Baby Chocolate Oblivions

This picture says it all. How do you feel about unvarnished chocolate? If the idea of something that is the essence of pure, rich chocolate, enriched by butter and saved from heaviness by the addition of beaten eggs, this cake will be your idea of heaven. If that description sounds over the top, then this is probably not the cake for you.
Compared to last week's various buttercream fiascos, these baby cakes are simplicity itself: Melt together a bit of sugar and a lot of high-quality butter and chocolate,

heat a half-dozen beaten eggs until they're lukewarm,

and then beat them again until they've tripled in size and gone from egg-yolk yellow to eggnog cream.

Then fold the eggs into the chocolate.

Actually getting them baked was much tricker than mixing them up. I had two six-cup silicone muffin pans instead of one twelve-cup pan, and an ancient roasting pan that was just a hair too small to hold both pans without smooshing them up a bit. Fortunately, because they're silicone, they smooshed easily.

But the really tricky part was getting the pans and the rack out of the roasting pan, which had hot water on the bottom, without a) burning your hands, b) getting hot water on the cakes, c) accidentally squirting more water on the cakes when trying to pull water out of the pan with a bulb baster, or d) all of the above. Note to self: throw that miserable cheap bulb baster away and get one that works. Also, Rose says that the cakes just twist easily out of the pans. I didn't think it was that easy, and many of the cakes left little pieces behind. This was not all bad, of course, because I was forced to eat all these little leftover pieces. And eventually, I got them all out of the pans, and even the ones that had absorbed a bit of hot water seemed none the worse for wear.

I invited a few neighbors over to test these cakes. Fortunately, they were all chocolate lovers. These baby Oblivions is that they come within just a hair of being too much--too rich, too chocolatey, too fudgy. But even the small piece of cake is probably too much. With the first bite, you may think this is the most delicious thing you've ever eaten. By the tenth bite, you're not sure you can, or should, eat another forkful. When I took the rest of the cakes into work, I noticed that everyone dived into theirs with great enthusiasm, but not everyone ate the whole piece. Even with these provisos, my final verdict is that this cake is chocolate with a soul.

Last Cake, Next Cake

This week's headline: Rose's Heavenly Cakes has just been named one of Amazon's Top 10 Cookbooks of 2009. For those of us who are working our way through the book (and who have used Rose's other cookbooks), this isn't a big surprise, but it's certainly deserved. Congratulations, Rose!
Some of the other books on the list look good too. Does anyone have any experience with any of the others?

The pumpkin cake brought out a burst of creativity in the Heavenly Bakers. Not only were there some great decorations, but there were also some clever substitutes for the pumpkin mold. Kristina used a Fairytale Cottage bundt pan, but ended up lopping off the trees because they stuck in the pan. Several people used bundt pans, and others made cupcakes. Mendy made a layer cake and Hanaa used a 9 x 13-inch pan. (This is the first week Hanaa has had a workable kitchen, so she was finally able to bake along). Faithy has got to get the award for the cake that's most unlike the illustration in the book. She covered her pumpkin cake in white fondant and made it her 20th Anniversary cake! (Check out the wedding couple on and around the cake). Also worth checking out is Kate Coldrick's blog. Kate is the woman who has gained fame by figuring out how to turn British flour into an approximation of American cake flour. She and fellow blogger Melinda have dubbed themselves the "Fallen Angels" because, although they follow the adventures and misadventures of the Heavenly Bakers, they have decided to cheer us on from the sidelines.

FEATURED BAKER
This week's Featured Baker is Nancy B. She managed to buy the pumpkin cake pan at a bargain price on eBay, an excellent idea if you plan ahead. Nancy said the pan was out of stock at her regular cooking supply store because a cake using the mold was recently featured in Southern Living and there was a run on it at the store. Good thing it wasn't feature on Oprah, or none of us would have it.
Nancy decided to make Rose's golden neoclassic buttercream instead of the burnt orange meringue buttercream, but she had a few difficulties with that. (There is a theme in this week's icing attempts. Only a lucky few got it just right the first time). She also thought it was tricky to frost the pumpkin and was not completely satisfied with her marzipan ornaments. I personally think her completed pumpkin looks terrific! But we're more critical of our own work, aren't we?


