another birthday cake

I made another birthday cake, this time for Mike, using a similar recipe to "yellow cake with chocolate frosting" just below. This time, I filled the cake with seedless raspberry preserves, and used a different frosting recipe, courtesy Martha Stewart. Overall the cake was really good, but I wasn't 100% into the frosting. I'm not a frosting lover, though; so often buttercream-style frosting is too fatty, too sugary, too much. This frosting contains three sticks of butter, and nearly a pound of chocolate! Now that's decadent.

I would have tried a ganache, but Mike liked the sound of a buttercream. Actually, Martha S.'s ganache recipe sounds a little flabby too. Two and a half cups is a lot of heavy cream. Maybe a chocolate glaze is the ticket.

Really, what I want to try is a 7-minute frosting, light and fluffy. I've never tried it before, but it seems completely unlike a fat-based frosting. Maybe a chocolate cake, with heaps of feather-light vanilla icing. . . .

Still, a tasty cake. I'm going on and on about the issue of frosting, but it was lovely and delicious, and I'm coming to rely on the yellow cake recipe below. It's a keeper. Happy Birthday Mike! I love making birthday cakes.

yellow cake with chocolate frosting

For a recent birthday, I made a yellow cake with chocolate icing. It needed to be dairy and soy free to accomodate food allergies, so I adapted this recipe, Moist Yellow Cake on epicurious.com. It turned out so good. I'm still thinking about it. Because I replaced butter and buttermilk with coconut milk, it has a slight coconut taste, but that's all to the good.

3 cups (330 g) cake flour
1 tablebspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 can coconut milk, thoroughly chilled in refrigerator
2 cups (454 g) granulated sugar
5 large eggs
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
rice milk, or other milk
1 T. white vinegar or apple cider vinegar or lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease and line with parchment paper two 8x2-inch (20x5-cm) round cake pans. Set aside.

2. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. Open the can of coconut milk. Drain and reserve the watery liquid, and scoop the solid coconut oil into a measuring cup. You should have one cup of solid oil. With electric beater, beat the coconut oil until light and creamy in a large bowl. Stop and scrape the bowl. It will get very airy and light--even more so than butter. I was amazed at how well this worked.

4.Add the sugar, 1/4 cup at a time, beating 1 minute after each addition. Scrape the sides of the bowl occasionally. Add the eggs one at a time.

5. Measure your reserved coconut water, and add rice milk to equal one cup. Stir in vinegar and vanilla. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Mix just until incorporated. Scrape the sides of the bowl and mix for 15 seconds longer.

6. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a knife. Lift up the pan with the batter, and let it drop onto the counter top to burst any air bubbles, allowing the batter to settle.

7.Center the pans onto the lower third of the oven and let bake 45 to 50 minutes or until the cake is lightly brown on top and comes away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Then, I iced it with frosting based on Billy's Chocolate Buttercream, from MarthaStewart.com, adapted to be dairy free and more chocolatey.

1 cup Earth Balance soy-free margarine (comes in a tub)
6 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled (I used Enjoy Life brand, which is dairy and soy free)
1.5 tablespoons rice milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2.5 cups confectioners' sugar
several tablespoons sifted cocoa powder, optional

In a big bowl with electric mixer, beat margarine until smooth and creamy, 2 to 3 minutes. With mixer on low speed, add chocolate until just combined. Add milk, vanilla, and sugar; mix on medium until well combined. For extra chocolateyness, add cocoa powder by the tablespoonfull as desired.

My final frosting was a bit stiff--it didn't spread 100% smoothly. Probably the added cocoa powder, not in the original recipe, was to blame. It tasted terrific, though, and without it the icing was very light brown. I thought it needed extra chocolate punch.

This was enough icing for a double-layer cake, but you might want to make a bigger batch for a triple layer cake or if you want lavish icing.

Also decorated the cake with a quick chocolate ganache--3 tablespoons rice milk, boiled in microwave in glass measuring cup. Add 1/3 c. chocolate chips, mix until all melted, cool a few minutes, then place in ziploc bag with a sharp edge. You can then snip off the edge and use it like an icing bag.

Date Cake

My version of a sticky date pudding isn't sticky at all because I skipped the toffee sauce. It's just sort of a regular cake. I based my recipe on Sticky Date Pudding with Toffee Sauce from epicurious.

• 1 3/4 cups packed pitted dates (about 10 ounces)
• 2 cups water
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 c brown sugar
• 3 large eggs

Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter and flour an 8-inch square baking pan (2 inches deep), knocking out excess flour.

Coarsely chop dates and in a 1 1/2- to 2-quart saucepan simmer dates in water, uncovered, 5 minutes. Remove pan from heat and stir in baking soda. (Mixture will foam.) Let mixture stand 20 minutes.

