summer! birthdays! while i gave my roommate a "choice" for her birthday cake (and it was, i would have baked almost anything), i was heavily leaning for chocolate guinness cake. it's been in my del.icio.us queue since december of 2004. that's three and a half years! luckily, i manipulated/convinced her that this indeed was the cake she wanted for her 24th birthday. i ended up using both the previous recipe and this one. it is basically the same recipe with strange differences in sour cream, butter and cocoa amounts. i split the difference in all of those, i think. and despite having a bad experience with a cream cheese frosting last year, i determined that letting the cream cheese soften up enough would solve most of the problem. i also added a few squares of melted chocolate to the frosting. it was a lot softer than i thought it would be, but firmed up nicely in the fridge. decoration from hagelslag sprinkles. there isn't a lot of beer at all in the cake, and the flavor is very subtle to the point of being almost non-existent, but i'm guessing it does add a lot of flavor somehow, as the cake tastes much more chocolately beyond just adding cocoa powder.
the cake dome fits (barely) in the fridge, but does protect the cake well...it was pretty moist to being with, but it's stayed moist too.

I have a couple other pictures of things I baked, but none of them were very spectacular.
In any case, I had my birthday again. I was much more blase about this one (this twenty-five?) than I was last year, maybe because I didn't plan a large party (yet). I did get much more excited when I received the X-Files box set from my parents. (Thanks parents.)
Not being all that excited does not mean no cake however. My del.icio.us is full of cake recipes, which I never make unless I have a good occasion. And even then, I sort of draw the line at more 3 sticks of butter in a cake. I started out with this, but only used the actual cake part. I had been meaning to make lemon curd at some point (look, I don't know, to go with scones or something) so I adapted this curd recipe for orange curd to put in the middle. And I really was going to go for the 'creamsicle' flavor with vanilla and orange frosting, but I decided that chocolate would work much better. And, thankfully, it did. My roommates compared the cake to an orange Milano cookie, and I thought it tasted like a Chocolate Orange, which I usually get for Christmas.
I *had* to go to a Yankees game the night before my birthday, when I was going to make the cake, so it got bumped up to the day of, between work and going out to dinner with my generous roommates at Franny's, which has been on my to-go-to list for forevvvvver. (Aside: It was very good, although the appetizers were perhaps better than the pizza)
So, the first problem was that we can no longer get the drawer beneath the oven open. I was dismissive of my roommate when he said he couldn't open it, but...it cannot be opened. I was somewhat apprehensive of sticking my hand under the oven (there was something of a mouse problem earlier- it's been a very long month) but it's really truly stuck. The cake recipe, if you will notice, calls for a 9"x 13" pan. This being inaccessible, and the fact that I refuse to buy two pans of the same shape because really, when am I ever going to need *two* pans...means that I had a square cake and a circle cake. The circle was smaller, so I circled the square somewhat successfully to come up with this.
The curd took forever to cook, and I think I do like lemon curd better, but it came out nice and thick and didn't use 9 eggs, so I liked it. This went between, and I have a lot leftover that I need to find a use for. Maybe cookies?
The frosting didn't use too much butter, as sour cream made up much of the bulk (right now my roommates will yell sour cream?!) and came out nicely.
It's not all that attractive to look at, and needed some time in the fridge to firm up the frosting.
But it was very tasty. As opposed to last year's, which was much prettier, but I realize I didn't like it all that much. But apparently I've made curd two years in a row and added strange dairy products to the frostings both times too.

Sooooo, icebox cake. I made it once before in Seattle, and it was Pretty Good. So when I saw The Chocolate Wafers at just the Key Foods near me, I bought a package. Of course, I then let them sit in the pantry until they were (only a little bit) expired. And I wanted to make cream scones too (hmm, I suppose that's another post. So behind. If you people knew how much I was running around trying to graduate and not collapse in the middle of streets...well, you'd be happier with reading about goldfish crackers.) so I figured a pint of heavy whipping cream was justified. I did not make the exciting and pretty cake, but I probably should have taken her advice and added sugar to the whipping cream. As it was, I followed the recipe on the back of the box and made it log-shaped. It was, again, Pretty Good, but like I said, I should have added sugar, and there are strange bits of chewy flakes (sort of like tasteless coconut?) in the cookies, which was sort of weird if you didn't eat a slice fast enough. But I'm mostly proud of the fact that my roommate was able to hold her own as an expert on icebox cake at work, when the subject came up the day after she had some.Whipping cream. Halfway done. As you might imagine, it was sort of messy. Taking pictures was sort of risky.

Okay, not the best picture I've ever taken. And sort of disturbing. It really looks much better once you cut it (On the angle, of course).

I had a little bit of leftover cream left, so I shook it in a small plastic tub and made butter like I did when I was younger.

(The buttermilk's the best part!)

Sweater Weather

Ah, fall. The air grows chilly, the wind is brisker, the leaves change colors, rainstorms abound.

Almost...none of this has happened. We had rain yesterday, but it felt more like a quick summery shower with some thunder and lightening thrown in. In my desire to hasten autumn along, I made this apple cake, which is less like a cake and more like an explosion of apples barely held together by a custard-like cake binder. The recipe is from the New York Times, and for some reason, I have a paper copy of it. Thanks to the good people at the Times, who have recently seen fit to open their archives to all, we see that it was published September 22, 2004. This all leads me to believe I probably bought the paper in the airport on the way back to the start of my third year of college. Which why would we be talking about now, since I made the cake a few days ago? Right. Here are all the apple slices in a bowl. This was sort of a pain. Here are...all the slices in a pan! (Not to be confused with previous photo.) But really, this is much more apple than cake. It is also...slightly too full, as I discovered when I was settling down to read my chemistry textbook while it was baking, only to be interrupted by the smoke alarm going off. Repeatedly. The very high ceilings of the apartment mean that this involves me jumping up and down a lot trying to wave the smoke away. Thankfully, roommates were not home. Although the smoke alarm did go off the next two times the oven was used, when they were here. On to other things that probably appall my roommates, this is the carnage leftover from peeling, coring, and slicing five apples. Which I cleaned up promptly, of course. And, the finished cake. The issue with the smoke alarm meant I took it out of the oven about 10 minutes before I would have normally, but the apples are nicely caramelized, and the cake was halfway between cake and custard. All persons partaking of it approved.