We get a total break from any kind of icing, buttercream or otherwise, for the next cake: Baby Chocolate Oblivions. I think a lot of us have made this cake before. I first heard of it from Evil Cake Lady, who referred to it as a gluten-free cake. Which it is, I guess, but calling it gluten-free makes it sound so healthy and virtuous, whereas the cake itself is so ... not. The recipe has only four ingredients: chocolate, butter, eggs, and sugar.
Rose highly recommends using silicone cupcake pans for their ease in unmolding the little cakes. I made these cakes last weekend and had a little batter left over, so I made one in a custard pan that I sprayed with Baker's Secret. It unmolded very easily with a sharp knife, so I would recommend that as an alternative to the silicone cupcake pans. In fact, it actually unmolded a little easier than the cakes in the silicone pan, which tended to leave behind a small bit of cake. This was actually good, because you couldn't tell it when the cakes where rightside up, and it also allowed me to sample little bits of the cake.

Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream

When you apply to colleges, the standard advice is to apply to a mixture of "reach," "match," and "safety" schools. The safety schools are the ones you're sure to get in; a match school is a good fit for your qualifications, and the reach schools are the ones you want to go to, but probably won't get in to, like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
As I looked through this cookbook, I divided the recipes in a similar way. The safety cakes are the ones on the quick-and-easy list. The match cakes are a little more complex and time-consuming, but within my range. The stretch cakes, though....that's another story. As I browsed the book, I saw some cakes that I knew I just couldn't make. My Harvard cakes. This pumpkin cake was one of them--not for the cake itself, which is easy--but for the icing and the decorations. Those were clearly beyond me. And yet, I finished it. It took two tries for the burnt sugar creme anglaise, and the frosting job has kind of a sixth-grade look about it, but still. I did it.

The buttercream was amazingly good, and such complexities of flavor! My first try on the creme anglaise was a disaster. Ironically, the reason for the disaster was that I was trying to make sure I'd get it right. A burnt sugar creme anglaise is the first step in making this buttercream, and I decided I'd get a new instant-read candy thermometer, so there would be no doubt about the temperature of the sugar.

Here's a picture of my pan with the sugar turning just about the right color of deep amber. But the thermometer was reading only about 200 instead of the 370 degrees it was supposed to reach. So I let it cook, and cook some more.

Any moron can see that this is beyond deep amber, but my thermometer was still nowhere close to 370. Finally I gave up and poured in the hot milk. Indeed, it did "bubble up furiously," as the directions promised. But it smelled a lot like burned sugar. I don't mean burnt sugar, as in a nice burnt sugar cake. I mean burned sugar, as in charred. I persevered, and got a disgusting dark brown mess that I couldn't even strain because it was too thick.

I was still deluding myself that possibly this was what it was supposed to look like until I tasted it. It was gross. I dumped it out and started over. I looked at the my brand-new instant-read thermometer directions (some might recommend doing this before using it) and saw that its temperature sensor was three inches above the tip of the thermometer, which might work splendidly if you were making a big pot of fudge, but didn't work at all for a tiny quantity of creme anglaise. And, while I'm being cranky, I'll point out that the creme anglaise recipe says it makes two cups, which is completely impossible when it contains only 3 egg yolks, a half-cup of milk, and a quarter-cup of sugar. But it worked just fine on the second try.

I think this is more or less what it's supposed to look like.
After my second try, I decided I'd had enough for the day and put it in the refrigerator until Pumpkin Cake, Day 2.
Bright and early on Day 2, I made the cake. Completely uneventful and easy.
Because I was in such a good mood, I worked extra hard on skinning those dang walnuts.


Here's what the cakes looked like coming out of the oven in the pumpkin-shaped pan:

And this is what they look like after being unmolded from the pans:

When I saw how cute they looked, I was glad I'd used the pan.
Back to the frosting--the next step is the Italian meringue, which I'd already made so the thrill was gone. Jim said the boiling sugar/water combo looked like a thousand little fish eyes. I wished he hadn't said that.

My hand mixer died a few weeks ago, and I have trouble beating a small amount of meringue (this one uses only one egg white), so I had to run to Target for a new one. I couldn't remember which one was recently recommended by Cook's Illustrated, so I bought a KitchenAid. It works just fine.