While mixture is standing, combine flour, baking powder, ginger, and salt in a bowl and whisk until well mixed. In a large bowl, beat together butter and sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add flour mixture and mix until until just combined. Add date mixture and with a wooden spoon stir batter until just combined.

Pour batter into baking pan and set pan in a larger baking pan. Add enough hot water to larger pan to reach halfway up sides of smaller pan and bake in middle of oven until a tester comes out clean, 35 minutes. Remove smaller pan from water bath and cool pudding to warm on a rack.

*****

A delicious cake, not too sweet. We ate it with vanilla ice cream, but no toffee sauce (which I'm sure would be delicious, but is just outrageously decadent.) In fact, I think a healthier version of this cake, with applesauce subbing for some of the butter and less sugar, would still be really good.

If I make this again, I'll probably ditch the water bath. It's unwieldy, and I'm not convinced it made a great deal of difference in my cake.

*****

Along with the date cake, we had chipotle black bean stew from Vegan with a Vengeance for dinner. I've made this many times, and it's always delicious and easy to put together. We used a bunch of corn on the cob from our CSA box.

Raspberry-Blueberry Pound Cake

I made Orangette's pound cake for a birthday last weekend. I didn't have any kirsch, but otherwise I followed her recipe, more or less. I was a tiny bit short of both sugar and butter, so made up the difference with confectioner's sugar and coconut oil, respectively. Used vanilla extract instead of kirsch. This turned out good, but didn't blow me away. I always want cake to blow me away. It's probably an unfair expectation.

I do recommend trying this with kirsch, or perhaps with lemon zest/extract, as the flavoring instead of vanilla. Orangette says in her comments that the kirsch really makes it, and I'm sure she's right.

chocolate cake number two

The second chocolate cake I made is from Nigella Lawson's Feast. I'm on the lookout not only for the perfect plain cake, but also for the ultimate fancy cake. My ultimate cake must include chocolate and coffee, and perhaps caramel or hazelnut. I haven't found it yet, although tiramisu isn't too far off. Nigella's Chocolate Espresso Cake with Caffe Latte Cream (p. 292) sounded like a candidate, so I wanted to try it before returning Feast to the library. I didn't make the Caffe Latte Cream, since this was just a test run.

Another motive for all these chocolate cakes is my friend John's upcoming birthday. I kind of want to make a cake, although I'm not sure yet if a cake will be called for by the festivities at hand, or if this is the cake. He's visiting from out of town. Sigh, it's been a long time since John and I have lived in the same place, and I no longer remember what his favorite type of cake is. I wish that I knew everyone's favorite cake, and had happy dinner parties with loved ones, the sort of dinner parties that Nigella has. Or Orangette. I love the fantasy of bonding over food. It doesn't happen often enough in my particular social circumstances. Still, I'd like to make a nice cake for John.

I do have one memory of an idyllic food get-together: Thankgiving 1997. My friend Joanna and her husband Ed lived in our neighborhood in Chicago, and they came over, along with some other friends. There was a lot of wine, beer, and hard cider involved. We thawed a frozen turkey in the bathtub, and Joanna and I made pies. One guy brought over some red bell peppers cooked in olive oil over low heat until melted down to nothing. So delicious with crusty bread. The turkey, despite great ignorance and drunken preparation, came out perfectly. I drank so much that I had to go lie in bed for a while, but then I rallied, returned to the group, and thus avoided shame.

But back to Nigella's fancy cake. It turned out good. It's an eggy cake with only a little flour, and it puffed up gorgeously while baking, then deflated as it cooled. It's a rather delicate cake, not at all dense or heavy, and would probably be a good choice to impress guests. I don't know. It was pretty and lavish, and but perhaps not my heart's desire. Clearly I'm looking for more than just cake here. But don't let that stop you.

Chocolate Espresso Cake
adapted from Feast by Nigella Lawson, p. 292.

For the cake:
5 oz semisweet chocolate chips
1 stick plus 3 T. unsalted butter
6 eggs
1 1/4 c. granulated sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 c. all-purpose flour
5 t. Medaglio d'Oro instant espresso, or other espresso powder
1/4 c. Frangelico or other coffee liqueur

Take all ingredients out of the refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature. The most important thing is that the eggs be room temperature. If, like me, you can't be bothered to take everything out ahead of time, set the eggs in warm water for 10 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350°. Butter and line a 9-inch springform pan.

Melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave in 30-second increments, stirring in between heatings to prevent scorching. Set aside. Beat eggs, sugar, and vanilla with hand mixer until thick, pale, and doubled or tripled in volume. Nigella does this in a standing mixer (I want one of those). It took me close to ten minutes of beating for the mixture to reach this state.

Gently fold in flour and espresso powder, and then chocolate-butter mixture, taking care not to lose volume. Pour into prepared pan and cook for 35-40 minutes. The top of the cake should be firm. Immediately pour the coffee liqueur over the top and let the cake cool completely before releasing it from the pan.

