed with the butter. This may have helped the frosting be less sticky and more uniform than the red velvet icing. Although this icing was terrific, it didn’t have the pillowy lightness I had been expecting after the previous cake. I think that was mainly due to the chocolate—there’s so much in the icing that it totally dominates the other elements. Except the butter. I might cut back on that next time.

The icing was excellent, and went well with the cake—as I said before, it’s the perfect chocolate-lover’s cake. But I was hoping for more of a light, fluffy foil to the intensity of the cake. Next time, I will play around with adding chocolate to the red velvet cake icing.

For June 1-14, I went a different direction, opting for a coconut-lime-ginger cake. I’m not a big fan of coconut, but as the coconut was just on the outside of the cake, I opted simply to leave it out. The cake consisted of vanilla buttermilk layers sandwiched with a lime ginger curd and finished with a marshmallow frosting. I’m a big fan of citrus curd, but I’d never made it before. I didn’t have any trouble with the curd for this recipe, but I think I must have grated some of the lime peel a bit too far into the pith, as I found the curd had a bit of a bitter undertone. I added a bit extra sugar to counterbalance this.

I also found that the ginger flavor didn’t come out at all. I love ginger (I’ve been known to eat pieces raw and plain) and I could have done with at least four times the tablespoon specified in the recipe. Still, the curd was delicious as a plain lime curd.

The cake layers were moist and tender, but wholly unremarkable. Allie liked them, but I would be unlikely to use them in another cake. I found that, as with many buttermilk cakes (or rather, cakes leavened with baking soda) that aren’t chocolate, there was a mild soda after-tone, which diminished when the layers were combined with the other elements.

The marshmallow frosting didn’t work out as well. Firstly, I broke the cardinal rule of meringue-type icings, and made it on a rainy day. The frosting is whipped over hot water, and I think I may have violated the second cardinal rule by allowing the water to touch the bottom of the bowl at points. The frosting turned out well, but a lot was crystallized in the bottom of the bowl. It was fluffy and sweet but not cloyingly so. Especially when paired with the tart lime curd, it perfectly balanced the flavors in the cake.

Allie's camera was on loan, so I had to take a picture with the camera on my computer. Not bad, eh?

However, after a short time, the top of the frosting hardened into a crust, though the underside stayed soft. Though I found the cake to be delicious, perhaps not my favorite, but still good, my roommates were less impressed, and therefore it has hung around the house for longer than it should have. As time passed, the frosting completely hardened into a shell that cracked off the cake when cut. It still continued to taste good, even with this bizarre change in texture.

All in all, it wasn’t exactly the greatest success, but far from a failure. We’ll see if I manage to catch up on cakes in the next month or so. I should have had one done last weekend, and I’m hoping to get it done this weekend instead. But when I do get it done, I’ll try tpo get it up a little more promptly!

1 (May 4-17): Red Velvet

I had never before in my life had red velvet cake. It always seemed tawdry to me, the pastry equivalent of a maraschino cherry. But after reading "A Lesbian Appetite," a story from Dorothy Allison's book Trash, where Allison describes her sister making the cake for each of her new love interests, the cake began to have some appeal. For a while, I only thought about making Red Velvet cake. I looked a recipes, tried to bring it up in conversation, imagined a rainbow of velvet cakes: green velvet, orange velvet. But actually making a cake and just pouring a bottle of red dye into it? Be serious.

But red velvet stuck around in my mind, and I finally decided I did want to make it. But there's hardly an appropriate opportunity to make this scarlet letter of cakes. Every time I make a cake for my roommates, they demand chocolate. But I had only just made a chocolate cake a week or so ago, and summer fruit isn't yet in season, and I wasn't in the mood for something citrus. Red velvet cake had just a bit of chocolate in it, enough to ground the flavor and the color, but it's hardly a chocolate cake, and so it seemed perfect.

It also seems rather fitting beginning to my summer of cakes with a cake that reaches into my southern heritage; a cake that is, to me, unpretentious and homey, if a little bit tacky. And did I say tacky? The cake I chose to make called for six tablespoons of red dye instead of the two I was expecting. To be fair, the recipe was for a three layer cake and so, with only two cake pans, I made 2/3 of the recipe. Still, I'd only bought one bottle of dye, so I ended up using only half the required amount. It came out a murkier burgundy than I imagine the traditional (2-bottle) crimson would be.
But it was delicious. The cake itself was moist and crumbly and sweet and delectable, but the frosting was the real treat. It's a butter roux icing, which is totally new to me, made by cooking flour and milk until thick and then combining this mixture with creamed butter and sugar. I cut down on the butter and sugar—I made 3/4 of a recipe to account for the cake being only two layers, and I only used one cup each of butter and sugar as opposed to the 1 1/2 in the recipe. I had maybe a cup of frosting leftover.

As is often the case when you're baking without the aid of electric mixers, it didn't quite come together at the end, and had a bit of a grainy look. It didn't affect the way the icing spread or tasted, though, so I didn't worry too much about it. The frosting was creamy, creamy, not-too-sweet, and very forgiving. It had lots of body, almost like it was a mousse or had gelatin in it, and it stayed soft even when refrigerated. I've decided to make this frosting my normal frosting for cakes and cookies, it was so good.

Preseason

During exams, I found only one thing could relieve my immense stress: baking. First, I made the delicious Three Cities of Spain Cheesecake from Gourmet (recipe can be found here). It was absolutely fabulous; although it was still a bit lumpy when I put it in the crust, it came out perfectly creamy. I did, however, fail to take pictures. I'm not sure if cheesecake really counts as a cake, but no matter, this came before this whole one-cake-every-two-weeks business anyway.


The cake that really precipitated my summer plan was this. It didn't turn out exactly as I had hoped: the cake wasn't extremely chocolatey, the frosting was extremely buttery, and the instructions not to cut off the rounded tops of the cakes meant I had to load all the frosting between the layers to fill in the gap. I ended up doing the decorations with your standard powdered sugar buttercream instead.