You can't tell from the picture, but I'm pouring about a quarter-cup of reduced orange juice into the frosting. The instructions say you can either use frozen orange concentrate or reduce your own by microwaving freshly squeezed orange juice until it's thick and syrupy.

Now it was time for the decorating: the moment I'd been dreading. I called my daughter Sarah and whined to her about how I was going to mess it up and she, of the more artistic nature, should come and help me. She was busy, so I took a deep breath and started in on it.
Enough orange food coloring to tint the frosting light orange and a smaller amount a darker, deeper orange.

Slicing off the top of the cakes and putting a little buttercream between the layers.

Jim ate most of the scraps from the top-slicing-off exercise, and proclaimed them excellent.
I taste the burnt orange meringue buttercream and also proclaim it excellent.
It does not, however, go smoothly onto the cake. Observe my icing skills, all you people who think I'm being too hard on myself when I say I'm not a polished cake baker.

This is the best I can do. My pumpkin is not nice and smooth like the picture in the book. My pumpkin looks like it has warts. On the other hand, my cocoa-colored marzipan stem is more successful than I thought it would be. (If you don't think it's successful, there's no need to be brutally honest).

The marzipan tendril--not as successful, but it's a recognizable tendril. Maybe a squirrel sat on it. Not everything in nature is perfect, you know.

I had a leaf-shaped cookie cutter, so I wasn't left to my own devices in shaping the leaves, for which I was grateful. One leaf is green, the other is starting to turn colors.

I was really getting into stamping out the leaves. And the brown tendril looked better than my earlier green ones.

By the time I'd done the cocoa tendril, I was getting tired of the whole marzipan thing, and I was hungry. Fortunately, as my cake was by no means perfect, it didn't bother me too much to cut into it.

This cake was so good. As is true with so many of Rose's cakes, the flavors and textures blend perfectly and you want to savor each bite because there are so many levels. Here, the buttercream is intensely and authentically orange because of the homemade orange concentrate and fresh orange rind, and the undertone of burnt sugar is a perfect counterpart to the tartness of the orange. It's rich (well, of course, it's buttercream), but the meringue makes it so light you forget you're eating two sticks of butter. The cake is just about perfect. You expect a pumpkin cake to be dense, but this one manages to be light as well.
But, while I'm pleased that I did the whole pumpkin shebang because it was a real challenge to me, I don't think I'd go that route again. It would be so much easier in a bundt pan or a couple of loaf pans, and is so rich in flavors that I'm not sure it even requires a frosting. I think an orange glaze might also be a good idea and much easier. This cake is so good that it deserves to be made more than a special-occasion, pull-out-all-the-stops kind of cake. We're going to be making a pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving, but this would also be a fantastic Thanksgiving dessert--or a dessert that you make just because you feel like having pumpkin cake.

TASTING PANEL

Sarah: "A perfect autumnal cake. It's really good, and the spices are perfect. The nuts add a lot to the texture."
Jim: "I love the pumpkin flavor and the frosting is not too sweet."
Karen: "It's a nice, light frosting. The cake is great. It's moist, but light too--the pumpkin could make it heavy, but it didn't. It's everything you'd want in a pumpkin cake."
Rochelle: "The best cake you've baked."



* * * * *
We have three new bakers this week. Welcome Jeanne, who hails from a small town in Mississippi that was nearly flattened by Katrina, and who lives in Louisiana now.
Also new is Shoshana, who will adapt the recipes to be non-dairy. Her blog should be a helpful resource for people who need to make those kinds of recipe adaptations.
Finally, as you might guess from the name of her blog, Positively cupcakes

is a big cupcake fan. We'll have to see whether she converts all the recipes to cupcakes. That could be a challenge.

I'd like to get people's input on whether we should think about limiting the number of bakers. I'd hate to say no to people who are willing to make the commitment to do this, but there is an advantage to being small enough so we can check each other's blogs and learn from one another. Please let me know your thoughts.

