I'm finally in the position to contribute to my blog again. Let's see what has been happening?
well, i finished my cake project of 2012. In November I made a Almond cake for my friends post wedding party....
and in December I made a Buche de Noel....
In 2013, I've decided to take on bread. I got all types on my list and have already made pretzels (which didn't turn out to hot. I think I fucked up the yeast...must try again!)
and foccacia (which I used to make a muffuletta for the old man)
One thing is for sure, bread is WAY harder to make than cake or pie. It will take me a while to perfect bread...especially all the varieties.
In other food related news, Toddski got me a tagine for xmas and I have been experimenting with Moroccan food and preserved lemons. I just love Mediterranean food and need to eat more of it and less burgers. I AM getting older.
At the end of last year I got to see two of my favorite bands, Neil Young with Crazy Horse and THE STONES! Both shows kicked ass but the Stones really delivered. Complete with Mick Taylor! I am hoping to see Seger later this year and maybe even Fleetwood Mac. I can't resist the white witch.
Toddski's book was just mentioned in Publisher's Weekly and he has a long interview in the current issue of PW Select. Yay! You can buy his book here. It has a new cover designed by our friend Christophe that is far better than the one pictured.
Lastly, I am going to explore the Hudson Valley this year in hopes of moving to a smaller, less expensive area where I can open my dream restaurant/bakery, Kookies. More on that later when I have a better idea of if it can actually happen. If you have any thoughts on upstate towns, please email me!
I realize I haven't posted anything in a while. I have been stupid busy with work and holiday crap. I have been keeping up with my cake resolution, i even made 2 cakes in November, but I will just post about the Almond Cake with Raspberry jam. This month I will be attempting a Buche de Noel, so wish me luck. I think for the new year, I will be making bread every month. Donuts, croissants, bagels, challah...I'll figure it out. Anyway, I just thought of something awesome to make my husband for xmas...
You guessed it. I made another birthday cake. This month, it was for my friend Tim (buy his book!). I LOVE anything coconut. Coconut milk, coconut rum, coconut cream pie, Almond Joys, those neopolitan coconut candies made by Brachs, you get the idea. It's the wonder fruit. So versatile and delicious. Is it a fruit? It is definitely the weirdest one. You need a hammer and an awl to get in one of those bad boys. But then you get to reap the benefits of its dank interior. When I lived in Raleigh, I would every once in a while make a special trip to Hayes Barton for an enormous slice of their coconut cake. (*side note- if ever in Raleigh and you want an absurdly huge piece of cake or pie, go to Hayes Barton. In fact all their portions are huge, so go hungry). I'm not sure if this one is as good, but it's pretty damn good.
Luckily, Tim also likes coconut cake. He told me tales of his mom's coconut cake that was "wet" it was so moist. Not sure if I'm picturing that correctly...As usual, I was hard pressed to find a good recipe. My criteria this time though was that it had to be coocnutty (as well as moist and delicious). Just because a cake is white, with white frosting and has coconut all over it, it doesn't mean that cake is a coconut cake. In fact that is unacceptable. The coconut must be infused. The cake must reek of Coppertone...but not taste of it. The whole thing should transport you back to a 1953 vacation in the tropics when coconuts were exotic.
I also knew I wanted the cake to be white all over. White cake, white frosting, untoasted coconut. The cake recipe (not frosting! frosting will follow) I chose is from Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes. I found the recipe posted on another blog and the woman discussed it's coconutty-ness which made it sound delicious. What sold me though, was her photograph of the slice. This is actually how I search for recipes and mold them together. I use Google IMAGES. I find the picture that most resembles what I want the end result to look like and go from there.
You can see from the picture of my slice, this cake is white and dense, and you can't really tell, but the moisture level is good. You can also note how I should have evened out the layers but I am unprofessional like that. I want it to look relatively good but what matters most to me is how it tastes. The recipe is called Southern Coconut Cake. I figured since Tim's mom is Southern, this might be a comparable cake. This frosting suggested, however, was a cream cheese frosting, which, don't get me wrong, I love, but it didn't seem traditional for a coconut cake. Instead I used this one from America's Test Kitchen:
Frosting
4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
Pinch table salt
1# butter, soft but kind of cold
1/4c cream of coconut
1t coconut extract
1t vanilla
Combine whites, sugar and salt in a bowl over slightly boiling water and whisk until opaque. Transfer to mixer and beat on high until whites are cool and thick and sticky. Reduce speed and beat in butter a little at a time. Beat in rest of ingredients scraping down the bowl as necessary.
