Happy Happy Lemon Cake

I can't believe we haven't posted since May.   My life has gotten so crazy, and this is supposed to be a quiet season.  Oh well.  Can't say what Sarah's excuse is.  She came to visit us recently, and while we did bake a key lime pie, it got eaten so fast I didn't even get a picture.  I assume Sarah will chime in with a cupcake review at some point.

Anyway, enough excuses and on to this amazing lemon cake.  This is a cake that I made at the end of May for a co-worker's birthday.  Like most cakes from BAKED, it had about a zillion steps but it was so worth it.  Every single part of the cake was amazing and when they came together it was awesome.  One of the best lemon cakes I have ever had, let alone baked.  I did not have three 8-inch pans, as the recipe calls for, so I used two nine inch pans and cut the layers in half for four layers and it was great.

I highly recommend this cake, but only make it if you have time (you can make it over two days or so).  You will be rewarded for your hard work with total deliciousness.  You can find the recipe here.

Ethnic Flavor: Aaaaples and Crisco for Rosh Hashanah

So the chagim (the many Jewish holidays that come one after the other in September and October) are finally over. Every year, it seems like they’ll never end, and then they do, and you’re like, huh, a small part of me misses them. But it’s a pretty small part.

One of the more fun parts about the chagim is the eating. Well, not on Yom Kippur. But whether you’re sitting at the dining room table or in a hut, there are plenty of festive holiday meals. This year, Rosh Hashanah was made doubly special by the fact that it fell on our dad’s birthday, and our mom requested that I make him a special holiday/birthday cake. (It was also a co-cake for our Uncle Joel, whose birthday had been the previous week.) I thought about it for a good long while and then – eureka! – remembered a tasty cake that my friend Nathan once shared with me when we came back to college after Rosh Hashanah senior year. Obviously it was a very delicious cake, to have stuck with me for the last two years. It was an apple cake, which is traditional for Rosh Hashanah. (We eat apples and honey for a sweet new year, get it?) So I e-mailed him and he kindly sent me the recipe. I knew it would be delicious but I wanted to add a little spruce to it, it being a double-birthday cake and all. Caramel glaze or frosting seemed the natural thing, but because we were having meat, I was concerned that it wouldn’t work out, as caramel is rather dependent on cream and butter. Luckily, I was able to dig up a surprisingly delicious recipe for vegan caramel frosting. It used the dreaded Crisco, for which I normally would substitute margarine, but I figured that one probably shouldn’t screw around with vegan recipes, which are already dicey at best. And then it was lucky that I had made the frosting, because we pretty much had to glue the cake back together when it came out of the pan, and it looked much nicer frosted.

The most fun part about this recipe was getting to use my dad’s apple peeler-corer-slicer, the latest in apple peeling-coring-slicing technology. It took me an embarrassingly long time and the help of my heroic father to learn how to use it, but once I did, it was so fun! I highly recommend using one if you are going to make a recipe with a lot of apples, like this one.

Me, coring/peeling/slicing apples

Neat!

The cake, despite being in pieces, came out just as yummy as I had remembered it being in the fall of 2010. There were a lot of desserts at that festive holiday meal, but this cake was by far the most popular! Serve it at your next apple-related event! (Perhaps a Steve Jobs memorial service? Haw haw haw.)

Ruth Margolin's Apple Cake

5 apples (tart, like Granny Smith)

2 t cinnamon

5 T sugar

3 C flour

3 t baking powder

2 C sugar

2-½ t vanilla

1 C oil

1 t salt

4 eggs

¼ C orange juice

Peel the apples, and cut into slices.  Sprinkle with the cinnamon and the 5 T sugar, and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the remaining ingredients together until smooth.

Grease a large tube pan.  (Either use a Baker’s Joy type spray that includes flour, or grease the pan and then dust it with sugar.)

Pour half the batter into the prepared pan.  Place half the apple mixture on top.  Pour on remaining batter, spreading to cover apples.  Top with remaining apples.  (There will be some sweetened juice in the apple bowl; you can drizzle it over the apples.)

Bake at 350 degrees for 1-¼ hours.  Let stand 15 minutes and then remove from pan and cool on a wire rack.

You can find the frosting recipe here.

The Final Baked Goods Friday (For Some)

Big news in Baking Sisters land - I started a new job at Oxford University Press this week. It's going well so far, with one exception. My reputation as a baker had apparently preceded me, which is great, but when I brought in Dorie's classic molasses cookies for Baked Goods Friday, no one was eating them! I was confused and dismayed, until my cubiclemate said to me, "It's so funny that you put it out right when you got here. Usually, people wait until after lunch." I, of course, replied, "Don't worry - I will train you to eat cheesecake at 9 a.m." Luckily, all the cookies were gone by 12:30, but it was a little touch-and-go for a while there. 

It was made especially galling by the fact that a number of my friends back at Basic were contacting me all day and telling me how sad they were not to have their weekly sweet fix. Now there's an office that really knows how to appreciate its 9 a.m. cheesecake. I knew that I had to make a special treat for my last day of work, and I settled on a cake recipe from Amy's Bread that had gotten rave reviews when I made for Rachel's graduation party. I don't usually make cakes for Baked Goods Friday because they're hard to transport, but I figured that this was worth it.