August oranges

My roommate is somewhat...particular, so I made him a tried and tested cake for his birthday, even if wasn't as ambitious as previous birthday cakes. The first time I made it, he and I ate it so much that it gone within the day, leading my other roommate to wish she had taken more sooner. It's a light, airy cake and has an quasi-caramelized base and very orangey, and comes from Chocolate and Zucchini.
This shot is of the surface of the moon. Fine, it's the cake pan buttered and sugared. It was hard to refrain licking the pan already.
The recipe calls for 1/2 cup of orange juice, or about the juice of one orange, plus the zest of one orange. I always assume my produce will not be the same size as anyone elses, so I bought two oranges; the worst possible scenario then means I have fresh fruit. Panic! Anyway, it look me one and a half oranges to get the half cup, although I don't have a real citrus juicer either which may have contributed to a low yield. Here are the ravaged and destroyed oranges. One of the reasons I think I like baking so much is that I get to eat the raw batter or dough. This recipe is exceptional in the fact that the batter doesn't taste very good raw. (Believe me, I always lick the bowl when I'm done, and most raw doughs taste excellent. I also assume in this day and age that raw eggs are pretty safe. Or, at least, I've fended off salmonella up until now.) Out of the oven, the cake is supposed to cool for ten minutes in the pan, then you flip it over onto a serving plate to finish cooling, and the caramelized part is on top. It's a really lovely cake, although I think I would flip it over to a rack to finish cooling instead of a plate next time. The plate doesn't allow for much cooling, and means the cake ends up sticking to the plate a lot. Still, my roommate's birthday was successfully celebrated, and thusly ends the summer birthdays. Whew.

marshmallowy chocolatey goodness

So, for my roommate's birthday, I baked her a cake. This (bookstore-) famous cake.
The recipe was kindly online here, although I am considering buying the book (or making someone buy it for me. 162 days til Christmas!)
We start with the mise en place, as inspired by the probably insane French Laundry at Home.
Fairly standard stuff. Which means this was probably a pretty boring picture for you too look at. You may instead marvel at my other roommate's bizarre paper towel stand. Moving on.
Dry and wet ingredients are combined separately, then joined by chocolate chips and buttermilk in steps to prevent a flour-cocoa explosion in my kitchen. Although that happens to me now matter how slowly I add them.
Now, I have problem in that I only have one cake pan.
"But Donna!" you say, "Cake pans are so cheap, why don't you just buy another one?"
Because I have anxiety attacks when I spend money. I also have anxiety attacks when I can't properly split cake batter into two equal portions, and when the Latter-Baked Cake comes out Mormon. I mean, doesn't rise as much as the first one. In any case, I used one cake pan and things came out more or less all right.
See? Although, indeed, the second one was not as tall as the first. However, the recipe calls for cutting each layer in half, making four layers, with the fourth crumbled up for outside decoration. I assumed this was not as crucial, and could be skimped on slightly. This was (foreshadowing) a minor mistake.
Persevering on! I made the frosting. There are no pictures of this as it was very hot and sticky, and my cell phone does not appreciate such things. In ALL senses of the phrase. It was very exciting however, pouring boiling sugar syrup into fluffy egg whites and then beating them some more. By exciting I mean traumatic. (In 7th grade, I got a really bad blister on my hand between my thumb and forefinger from caramelized sugar the week we had to play racketball in gym. Also, when I made marshmallows a few months ago, I did about the same thing and nearly killed my handheld mixer in the process.) I probably could have whipped it up a little more. I ended up not having quite enough in the end, although I should have just reduced the amount between the layers. Which, conveniently enough, are shown below. It's so pretty, I almost wanted to stop here.
But no, there were sides to frost! And crumbled cake to press on! I should add here that marshmallow frosting is incredibly sticky. The crumbled cake...I should have let the cake half dry out a little before crumbling in order to get smaller crumbs and a more even covering. Which was, as I alluded to earlier, already sort of in a dire position with me skimping on the size of the cake "half." With a moderate amount of effort, we present this.
You can see there's some white patches. It adds character, okay? C'mon.
Now it needed some birthday-ification-tion. Guess how old she's turning! Guess! Guess!
Fine, don't guess. The number 23 and the fuzziness of the picture had been brought to you by viewers like you. And strawberries and mint leaves, which were carefully arranged after about ten minutes of staring at a strawberry.
Long story short, she loved it and I'm the best roommate ever. However, cutting it was sort of difficult as large chocolate chips were in the cake. If they got caught on the blade it got messy and the layers started to shift. As seen here.
Next time I would use mini-chocolate chips or chocolate shavings, as I think was originally in the recipe. Also, I really need a cake dome to store in the fridge, but the cake held up pretty well for a week with a large pot covering it. I would make/eat this again, although I probably wouldn't because it wasn't the best cake I've ever tasted in my entire life, and there are so many cake recipes still out there.
That's a boring way to end this post. Here, instead is a picture of frosting and cake that I didn't work in earlier. If you're not already overwhelmed by excitement/diabetic shock.