I used half this recipe for icing. (Something about a pound of butter kind of made me think, yikes!) The cake it is originally for is a four layer cake so I didn't think I needed as much. I actually had barely enough, and the only reason i got away with it is because I covered the cake in coconut flakes. So if you are making this a three layer cake or if you really like frosting make the full recipe. If you are like me and like minimal frosting, you can get away with half. I really enjoyed this cake. The coconut flavor is there but not insane. You get more coconut out of the frosting than the actually cake. The frosting is not super sweet as well, more buttery than sweet. It was dense and kept for a few days, wrapped. You could also toast the coconut if you like it better that way. All in all, a winner.
I'm entering my Bacon Apple Pie in Enid's Apple Pie contest this weekend. I probably won't win, but it will be fun to compete and see everyone else's entries. If you want to make it, the recipe is as follows:
1 pie crust of your liking
6 apples (I use a mixture of what I can find, hopefully a couple of these varieties: granny smith, golden delicious, spartan, mutsu, honeycrisp and empires)
1/2t each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg
1-2T lemon juice
1/4c sugar (sometimes a little less)
2T flour
For the topping:
1c flour
2/3c brown sugar
6 strips of bacon, cooked using your preferred method and roughly chopped
1 stick of butter, at room temp and cut into small pieces
Roll out your pie crust and place it in your pie pan and chill while you make the filling and topping.
Preheat the oven to 375. Obviously, when you buy apples they don't come peeled, cored or sliced so go ahead and do that and place them in a bowl. I find that one of these helps a lot AND it's inexpensive. Sprinkle the rest of the ingredients over them and toss so every apple has yummyness on it.
In a separate bowl make the topping. Toss together the brown sugar and flour until combined. Add the bacon bits and mix well. Then add the butter. What I do is just kind of mashed the butter and flour mix with my fingers until everything is combined and you have small clumps of streusel.
Put the apple mixture into the pie crust and top with the brown sugar mixture. Bake for 40-45 minutes? I don't really time things anymore. I just kind of check on it every ten or fifteen minutes and when the pie is bubbling through the crumb topping, I know it's done.
Don't try and make this for the contest either. That would be so lame. But do contact me if you want I should make you one.
Every time I get on an express train, I am surprised at how GD slow it moves (I shouldn't be at this point, but I am). I don't think anyone at the MTA has any idea what the term "express" means. Well, here ya go MTA:
ex·press/ikˈspres/
Adjective:
Operating at high speed.
The key words here are high speed. That does NOT involve stopping every minute mid-route. It also does not involve moving at about 5 mph. Get it together please.
A few weeks ago, I got me a zip car account. I was sick and tired of being stuck in this GD city all the time. I had been wanting to travel upstate and to the beach for years. Let me tell you first off, Zip Car is awesome. They have cords for your ipods, they pay for gas and they have e-z passes so you can pay the tolls later. Also, you can rent hybrids. Sold! Anyway, my first trip was to Storm King.
Storm King is this sculpture museum about an hour and a half away form the city. I had been wanting to go, mainly because there is an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture there. If you are not familiar with the man, I suggest watching the documentaryRivers and Tides. He is the most patient man on the planet.
Once we arrived at Storm King and started walking around, I found there was much more to see. The first thing that really caught my eye was the giant R (first photo)...that's at least what it looked like to me. In search of the restrooms, we came across this LOTR type sculpture (above) and this overlook of the land (below).
We kept walking on my quest to find this Goldsworthy wall. We went by a giant canoe, a pendulum and a deconstructed buddha-like statue...and then the wall started. Actually, it wasn't THE wall, it was a mini version. Then we saw the real one.