Last Cake, Next Cake

Not as many people made this cake as made the apple upside-down cake, but most of those who did liked it as much as I did, even Raymond, who tells a funny story about a cake that nearly ruined his childhood: his aunt's dreaded Mazola oil cake. He was afraid he'd end up hating this chiffon cake as much as he hated his aunt's, but he didn't. If you haven't taken a look at his version, you might want to check out how beautifully he decorated it.
Jenn decorated her cake by making a heart-shaped design made out of whole almonds on top of the cake. Very simple, but pretty!
Nicola whipped up her cake while she was packing for a trip to New Zealand--with her 15-month old son! And she doesn't even sound frazzled. The cake looks great.
This week's featured baker is Vicki. I like reading Vicki's blog because, like me, she sometimes feels inept in the world of baking. She couldn't find blanched almonds, so she blanched them herself, which I thought was pretty gutsy. And she nearly forgot to add the almonds and flour, and had to toss them in at the last minute--a mistake I've made myself once or twice. Although her cake turned out just fine, Vicki has volunteered herself to be the tester that Rose really needs: the "unskilled-wanna-be-baker .... The simpleton tester. Like a lab experiment behind one way glass. To see when confusion sets in." This is not a bad idea, although I'm not so sure that Vicki is really the one to do it. I was thinking more of myself, to tell you the truth.

Next week: The Great Pumpkin Cake, just in time for Halloween. This looks like an easy-enough cake. You probably have everything you need to make it in your pantry or refrigerator right now, at least you do if you've been heeding the warnings about the Pumpkin Shortage of 2009. You also need walnut oil, which you may not have on hand. A word of advice: put that walnut oil in the refrigerator after you've used it because it can go rancid pretty quickly.
The frosting looks a lot trickier than the cake. It has three components: a creme anglaise, and Italian meringue, and then the completed "Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream." The only other time I've made a frosting that needs five words to describe it is when I made the "Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting." And guess what book that's from?
Then there's the decorating! If you use the pumpkin mold, you can decorate it with marzipan stem, leaves, and tendrils. Although I've never tried to make marzipan leaves and tendrils, I have an uneasy feeling that I'm not going to take to it like a duck to water. If you don't use the pumpkin mold, why bother? This might be a good argument in favor of using some other kind of pan. It looks like the kind of cake that would do very well in a bundt pan or in loaf pans.
Good luck!

Almond Shamah Chiffon

I loved this cake! And herein is an advantage of deciding to bake every recipe in a book. If I hadn't committed myself to that, I would never have baked this cake. Too putzy, too many steps, too spongy a cake, too cute and pink.... But now I'm thinking that I might want this cake for my birthday cake instead of the passion fruit, which was my previous choice.
It is putzy, though. I took a vacation day to stay home and bake this cake so I could serve it to my investment club. When my friend Teddie asked me why I hadn't been at work, and I told her I'd stayed home to bake a cake, she was astonished. How long did it take? I told her about five hours, counting everything including cooling times. Then she asked me what had taken so long. I told her about toasting and grinding the almonds, sawing off the tops of the cakes, beating the eggs for five minutes, making the Amaretto syrup, etc. She replied, "No normal person would bake this cake! It's way too much trouble!" She might be right. If you're a normal person, stay away from this recipe. I must add that she stopped insulting me after she ate a piece.
No individual step is hard, but there are a fair number of steps. My mom taught me to put all the ingredients out on the counter before I started cooking something. She didn't know, I'm sure, that there was a French name for this common-sense step. Mise en place does sound more chef-y than put the ingredients on the counter.

I couldn't figure out how the almonds were going to work in the sponge cake. Sponge cake is light, ground almonds make a cake dense. How can you have a light, dense cake? Amazingly, that's pretty much what you get. It's so moist and tender, yet it has the slight texture of almonds, which gives the batter )made with egg yolks beaten for five minutes)

and a meringue, some heft.

There are lots of warnings about how fragile and tender the cake layers are, so I held my breath every time I handled them, which was a fair amount of breath-holding.

Some of the five hours it took to make the cake included a run to the liquor store to buy some Amaretto.

My little cache of liquor has quite an amazing number of bottles of expensive things I've bought for one recipe and never used again. In fact, I've bought three different bottles of Calvados on three different occasions for three different recipes. Each time, the bottle has been pushed to the back of the cabinet and I forgot that I already had some. If anyone needs to borrow a quarter-cup of Calvados, I'm your go-to woman.
The syrup is easy enough to make. It just has to cool for a while. Once you denude the cake of its top crust and brush off any crumbs from the bottom crust,

you can happily brush alcoholic syrup on the layers

As I remember from my chocolate-raspberry tiramisu, however, after you do that, the cake becomes very, very fragile and will fall apart when moved. This was not a tragedy with the tiramisu because you could pretend that's how you wanted it. It's hard to pull that off with a layer cake.
I got so nervous I ordered Jim to put the first layer on the cake plate while I closed my eyes.

