“Birthday” cake

May 3, 2012

After red velvet cake, I think that “birthday” cake is my favorite to make (and eat, of course). I like to call plain vanilla cake with either chocolate or vanilla icing “birthday” cake because it reminds me of the cakes that my parents used to get from the grocery store for my birthday when I was a kid. So delicious. I think that a good vanilla cake always hits the spot.

I’m still working on the perfect vanilla cake recipe. So far, I have narrowed it down to two options – a slightly adapted American Culinary Institute recipe, and a really random recipe that I developed by combining several others. Neither is perfect, and I am hoping that with a little tweaking I can come up with one that works better.

This cake was inspired by Emma, and I used her chocolate icing recipe. While it was delicious, I think I prefer chocolate icing that uses melted chocolate as opposed to cocoa powder. It’s smoother and less grainy. So the next time I work on my vanilla cake recipe, I will definitely pair it with a different chocolate icing. I just hope it doesn’t take me as long to perfect this cake as it did red velvet… because that leaves about 15 more tries.

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Chocolate Chunk Cookies

April 27, 2012

Lately, all I want to eat are lots and lots of these:

 

 

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I am noticing a theme

April 19, 2012

 

When I do make it into the kitchen these days, banana products have been on my brain. I pretty much ate this whole batch of banana chocolate chip muffins by myself. Here are two things I know: 1) banana muffins are always better better with chocolate chips and 2) all muffins are better when sprinkled with raw cane sugar.

I also tried Jennie’s recipe for everyday banana bread. I really liked the thickness of this bread, but I couldn’t get over the slightly grainy taste of the whole-wheat pastry flour. I keep trying to like whole-wheat flour, but it just isn’t happening. Maybe with some chocolate chips…

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Easter cookies

April 10, 2012

So it turns out that I only like to bake on holidays, which is why you haven’t heard from me since Christmas. But now I’m back with Easter cookies!

(Okay, there might be slightly more to the story than that. In short: I’m pregnant – yay! But I’ve been super sick – not yay! And if you can relate, you know that being in the kitchen handling food is about the last place you want to be. So I took a break from baking and blogging, but now I’m slowly returning to the land of the living.)

This weekend I decorated sugar cookies using recipes from Glorious Treats. I swear, she makes the most perfect sugar cookies that I have ever seen. Mine did not turn out anything like hers. But I will say that they held their shape really nicely, which is something that my sugar cookies usually don’t do. So I would recommend using her recipe, and also following her tip of placing the entire tray of cookies in the freezer for 3-5 minutes before sticking it in the oven.

I also decorated my cookies using this recipe for royal icing. It calls for meringue powder, which I had never used before this weekend. I had to go to Michael’s to get it, and honestly, I wasn’t thrilled. It had a strange, chemical-like smell, and I thought I could detect a weird taste in the icing. The meringue powder did make the icing easier to work with though. The last time I made sugar cookies, I used a recipe that called for corn syrup, and the consistency of that icing was a lot harder to decorate with. Luckily, I always have plenty of sprinkles on hand to cover up my errors.

While I had fun making these, I think the jury is still out on sugar cookies. The decorating is so laborious, and I’m not sure that they taste good enough to warrant the effort. Especially when chocolate chip cookies taste so good and all you have to do is scoop them onto the baking tray…

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Holiday baking

December 22, 2011

This is such a great time of year to bake. I love winter flavors – peppermint, cranberries, gingerbread, eggnog.  Plus it’s cold (and this matters because my oven heats up my entire small apartment, and that’s not fun in August).  Last night, I was having one of those nights where I couldn’t go to sleep without baking and eating something delicious. It was probably brought on by the fact that I ate a very healthy dinner (which is guaranteed not to make me full).  I was wanted to try something quick and easy from my new cookbook, Desserts from the Famous Loveless Cafe.  I’ve never actually been to Loveless Cafe (in Nashville, TN), but I know that I’d love it.  I’m already in love with this book.  The desserts are my favorite kind – cakes, pies, biscuits and other “comfort food” desserts with plenty of sugar.  The South knows desserts.

I opted for a brown sugar buttermilk pound cake.  I toyed with the idea of making it an eggnog pound cake by substituting eggnog for the buttermilk and throwing in some nutmeg, but I decided just to follow the recipe exactly. I think I’m a little scarred from all the “experimenting” that I did at work to develop holiday-flavored cupcakes. It sounds easy enough, right? And it was in some cases. It only took a few attempts to get the eggnog cupcake with rum buttercream just right. Same with peppermint. Gingerbread though was another story.  I almost hate gingerbread now. I must have tried and tweaked about ten different recipes, and nothing came out just right. Granted, it’s a little harder when you are developing recipes for a business that already has an established product, because whatever you come up with can’t just be good, it also has to fit with the other products. I just couldn’t make the gingerbread fit.  On the plus side, I learned a ton from trying, and I had a lot of halfway-decent samples to try.

p.s. More holiday baking to come… my sister is flying in tomorrow, and not only does she like to bake, but she takes great pictures!

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Christmas Extravaganza

December 17, 2011

The holidays are in full swing, and we’re now in the midst of Christmas extravaganza. (We’re about halfway through birthday extravaganza, but it’s okay to have two simultaneous extravaganzas. That’s just how we roll.)  Christmas extravaganza is a series of holiday events planned by my husband, who has the Christmas spirit of Clark Griswald. It knows no bounds.

