i’ve been working pretty hard, and i rewarded myself recently with a cannele mold (the smallest one i’ve ever seen! not that i have seen a lot of cannele molds, but it’s smaller than i thought it would be) from amazon. i don’t really have […]
a couple weeks ago, i fell in love. i don’t normally go for non-classic bundt pans because they are usually too complicated. why would i want a sunflower-, rose-, or sandcastle-shaped bundt pan? that the cake isn’t a standard layer cake is already enough for […]
as my funds run out (i just parted with my tuition money – my first semester paid with money i earned all on my own!), i am still managing to fritter away money on my baking experiments. i guess i’ll just have to work more hours on my freelance stuff.
i have to admit that, in the absence of my (cambridge) roommates, it’s really nice that people at the office are willing to eat things that people bring in. in cambridge, we basically have a revolving door and somebody is over almost every day or night, thus creating the perfect environment to give away food after every experiment. in new york, i just don’t know as many people, nor do the people i know live close enough to just stop by in the evenings. so the office is my stand-in recipient of my baking experiments.
this week’s experiment is actually a pretty poor in terms of rating an experiment, and more a crowd pleaser for work – it’s a chocolate pound cake i’ve made several times. i like pound cake in general because it has very little artificial leavening – ie, baking soda or baking powder. instead, it derives its structure and texture from the actual making of the cake – if you don’t mix the batter enough, your pound cake won’t have the right texture. when i bought my first baking cookbook, the author expounded on the virtue of creaming the butter for a full five minutes every time. i admit that i was a young and naive 18 year old at the time, and i scoffed. i still make cookies with a wooden spoon (ie no creaming the butter), but i am a convert to creaming the butter properly for cakes. creaming the butter incorporates air into the butter, giving your cake structure and texture. pound cake is essentially a study in how to incorporate air into your batter – the standard method is to cream the butter, beat the butter and sugar for a good long 10 minutes, add the eggs one at a time, then alternate dry ingredients and some moisture-rich ingredient (sour cream, in this case), beating each in every time. so you see that by beating everything in very slowly, you develop the structure of the cake purely by mixing the ingredients together. the efficiency of the method is a beautiful thing. (more…)
when i was growing up there were tons of things that my sister and i weren’t allowed to have: twinkies, hostess cupcakes, tv dinners, all manner of synthetic food. this was all for my own good, of course, but when i was ten years old […]
i vaguely remember having promised to update you all on the longevity of the pound cake. i also vaguely remember having forgotten – ok, i very distinctly remember having forgotten to do so. so with respect to elvis’ poundcake, i’d like to report that the […]
it’s a good thing i didn’t eat breakfast. because i just made a cake that made me remember why millions of people survived without chocolate cake for centuries.
typically i’m not a huge fan of vanilla-flavored cakes; they tend to be overly dry, or have too much vanilla…essentially i’ve come to realize that i’m just not a fan of vanilla in general, unless it’s ice cream. ice cream is one of the few venues in which producers manage not to go overboard (in the case of good vanilla ice cream).
i recently made shuna fish lydon’s caramel cake. it had a gorgeous photograph: it was golden-brown (closer to a dark brown), somewhere between a golden cake and gingerbread, with a larger-than-normal crumb. it looked moist, but not too moist, not dry, and just…beautiful. (more…)
sometime (again, my memory is pretty much shot) after my final review, carrie wanted to make coq au vin from the latest issue of cook’s illustrated. i offered to make dessert, and then cast about thinking of a winter dessert that would be suitable. i […]
carrie: and when we go to star, we could get – me: pork loin! carrie: yeah, that too…but i was thinking of ice cream. (24 hours later) carrie: last night i had a dream about rare meat…i think it was the pork loin. * * […]
when i was younger, my mother used to buy my grandmother’s birthday cake at konditor meister. their cakes were these enormous, wonderful confections – a dark, dark chocolate cake filled with whipped cream and cherries, with a bit of rum. on top, they were decorated with huge chocolate-covered strawberries. in keeping with the times, we weren’t allowed to eat the frosting (buttercream). i’ll have you know that i gleefully eat frosting now, although my mother’s ploy worked to a degree – my tolerance for frosting is still pretty low and i can’t stand supermarket frosting, where you can still taste the grit of the sugar. there are certain occasions when the grit of sugar is an acceptable texture, for example, whipped cream. frosting is not one of those occasions. (more…)
after having swallowed too many bites of those awful carmel ice cream cakes, my sister and i began making our grandmother’s birthday cake every year. for the past four years or so, we’ve made variations on the same cake for her birthday, which falls on […]