Meanwhile, I made the raspberry whipped cream.

I still had half a jar of seedless raspberry jam that I'd used for the tiramisu. It seemed like a lot, but was about 40 grams short of what I was supposed to use. Good old Jim offered to run to the grocery store and get more, but I decided it was close enough. I added 40 more grams of cream to make sure I had the correct total amount, and I added a little sugar to make up for the absence of jam. It was perfect.
I adore whipped cream, and I love the idea of using it for frosting. It seems more like you're required to eat it when it's the actual frosting, whereas when it's just a dollop served on the side, you always think that if you were a better person you wouldn't eat it. I always eat it anyway, but I appreciate not being put in that moral conundrum.

My investment club was awed. We'd already gone through a few bottles of wine and decided on a few stock purchases which we bought with money we'd made from selling stocks at a profit, which is not our usual modus operandi. So we were already a cheerful group, and we became even more cheerful when we started eating
this cake.

I don't know why I chose this for an autumn cake. It you were to attach this cake to a season, its pale yellow cake layers and girlishly pink whipped cream would definitely attach it to spring. It would be an adorable cake for a baby shower or for a Mother's Day dinner. On the other hand, it was pretty darned good on a chilly October night.
TASTING PANEL
Joyce: "Divine! This is the best cake I've ever had."
Betty: "Fabulous! The texture is so light you can hardly tell there are almonds in it."
Patty: "The raspberry is nice and tart--I like it that it's not too sweet."
Barbara: "This is a good alternative to chocolate."

* * * * * * * * *
We have another new baker. Lisa, who describes herself as an avid photographer and baker, is joining up. It's a perfect combination of interests for this project, and I'm looking forward to following her blog.

Last Cake, Next Cake

The apple upside-down cake was a winner! There was a wide variety of apples in use (Cortlands, Honey Crisps, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Cox (from England), and Ginger Gold). There were also a few people who didn't know what kind of apples they had, but everything worked.
The featured baker this week is Sugar Chef. When you look at her blog, you won't be surprised to learn that she's a professional pastry chef. All the Heavenly Bakers turned out lovely cakes, but not all of them are decorated to the nines, as Sugar Chef's is. Her apple pattern is perfect, and she also shows a piece of the cake plated with an amazing-looking icing flower and green leaf. How did you do that? But what can you expect from someone who's won a L'Affaire Chocolat competition and who markets her own homemade peanut brittle?
From the sublime to the very funny, I must also mention Nicola's account of her dinner party disaster wherein she bakes the upside-down cake in a springform pan that is not fully leak-proof. To quote her blog: "Our poor dinner guests had to listen to me witter on about the bloody oven (it is atrocious), while sitting in an ever increasing smoky haze, in the cold (had to get rid of the smoke by opening the door and windows!). They were even more surprised when I started to take photos of the disaster. After all, who would blog about smoking a cake?"
Finally, a little shout-out should go to Raymond, who gamely used his cell phone to take pictures of his upside-down cake because his camera was out of town.

Next week's cake, the Almond Shamah Chiffon, is not on the quick-and-easy list, and that generally means that there are a lot of steps involved. And, being a chiffon, it generally means a lot of eggs are involved. Again, no oddly-shaped cake pans to purchase, although it's time to start thinking about whether you're willing to pop for the pumpkin pan. (Check EBay). There were only five cans of Libby's pumpkin on the shelves of Whole Foods when I last checked, and I took three of them, feeling mildly guilty for being a hoarder. I'm very sorry if I got there before you did and bought up the pumpkin.

