Daring Bakers in February: Flourless Chocolate Cake & Fresh Mint Ice Cream
February 28, 2009 at 2:02 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, daring bakers, groups, ice creams & frozen, sweet things | 40 Comments
I skipped out on last month’s Daring Bakers’ Challenge, so I wasn’t about to miss this one– especially since our hosts Wendy at wmpesblog and Dharm at Dad – Baker and Chef chose something exceptionally decadent. Actually, they chose two exceptionally decadent things: a flourless chocolate cake (called “Chocolate Valentino”) and homemade ice cream.
It may surprise you that a cake worthy of a restaurant plate has just three ingredients: chocolate, butter and eggs. Since chocolate is the star of the show here, use the best stuff you can. The recipe calls for semisweet chocolate, but I only had bittersweet so I threw a couple tablespoons of sugar into the meringue component. This sweetened it up a bit and also made the meringue more stable. I should also note that making the cake is just as easy as remembering the three ingredients! Melt the butter and chocolate together, add in the yolks, whip the whites to a meringue, fold them in, and bake. Keep a close eye on the cake in the oven, as mine baked quickly…but then again, I did just make a half recipe. This cake is so dense and chocolatey– it’s a really special dessert, but not at all hard to make.
To tell the truth, I think a rich cake like this pairs better with a light whipped cream than it does with an equally rich ice cream. But ice cream was part of the challenge, and it is really one of my favorite things to make. We were given the option of making either a traditional custard-based ice cream or an eggless Philadelphia-style one. I happened to have several yolks leftover from the coconut cake I had made a few days before, so that meant a French-style ice cream for me. I also had some fresh mint in the fridge…since I love the combination of chocolate and mint, I thought that would be a good way to go.
I have made a lot of ice cream at home (incidentally, I use the KitchenAid ice cream attachment and have had good results with it), and something I’ve learned is that if you start with a good vanilla ice cream recipe as your base, you can easily modify it for other flavors. For my mint ice cream, I used the custard-based classic vanilla recipe provided by Dharm, and rather than steeping the milk with a vanilla bean, I steeped it with a couple handfuls of fresh mint leaves. I also increased the sugar by two tablespoons, but this was just a matter of personal taste. Getting the mint flavor right can be a little tricky. The more mint you use, and the longer you infuse it, the more herbal the ice cream will be. That may sound obvious, but I’ve made several batches in the past that have tasted almost grassy. I was going for a subtler flavor here so I was careful when adding the mint, and made sure to taste the milk after it had steeped.
Check out the DB blogroll! And visit Wendy or Dharm for the recipes for both the Chocolate Valentino cake and the ice creams.
The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef. We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.
The Cake Slice: Southern Coconut Cake
February 20, 2009 at 2:39 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, layer cakes, sweet things, the cake slice | 45 Comments
I am a coconut cake fanatic. I love it in all its forms…filled with pastry cream or lemon curd, iced with cream cheese frosting or buttercream. Any which way you slice it, I’ll take a piece! Coconut cupcakes are scrummy too…I made some here awhile back. So, naturally I was excited when Southern Coconut Cake won The Cake Slice group vote this month (although I know it only came from behind to beat out a chocolate-peanut butter cake because of the current salmonella scare, but so what).
There are no yolks in this cake, so the crumb is snow-white fluff. I really like that the recipe incorporates coconut milk into the batter. I punched up the coconut flavor a bit more by using a combination of vanilla and coconut extracts (rather than straight vanilla), and by folding a handful of finely grated unsweetened coconut (the desiccated stuff from the health food store) into the batter at the end. I made half a recipe, but rather than baking it in three 6-inch pans, like I usually do, I spread the batter into a quarter sheet pan (measuring something like 9″ x 13″). I then cut it into three strips, which I stacked into a rectangular cake… for some reason, I was obsessed with having a slice that looked like Pepperidge Farm.
The finished cake is not frosted with a traditional cream cheese frosting, but with a super light cream cheese buttercream, made with an Italian meringue. Wow, is it good…and it’s something that I never would have thought to do. The book that this recipe comes from, Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes, has so many cool ideas– I’m really glad to have it. I made a two-thirds recipe of buttercream, so I could have leftovers to frost my Valentine’s cupcakes.