It weaves in and out of the trees as Mr. Goldsworthy does not like to disturb the natural habitat. The coolest part is that it ends at a pond (or small lake, as I like to call it) but it doesn't end. The wall slowly descends into the water and disappears and then reappears on the other side and continues up a hill. I am not happy with my photos of this effect so you will have to go see for yourself.
On the other side of the wall and pond there was this wave hill. I'm not really sure how they built it but it looks killer. That is Todd all the was to the left on top of the hill waving his arms. There were children rolling down the hills too. The museum is totally worth the $12. So much more is on display than what I have shown. On the way home, we stopped at a nice farm and bought some honey and looked at some ponies and a pig but I had already run out of film...
I can't believe I have followed thru on my resolution this far. It's already September! Only 3 more cakeys and I will have succeeded.
This month it was my dear friend, Jimmy's 40th birthday so I just had to make him a cake (next month it is his husband's birthday so he will probably get one too...). My scheduled cake for this month was a Chocolate Peanut Butter cake and lucky for me Jimmy approved. I had found this recipe on, you guessed it, Smitten Kitchen a while ago and have been dying to try it.
Let me preface this post by saying that my oven has been broken for 2.5 weeks. A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to bring a pie to a restaurant to see if they wanted to buy some to sell. I went to preheat my oven and twenty minutes later it still was not hot... 4 visits by repairmen later (3 by someone who doesn't fix ovens and 1 by someone who does), and I still don't have an oven. I am told I will be getting a new one today. We'll see.. Tim and Jimmy were nice enough to let me come upstairs to make the pie in their oven and it turned out nicely. However, the restaurant in which I took it to turned out to be very un-dude. The owner stood me up (he knew the exact time I was coming) and even though I left the pie with the chef, I never heard back from anyone. WTF? Who does that? You can at least contact me and say one of three things, it sucked, I loved it or just thanks for the pie, we'll think about it.
Anyway, screw them, onto the cake. I knew Jimmy's birthday was the 6th so I had to get this cake made. Again, T&J granted me permission to use their oven one afternoon and I got the baking part out of the way. This cake was extremely moist (view photo). After the layers cooled in the pan for a while, I unmolded them directly onto plastic wrap, cooled them a little longer then wrapped them tightly and placed them in the freezer. I knew if I had left them to cool directly on my wire rack for too long, they would stick and I would have a disaster.
Not sure why the cake is so damn moist (even a week later), perhaps the vinegar or the veg oil? They didn't even ever seem to freeze fully. On the fifth, I made the frosting and glaze. I modified the frosting a bit because it called for FIVE cups of powdered sugar. FIVE! That is insane. I put three in, but then thought it should be a little firmer so I added one more. That was plenty. I can't imagine more sugar making it better. I also had more than enough to ice the cake and write a birthday message on top.
The glaze is the fun part. Even my husband, the artist, was commenting on how nicely I had made the drips look. I also did this slightly differently. I don't have the patience for a double boiler sometimes so I do the heat the liquid and pour over the chocolate method or just heat everything on low. It worked fine. There was also a buttload of this stuff, you could probably cut it down to 3/4 of the recipe, but it's also better safe than sorry.
Final verdict- cake was a success. Everyone loved it. Now I am going to have some for breakfast...
So it's August and pretty hot out. I figured it was high time I made an ice cream cake. I recently acquired the ice cream maker attachment for my Kitchenaid. I spent so much money at this one store, they gave me $75 off anything I wanted. I only had to pay $12 for it...well 12 dollars plus the 200 I had to spend to get the discount, but I got a lot of great stuff! Anyway, all summer I have been making small batches of ice cream. First Pistachio, then Lemon Custard (didn't like that one too much-it needed to be more of a lemon creme cookie filling tasting), then cookies n cream- my childhood favorite and finally teaberry which tastes like pepto bismal but better.
I knew that in August I was going to make an ice cream cake modeled after a Baskin Robbins ice cream cake which features both cake and ice cream, but with the addition of Carvel crunchies. The big decisions came with what kind of ice cream to feature and what kind of cake. TBC after the jump...
I decided I wanted to make espresso ice cream. I LOVE coffee ice cream. At first I was torn between a white or a chocolate cake. Chocolate goes so well with coffee but I already had the chocolate crunchies in there, so I went with a white cake. I figured it would be kind of a play on tiramisu minus the delicious marscapone (however, I made some mistakes...)