Apple Upside-Down Cake

This is literally the first cake in the book, and you could do worse than choose it to be the first one you make. Everyone likes apple, right? Apples are tasty and all-American, even if this is cake instead of pie. And it's easy, too--#1 on the Quick-and-Easy list. I'm afraid I'm going to work my way through the quick-and-easies and end up where I have five cakes left to bake and they're all killers. But this isn't a killer at all.
It was apple season even in the grocery store; although I didn't get to an apple orchard, there were lots of local apples at Lunds. I was pretty sure I'd end up choosing Honey Crisp, and indeed I did. The Macouns that people from the east coast are so fond of aren't available here. When I was at Martha's Vineyard, I was briefly excited when our host pointed out a big bowl of apples and said that some were Macouns. At last, I thought! I'll be able to see what the fuss is all about. But when I asked her which ones were Macouns, she said she didn't know. I ate an apple, which may or may not have been a Macoun.

Rose even gives instructions on how to most efficiently cut apple slices. She recommends using a melon baller on a halved apple, cutting each half in half, and cutting each quarter into three slices. I couldn't find my melon baller, which is not surprising. What's surprising is that I have a melon baller. Slices or square pieces of melon are just fine with me. So I did it the way my mom taught me.
This recipe requires toasting walnuts, but not rubbing the skins off. I don't know why some recipes demand skinless walnuts and others don't, but that's one of my least favorite steps, so I'm glad that this cake is less fussy than some others I could name.
The apples are sliced and sugared before the batter is made--you can do this up to one and one half hours before making the rest of the cake, and at least a half-hour before, but it doesn't get a "Plan Ahead" label. So you can just try to fill in a few words in the Saturday crossword while the apples are giving up their juices.

The Saturday crossword always makes me feel stupid. I go through the entire puzzle and I'm lucky if I know three or four words. Somehow I almost always end up completing it, but usually not until the afternoon. I hear that there are people who can do even the Saturday crossword in fifteen minutes. I'm glad I don't know any of them.
My nerve failed me a little bit in the next part, where you boil a mixture of the apple juices, brown sugar, and butter until the mixture is "bubbling thickly and deep amber in color."

I was afraid it would burn, and it looked deep amber to me, but if I'd let it boil for just 30 more seconds, I think I would have gotten a deeper caramel flavor.

Are you thinking I should have put the walnuts on first? That's what I thought, but I read the recipe again, looking for the instructions to scatter the walnuts on the sugar mixture. It turns out you don't do that until the cake is done, probably so the walnuts, which have already been toasted, don't get too brown. Jim is on red alert when he sees a bowl of some ingredient that's not been used. Ever since I forgot to add some key ingredient and then blamed Jim for not telling me about it, he's been on the lookout. But he's too polite to say, "You idiot! You forgot to add a key ingredient again!" So he said, "Umm, just wondering....do the walnuts go in the batter or on top?" I said they went on top but not until the cake was done. "You just think I forgot them, don't you?" I said in an accusatory tone. He admitted that was sort of true. But even I realize I can't yell at him for failing to remind him and then yell at him for reminding me. So I didn't yell, or even snarl.
Batter gets plopped on the apples. This is satisfying for some reason.

The cake was done after 35 minutes. When I use the convection setting, I can almost always count on the least recommended time. If I don't use convection, it takes longer. I know I should have a thermometer, but I don't.

The hold-your-breath moment comes when you have to turn the cake upside down and then carefully lift the pan off the cake. You know it's not going to be good when Rose tells you what to do if the apple slices stick to the pan. In fact, a few of them did, but it was nothing to ease them back into place.

When you start breathing again, you can scatter the walnuts on top.

Serving is easy, because it looks pretty either without whipped cream:

or with (mine is just plain whipped cream, not the bourbon whipped cream in the recipe, because I don't like bourbon):

There's a peach upside-down cake variation, which replaces walnuts and vanilla with almonds and almond extract, but peach season is over. I'd like to try it sometime--maybe when I finish this project and can bake something just because I feel like it. I can't really complain about being forced to bake this cake, however; it's a reach, moist sour cream cake with a good appley taste. A lovely dessert for a fall evening.

TASTING PANEL

Doug: "Much better than my mother used to make, but then she wasn't a very good cook." (Talk about damning with faint praise).

Laurel: "The walnuts are critical."

Mary: "I love the apples--what kind are they? The cake is so moist too."

Jan: "I liked it both ways, [with and without whipped cream], but "with" was best."

Jim: "It smelled really good when it was cooking, and it tastes great."

Karen: "I taste a kind of toffeeish flavor. It's really good."