Not only does this cake taste great, but it’s also soooo pretty. I want it for my wedding cake. Oh, darn…I’m already married! But there’s actually something else I can celebrate with a yummy coconut cake– a whisk and a spoon turns two today! I can hardly believe it (especially when I go back and look at those early posts–ha!), and if it weren’t for all of you who read and leave such encouraging comments, I may not have kept at it for so long. Thank you for making blogging so wonderfully fun and fulfilling!!
Here’s a printable link to the recipe. Better yet, get your hands on a copy of Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes by Alicia Huntsman and Peter Wynne. Cruise through the list of The Cake Slice Bakers to check out all of our coconut cakes this month.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Devil’s Food White-Out Cake
February 17, 2009 at 2:19 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, cupcakes, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 49 Comments
Oh, I bet a lot of TWDers have been waiting a long time for this one, and we have Stephanie of Confessions of a City Eater to thank for finally choosing it! Actually, I feel a twinge of guilt posting this picture. It’s almost as if, by turning Dorie’s cover cake into cupcakes, I haven’t quite done her recipe justice. Please forgive me…it’s just that I’ve been doing a lot of layer cakes with The Cake Slice group lately.
Geez Louise, I love devil’s food cake. I mean, really…it’s so chocolaty, and that moist but dense thing it has going on…it’s just the best type of chocolate cake (by the way, I like it chilled). This particular devil’s food recipe is extra-special because it has little chopped chocolate bits throughout. I made a half recipe and got ten cupcakes. I actually only turned six of them into White-Outs. The others went, unfrosted but nicely wrapped, into the freezer, and later (along with some leftover cream cheese frosting you’ll read about in a few days) became Valentine’s cupcakes.
The White-Out Cake is Dorie’s spin on the classic Brooklyn blackout cake, but here the filling/frosting is homemade marshmallow Fluff. Yay, Fluff! I even cut a hole out of the center of each cupcake and filled it with extra marshmallow meringue. You know where I was going with that, right? I reserved the little plugs of cake for my crumbs. One note about the frosting: I reduced the cream of tartar in the recipe. A friend had made this cake about a month ago, and told me she thought the frosting had a slightly metallic taste…the large amount of CoT was the only culprit I could think of.
So good…it was so good. Make it yourself and see– the recipe, of course, is in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, but she also has it here on NPR’s site. Don’t forget to read Stephanie’s post and check out the TWD Blogroll to see what everyone else came up with!
Tuesdays with Dorie: Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread
January 27, 2009 at 1:46 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 57 Comments
I’ve had my eye on this recipe for quite awhile, and I was pretty happy when Heather of Sherry Trifle picked it for this week’s TWD. My mum made gingerbread cookies with us every year at Christmastime, but gingerbread in cake form is one of those “newer discoveries” that I wish I hadn’t missed out on for so long.
With the addition of chocolate and icing (yay, icing!), Dorie’s version takes the classic gingerbread cake and shakes it up a bit. I have been a little cacao-deprived as of late, so I really liked the little flecks of chocolate speckled throughout the cake. And the chocolate icing..my gosh, the icing. I used a shot of espresso from the coffee shop to make it, so the coffee kick was quite noticeable, and quite tasty. The chocolate and coffee worked really well with the cake’s spicy ginger trifecta (fresh, ground and candied).
I made two-thirds of a recipe and baked it in an eight-inch sqaure pan. I did this before I even saw Dorie’s note, so I gave myself a pat on the back for that one. Dorie’s serving size suggestion was a bit…ummm…gigantic. I was actually able to get nine pieces (instead of six) out of my smaller cake. This was four nights worth of dessert for us, so we paired it with vanilla ice cream one night, whipped cream the next, and enjoyed it plain-Jane with tea another. Every which way, it was delicious, and stayed nice and moist the whole time.
For the recipe, read Sherry Trifle or see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (she also has it here on Serious Eats). Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
The Cake Slice: Banana Cake with Praline Filling and White Chocolate Ganache
January 20, 2009 at 7:30 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, layer cakes, sweet things, the cake slice | 40 Comments
Ack–I didn’t realize that this post and the TWD one would fall on the same day! So in addition to having to crank out two posts on Monday night, I have also been subsisting on an all-cake diet for the past week!