This was perfectly delicious without the Caffe Latte cream, but maybe it would be even better with. Here is another blogger's account of making this cake that includes the cream recipe. The liqueur flavor was rather pronounced. If you don't like that, you might want to leave it off. I wonder if the cake would not deflate if you nixed the liqueur. Any readers out there, let me know if you try these variations.

chocolate cake #1

There's a certain yin and yang to my cooking habits. When last I wrote, I was making salads, brown rice, and chard, but since then I've been all about chocolate cake. I've baked not one but two chocolate cakes in the last week.

I love cake but I'm not crazy about frosting, so I'm always on the lookout for cakes that are complete unto themselves and don't require buttercream. French yogurt cake is a good example. I'd been reading More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, which I checked out of the library after reading a scathing review of Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte on amazon.com that, among other things, complained that Hesser is no Laurie Colwin. I'm not so sure. I enjoyed Cooking for Mr. Latte at least as much as I did More Home Cooking. To Colwin's credit, upon reading this chocolate cake recipe, I went immediately to the kitchen and started making it.

Buttermilk Cocoa Cake
Adapted from More Home Cooking, p. 161.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. and butter and flour a 9- by 2-inch round cake pan.

2. Mix together the following:

1 3/4 cups flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour)
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

3. To these ingredients add:

1 c. buttermilk (I used 2/3 c. plain yogurt mixed with 1/3 c. rice milk)
1/2 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix.

4. Turn the batter into the pan, bake the cake in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean, and let it cool for 5 minutes before turning it out of the pan.

Here's what Colwin says about the cake:

It is hard to encapsulate the virtuosities of this cake. It is fast, easy, and scrumptious. It has a velvety, powdery feel—the result of all that cocoa. It is not so horribly bad for you, because you use buttermilk, which is relatively low in fat, and cocoa powder is defatted anyway. Furthermore, it keeps like a dream and tastes even better after a few days. If you want to be lavish you can dress this cake up by serving it with ice cream or crème fraîche. This mitigates its purist, minimalist virtues, but that is the way of chocolate cakes. They are good in themselves but sometimes call out for window dressing. You can eat them gussied up with all sorts of rich and fattening things or you can leave them quite alone and serve them in pristine, solitary splendor on a nice white plate.

Right after making it, I found the cake disappointing. It isn't very moist, and the texture is crumbly. This is common for eggless baked goods, and I may have caused yet more crumbliness by using whole wheat pastry flour instead of all-purpose flour. The batter, too, is very thick; it seems more like muffin batter than cake batter. The next day, though, the cake was unbelievably delicious. I found myself standing over the pan, cutting myself little slivers and picking up the crumbs with my index finger. It also has the virtue of being easy to veganize. You could use nondairy yogurt instead of buttermilk, or add a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar to soy milk.










Next I'll write about chocolate cake #2.

orangette's lemon cake and frozen yogurt

I find orangette's blog extremely comforting. I have no idea if the real person Molly Wizenberg has a life that feels like the blog does, that has that urbane tone, or even if it's possible for a life to be like the blog that chronicles it. The blog brings into existence a world and a narrator who are about beauty, pleasure, leisure, and fulfillment. I guess correspondence to reality is beside the point. Narrative in general is comforting to me, even if some of the details are upsetting. Orangette definitely has that spark of narrative magic.

One great benefit of unemployment is that I've had ample time to read. It's great. I've torn through a couple books this week, and I love the drug of getting swept up in narrative. Also, I've been making use of the public library, so the pleasure is guilt free. No books accumulating around the house; no shameful amazon packages arriving. I read Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte and All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House by David Giffels. Both are enjoyable reads. Giffels is quirky and brilliant and a terrific writer. Hesser's a well-known food journalist and the book has recipes, none of which I've tried yet, but they look good.

I've been dipping into Orangette's recipes, as I read her archived posts. I recently made her French-Style Yogurt Cake with Lemon. Actually, I made it twice, once using eggs, another time eggless (replacing eggs with extra yogurt and some Ener-G Egg Substitute, if I remember correctly). The eggless version tasted good; the texture was crumblier than the egged version. It's a simple cake, not flashy. I love the fresh lemonyness of it, clean and elegant. I did jazz it up with a side of frozen yogurt, which is the easiest possible frozen dessert and delicious.

Vanilla Frozen Yogurt

4 cups Brown Cow Cream Top Plain yogurt
1/4 cup agave syrup (you might want to start with less and add more to taste)
1 t. vanilla extract

Whisk the yogurt with agave syrup and vanilla extract. Taste and add more syrup if necessary. Freeze in ice-cream maker according to basic instructions. I use agave syrup here because it mixes directly into the yogurt and has a nice clean taste. Honey or maple syrup would be tasty too, but would contribute more flavor to your final blend. Or you could use presweetened vanilla yogurt. I haven't found a yogurt that I like as well as Brown Cow.