I’ve seen a lot of recipes for oreos over the past year or so, as it has become increasingly trendy to make classic American treats at home (twinkies, hostess cupcakes, oreos, ketchup, etc). I usually pass them by, thinking that while homemade hostess cupcakes […]
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 […]
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 december 26th.
this year would be no different from the rest; the desired cake would be chocolate with chocolate frosting, with cherries somehow involved in the whole shebang. i was away from my very infrequently updated recipe file, which contains the chocolate cake recipe from American Classics, one of the America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks – which is, notably, different from the one in The Best Recipe. this recipe is my favorite chocolate cake recipe, and i have not yet found one to rival it. however, it was 25 miles away, so i consulted epicurious.com.
197 recipes later, i had chosen a cake – the chocolate layer cake with milk chocolate frosting. however, i wasn’t particularly excited about a milk chocolate frosting, so i sifted through more icing recipes until i had a great idea. the chocolate frosting i’ve liked most during my years of baking experience is a chocolate frosting from Cook’s Illustrated, specifically the whipped ganache that went with yellow cupcakes. when i made them last december, i slightly overbaked the cupcakes, and accordingly the combination was forgotten through the mediocrity of the overall result. however, the frosting had been fantastic – it was a regular ganache, but whipped. (more…)