This Banana Cake with Praline Filling and White Chocolate Ganache happens to be the latest installment of The Cake Slice. I guess the title kinda tells it all, right? You start with a white cake, softly flavored with banana purée. The tall layers are stacked with a white chocolate ganache frosting that has sugared pecans folded through. Then the cake gets frosted with the remainder of the ganache, and decorated with the rest of the pecans. I halved the original recipe to make a six-inch layer cake. Normally, I get six servings from a six-incher, but this cake was so toweringly high that I was able to get eight!
I will admit that I did not make the sugared pecans according to the recipe’s directions, which call for deep frying. I didn’t want to use up half a bottle of oil to fry off a few nuts, so I dry-toasted them in a skillet instead. Then I added a pat of butter, a couple spoonfuls of brown sugar and a sprinkle of salt, and cooked the nuts until the sugar and butter made a glaze. I use this technique to make crunchy candied nuts for snacks and salads all the time, and it works really well.
As someone who is not terribly fond of white chocolate, it surprises me to say that I thought the ganache frosting/filling was the star of the show! The banana cake definitely has the texture of a white cake, rather than something more banana bready, and the flavor is gentle, too. It goes so well with the frosting, which is made by mixing ganache into softly whipped unsweetend cream. The whipped cream really mellows out and tones down the tooth-achy sweetness of the white chocolate, and the resulting frosting is soft, light and decadent. I will definitely be using this recipe again, as it’s super-good and much less rich than a traditional whipped ganache frosting (which I have described here and here).
All-in-all, this was a delicious cake…and one I’m really glad I made! Here’s a printable link to the recipe (better yet, get your hands on a copy of Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes by Alicia Huntsman and Peter Wynne), and cruise through the list of The Cake Slice Bakers to check out all of our banana cakes this month.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Berry Surprise Cake
January 20, 2009 at 1:14 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, layer cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 32 Comments
Surprise! I love a surprise…the good kind only, of course, and Dorie’s Berry Surprise Cake certainly falls into that category. Mary Ann of Meet Me in the Kitchen chose it for TWD this week.
A single layer of genoise sponge is cut in two horizontally, hollowed and filled (bread-bowl style) with a lightly-sweetened cream cheese and fresh berry mixture, then craftily reassembled. Whipped cream frosting hides what’s going on inside (hence the surprise). At Fairway, blackberries were not only the best looking, but also the cheapest, so I went with those and used cassis to flavor my soaking syrup. When berry season rolls around, I’ll be trying out raspberries as well.
From the outside it is pretty unassuming, right? Trust me, it is really delicious…not too sweet, and I love the way genoise kind of takes everything in. We especially liked this cake after a day or two, when it became almost trifle-like.
For the recipe, read Meet Me in the Kitchen or see Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
Tuesdays with Dorie: Tall and Creamy Cheesecake
December 30, 2008 at 1:52 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, cheesecakes, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 45 Comments
When I saw that Anne of AnneStrawberry had chosen Dorie’s Tall and Creamy Cheesecake for TWD, my first reaction was something like “errrgh.” Now, I love me some cheesecake (one of my favorites can be seen here), but I didn’t know how I’d make it fit into my holiday eating plans. Then I realized that my holiday eating plans basically boiled down to eating as much as possible, so cheesecake would actually fit in quite nicely.
I did jazz up the basic recipe to make it a bit more festive. Rather than a graham cracker crust, I made a gingersnap one. Then, I topped each piece with homemade cranberry sauce (because I love it, and must have it more often than just at Thanksgiving).
This cheesecake is fantastically good! Thanks, Anne and, it probably goes without saying, Dorie! I used 1/3 less fat cream cheese (you know, that “Neufchâtel” stuff) to make mine. Combined with full fat sour cream, it was just perfect. One more note: I like to use the food processor, rather than a mixer, to make cheesecake batter. It still requires a scrape or two, but as long as your cream cheese and eggs are room temperature, you will never get a lump. Oh, yeah, I also wanted to say that a half recipe works nicely in a high-sided six-inch springform.
Did anyone find the instruction to let the cheesecake “luxuriate in its water bath” amusing? I was jealous– I would like to luxuriate in a water bath!
For the recipe, look in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (she also has it here on Serious Eats). You can find it on AnneStrawberry, too. Don’t forget to check out the TWD Blogroll.
Happy New Year!!