I went to my trusty ice cream cookbook for the ice cream recipe. I tend to make custard based ice creams as they taste richer than "Philadelphia" style ones. There was no recipe for espresso ice cream so I improved on the coffee one. I used 2 1/2 tablespoons of instant espresso powder instead of soaking coffee beans. The ice cream has a strong espresso flavor but I really like it. It's not overly sweet either. This really is an excellent ice cream cookbook, I've had it for 13 years.
For the cake layer, I chose the Momofuko Milk Bar's birthday cake sans sprinkles. I figured I should try it out since its always getting so much damn press. I got the recipe here. Verdict: don't know if this was the best cake to pick. It's not as moist as I like a cake to be, but maybe that has something to do with it having to be frozen. I feel like I should have soaked the cake in a kahlua coffee mix to make it more tiramisu-ey. That may have also helped it stay moist or it may have frozen it more. The flavor of the cake is not strong either, but that may have to do with the espresso ice cream overpowering it. I wish I had used this recipe instead.
On my way to pick up a rental car for our trip to Maine last month, I came across this amazing old school Carvel. I instantly thought of Fudgie the Whale, a cake my husband and I are obsessed with. A whale shaped cake that is smiling! Google it. I eventually bought him one for his book release party (buy one of his books here!) and while I was there I purchased a couple of extra containers of "crunchies". You can do that! And it only costs $2 per container.
This cake was not too hard to complete. I first made the cake part and removed it from the pan. I froze the ice cream in my maker. I lined the same clean cake pan with some saran wrap and spread the soft ice cream in it (it came up about half way), covered it in saran wrap and froze it for about an hour or two so it was a little firmer. Then i pulled it out of the freezer and topped the ice cream with a layer of crunchies and then the cooled cake. I wrapped that in Saran Wrap and froze it again over night so it got real hard. I put a few books on top too to weigh down the cake so it would stick together nicely.
The next morning I whipped up a half batch of this icing. I quickly ice the cake- you have to be fast cause it starts melting fast unless your kitchen is in a walk in fridge-and since it looked kind of crappy, I used the leftover crunchies to coat the sides. I then froze it again for a few hours. Like I said earlier, it's a pretty good cake but not my favorite that I have made this year and I really think that is because of the cake part. Oh well, better luck next time...
Hey! So this month marked my 32nd birthday and I wanted a strawberry cake. I had a small problem though. I also wanted to go to Maine for a couple days. My solution was, bake the cake, freeze it and when I got back from my mini-vacay, ice it and share with friends.
First things first, bake the cake. I don't know if all of you know this, but summers in NYC suck ass. It's hot as f?@#, the humidity is stiffling, and people don't really have central air in their apartments so it pretty much is an awful idea to bake anything or to turn your oven on at all. But GD it, I made a pact to make a cake every month and I'm gonna do it.
Strawberry cake seemed like a nice summer treat. I also love, Love, LOVE the strawberry cupcakes at Sugar Sweet Sunshine and had to be able to make something similar at home. I used another recipe from Smitten Kitchen, the Pink Lady Cake, but I used the same cream cheese frosting recipe I used on my carrot cake cause I had some in my freezer.
The cake portion of this project went without a hitch. I didn't burn anything, or undercook anything (like last month), they didn't stick to the cooling rack or nothing. The only thing I suggest if you make this cake, is to add a few drops of red food coloring so the cake is pinker. Also, I used fresh berries as they are in season now. The frosting I made was delicious. It is not mega sweet and the sour cream gives it a slight tang.
I got my husband to help decorate since I felt weird about writing Happy Birthday to myself on a cake. He did the top (which includes a drawing of me in muppet form) and I did the dots on the sides, following the photo on Smitten. The end product was a totally delicious birthday cake. I took it out to dinner and to the bar we did karaoke at. People kept urging me to give it all away, but I said "Hell no". I took about a quarter of it home and have been happy I did so for the last few nights. It is a super moist cake filled with berry flavor. (Oh, and PS- the freezing took nothing away from the taste, so you can make them at night when it's cooler and ice during the day.) You should make one.
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