I don’t think any of our planned events can top the first one though, which was an overnight trip and dinner at the Inn at Little Washington. This place completely knocked our socks off. It lived up to every single bit of hype. The Inn was beautiful, quaint, and impeccably decorated. The staff was incredibly friendly and accommodating. Most importantly, it was the best dinner I have ever had. The food was so good that I even enjoyed things that I normally don’t like (ex. bread pudding – see below). At the end of the meal, which included dessert, our waiter brought us a small container of cookies and candies “for the road.” That’s my kind of restaurant.

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Birthday Extravaganza

December 8, 2011

December in our house means it’s time for birthday extravaganza! All four of our parents and both of my sisters have birthdays in December and January. Combined with the holidays this leads to a lot of celebrating… and a lot of baked goods.

We were fortunate to celebrate both my Mom’s and my Father-in-law’s birthdays together with them in person this year, which has never happened before. Obviously, the occasion called for a red velvet cake. Obviously.

And here’s a little side note about cake… I’m not particularly good at cake decorating. My border piping skills leave a lot to be desired, and try as I might, I can never get the top and sides perfectly smooth. This time, I decided to stop trying and just smeared the icing around in a pattern that would hide any flaws. I was pretty pleased with the result.

 

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Review: Thanksgiving desserts

November 30, 2011

I can’t believe that Thanksgiving was a week ago! Holy cow. But then again, I was so exhausted from cooking and eating Thanksgiving dinner that I slept for a few days afterwards. I pretty much just woke up yesterday. Here’s what was lovely about my holiday: learning how to cook a turkey with my husband and spending time with my family. Here’s what was not lovely: my desserts. They kind of bombed. In fact, the turkey turned out better than the dessert, which is blasphemy as far as I’m concerned.

I’ll start with the worst one so that I can finish on a good note. I made a pumpkin cheesecake using a recipe from Cooks Illustrated. I have tasted this cheesecake before and it’s delicious, so I know the recipe is good. But last week, not so much. The water bath leaked into my pan causing the crust to get soggy. I did wrap the pan in aluminum foil, but apparently not tight enough. Soggy-crusted cheesecake = sad me.

I also made an apple galette with brown butter using this recipe, which is adapted from one of Jennifer Perillo’s. I think that I was trying to do too many things at once because I burned the brown butter. Burnt brown butter also = sad me.

At least my almond cake turned out well. Have you heard of Maggie Austin cakes? I had not until a few weeks ago when I saw an article about her in the Washington Post. I am in awe of her work… the textures are amazing! She makes wedding cakes look like they are constructed from expensive fabrics. In the Washington Post article, she shared a recipe for an apricot-glazed almond cake with honeyed mascarpone cream. I might have drooled a little when I read the recipe. It’s a delicious cake, it’s easy to make and it looks (and sounds) fancy. Pretty much the perfect combination.

Oh, here’s one more lovely thing about my holiday: my family insisted that all of the desserts were delicious.

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Lawyer-turned-baker series

November 22, 2011

Every time I think that I am crazy for quitting my job as a lawyer to bake cupcakes, I hear about someone else who is just as crazy. I mean adventurous. I’m not the first lawyer-turned-baker, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. I’ve decided to feature some successful bakers/former lawyers on this blog for inspiration.

One of the most well known lawyer-turned-bakers is right here in Washington, DC – Warren Brown. Mr. Brown left a career practicing law to start Cakelove, a retail bakery specializing in cakes and small sweets baked from scratch. Cakelove currently has seven locations in the DC (surrounding) area. From 2005 to 2007, Mr. Brown was the host of TV show ”Sugar Rush” on the Food Network. He is the author of two cookbooks, CakeLove-how to bake cakes from scratch and United Cakes of America.

The “story” behind Cakelove and Mr. Brown’s transition from lawyering to baking is featured prominently on Cakelove’s website. This is my favorite part:

“Why cakes? I’m often asked, ‘Why would you give up a promising career in law to bake cakes?’ Some people kind of scratch their head when they think of what I have done. Others look at me like I’m crazy. Most totally understand what I’ve done—and smile. Here are a few reasons why I bake cakes from scratch…”

To read more, and to drool over pictures of their cakes (my favorite is strawberry buttercream), check out www.cakelove.com. I’ll be over here, baking and dreaming…

 

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The best chocolate chip cookies in the world?

November 19, 2011

I was excited this week to try  Jacques Torres’ much-acclaimed chocolate chip cookie recipe. I LOVE chocolate chip cookies – they are my favorite go-to comfort sweets after cupcakes – and I have never found a recipe that I love. There are plenty of good recipes out there, but none that knock my socks off. I had high hopes for this one, but due to a few stumbles while making it, I will need to try again to see if it lives up to the hype. The cookies were really good, but the jury is still out. I definitely have to try again.

First of all, in the middle of getting my ingredients together, I realized that I only had whole grain pastry flour. This definitely changed the texture of the cookie, and made it a little grainier and crunchier. I don’t like a crunchy chocolate chip cookie. I go for chewy – all the way. Second, I didn’t have chocolate, so I used chocolate chips. I think that the coarsely-chopped chocolate is really important to this recipe, and I lost something by using chips. Third, I was too impatient to let the dough chill for at least 24 hours before baking. Several food bloggers who have tried the recipe (ex. A Tender Crumb) suggested this. Some people clearly have more will power than I do.

Also, this recipe is not for the faint of heart (or people who live in a two-person household like I do). Holy mound of cookies! I’ve never baked such a large cookie recipe in my life. This is about half of the finished product:

 

 

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