Daring Bakers in December: French Yule Log
December 29, 2008 at 5:29 pm | Posted in cakes & tortes, daring bakers, groups, other sweet, sweet things | 41 Comments
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. Now, now…before you go thinking that we did that last December, let me assure you that this is a very different dessert altogether.
This yule log is a truly impressive, multi-layered affair. Almond dacquoise, chocolate-caramel ganache, praline feuilletine, and vanilla crème brulée…all nestled between layers of dark chocolate mousse, and capped off with a super-shiny glaze. Sounds lush, right? It certainly is. (The ganache layer, by the way– amazing!! Also the crispy feuilletine…I could have eaten the whole layer by itself, before it even made it into the log.)
This is kind of an investment in time and ingredients, but taken separately, each component is actually quite easy and quick to prepare. I spread my work over three days. On day one, I made the ganache, feuilletine and brulée layers. (I can see the feuilletine layer being a bit of a pain, but I had it easy, because I was able to purchase gavottes and praline paste through work.) On day two, I made the dacquoise and mousse and assembled the layers, leaving it to freeze overnight. On the last day, all that was left was to unmold and prepare the glaze. I used a standard loaf pan (lined with plastic wrap) to mold my log. The finished dessert is quite large…it’s probably about ten servings. And we will enjoy each and every one.
Sorry that I don’t have more (or better) pictures to share, but my apartment is like a cave with the low winter sun, or lack thereof! I have to take what I can get. Let me assure you that this dessert is as decadent as it sounds, so if you’re up for a challenge, visit Hilda’s post for the recipe.
The Cake Slice: Chocolate Hazelnut Nutcracker Cake
December 20, 2008 at 1:31 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, layer cakes, sweet things, the cake slice | 26 Comments
Gosh–hasn’t December gone by so fast?!? It’s already time for the third installment of The Cake Slice! This go-round, the group cooked up a very festive Chocolate Hazelnut Nutcracker Cake from the book Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes by Alicia Huntsman and Peter Wynne.
You’ll need to fish out your nutcracker to make this one– the batter has plenty of hazelnuts, ground fine. It also contains an unusual ingredient…graham cracker crumbs. I’m wondering if these are there for subtle flavor, or if they really just act as an extender for the nut meal. The cake is filled and frosted with vanilla whipped cream (a.k.a crème chantilly, if you want to get all fancy-like).
While this cake was certainly good, R and I both though it was missing something. The flavor was predominately hazelnut, and I think, for a cake with the word “chocolate” in its name, it needed to taste of chocolate, too (just a very small piece is grated into the batter). If I get around to making it again, I think I’ll fill the layers with a dark chocolate ganache, and just leave the chantilly for the outside. The rum soaking syrup, though, is a must! Visit Gigi and Katie for the recipe (or get your hands on a copy of Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes), and cruise through the list of The Cake Slice Bakers to check out all of our nutcracker cakes!
The Cake Slice: Sweet Potato Cake
November 20, 2008 at 4:41 pm | Posted in cakes & tortes, groups, layer cakes, sweet things, the cake slice | 30 Comments
I just realized that today’s the posting day for the second installment of The Cake Slice! This month (or yesterday, in my case) we baked up a Sweet Potato Cake from the delicious book Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes by Alicia Huntsman and Peter Wynne.
If you are thinking that this cake sounds a little weird, the sweet potato puree makes the cake really moist (and orange-hued), but I think the flavor actually isn’t so noticeable. The cake batter has all of the nice, warm fall spices…cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves…and they are what really shine here.
The spice cake is great with the frosting…a chocolate cream cheese frosting, that is! According to the recipe, the chocolate cream cheese mix is just used to frost the outside. The cake “should” be filled with an orange cream cheese filling. I’ve said this a trillion times, but I don’t like fruit and chocolate, so I went chocolate all the way! I am missing a few kitchen essentials right now, like a scale and a sieve. I had to wing the frosting, adding powdered sugar and chocolate to taste (which for me means less sweet and more chocolate). Since I wasn’t able to sift the sugar, I had a few lumpies in there, but that’s not gonna end my world.
This is a cake I’m really glad I made– it’s moist, spicy tall and tasty! Visit Katie for the recipe (or get your hands on a copy of Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes), and cruise through the list of The Cake Slice Bakers to check out all of our sweet potato cakes!
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