Here's the trick about this cake (or rather, this cake's frosting) - it's made with poured fondant, so you must remember to make that at least 24 hours before you want to make the frosting. The cake itself is pretty straightforward and quite delicious. It's got a moist density that reminded Rachel and me of the Entenmann's chocolate cupcakes we used to have on our half-birthdays. (Appropriately enough, my last day at Basic, the 28th, was also my half-birthday.) Those cupcakes were especially fun because of the stiff, thick layer of icing on top that you could peel off and eat separately. Ostensibly, the poured fondant is supposed to make the icing on this cake hard as well (although not as creepily, artificially hard as the Entenmann's kind), but it mostly tasted like regular frosting to me. I didn't make it pink, because what's the point? 

As you'll see from the photograph, I also tried to make the very dignified and classy-looking Basic logo out of Betty Crocker's finest electric blue frosting-in-a-tube, which I had bought at Morton Williams at 7:30 a.m. that morning. It didn't go that well, but whatever, it's the sentiment that counts. Oxford University Press, get ready to get fat!

You can find the cake recipe here and the frosting recipe here.

You're a Grand Old Donut

Hi there, happy Fourth! I hope everyone had a very nice time celebrating America's birthday. I, for one, had a lovely day filled with family, beach, 1776 (the movie, not the book), and of course yummy food. What kind of yummy food, Sarah? Glad you asked. Ever since I saw the buttermilk farmstead donuts in Baked Explorations, I've wanted to make them. Only problem is, donuts really need to be eaten the day they're made. Usually I can bring any class of baked goods to my office and they'll be gone within two hours. But I didn't feel like waking up super-early to make donuts to bring to the office. Sue me. So I needed a special occasion, one on which I knew I'd have a free morning and a captive audience forced to eat my donuts. And what better occasion than America's 236th birthday. What a dame.


The donuts were pretty easy to put together. The dough didn't cohere as well as I wanted it to but it didn't seem to negatively affect the end product. (Some of the donuts did come apart, but I think that was because they were too big.) My main piece of advice is to actually follow the recipe and fry the donuts for the full amount of time recommended. I took mine out when I thought they had achieved a nice brown color but then they were a little undercooked. Of course if you're in to things being undercooked (I am), it was all good. Throw together some vanilla glaze and slap some red and blue sprinkles on that sucker, and you've got yourself a delicious, patriotic treat. Happy birthday, dear America!


You can find the recipe here. (And for those readers concerned about my continuing saga with boiling oil - all of you, I'm sure - I will inform you that apart from one splatteriffic close call where the oil nearly came into contact with my shoeless foot, all was well. I think I'm getting more confident here.)

Baked Sunday Mornings: Chocolate Whoopie Pies

This week's Baked Sunday Mornings was chocolate whoopie pies, a fairly straightforward mix of 2 chocolate cake cookies with a marshmallowy frosting.  These were easy to put together -- the cake didn't even require a mixer and the frosting came together quickly.

I enjoyed these, as did the two events I brought them to (the recipe said it would make 15-17 small pies, I got 24 small and two very large).  However, knowing the enormous amount of butter in the filling made me think that they could have been just as good with a less rich filling.  Even at a small size, one is really enough.  I was thinking that the filling could also be made in other flavors -- salted caramel, mint, or raspberry (which would make a nice Valentine's day pink color) all came to mind.  I will certainly try that in the future.

You can find the recipe and all the other bakers' creations on the Baked Sunday Mornings website.

Cupcakes for a Sweet 2012

Happy New Year from the Baking Sisters! It's a fun and festive holiday that gives me an excuse to dress up, wear my awesome sparkly headband from J. Crew, and of course bake like a maniac! Tonight, I'm headed to a party, and when I saw these clock-themed New Years cupcakes in the Martha Stewart Cupcake Cookbook, I was intrigued. They are holiday-appropriate and not too tricky to make, although I have to warn that melted chocolate is not really amenable to being poured neatly out of a pastry bag, so I used a chocolate-dipped toothpick to make all the numbers, which was a pain, but whatever. For the cupcake recipe, I used this recipe, which is excellent! It's extremely fluffy and silky; my friend and co-baker Emily said that the batter was more the consistency of mousse, and I agree. I used the Swiss Meringue Buttercream, but as always, I used three sticks of butter instead of four, and it was still plenty buttery. Then I just melted an ounce of chocolate, and after several failed experiments with the pastry bag, I discovered the toothpick trick and all was well. Emily so kindly cut out the clock hands you see above, and I put foil on a cake plate to make the clock face. We're going to bring it to the party and reassemble the whole thing, cause we're ridiculous, in a good way. The Baking Sisters wish you a happy (and sweet) New Year!

Happy Belated Birthday Blog and Beth

As I think I mentioned before, I work with a group of fabulous women.  One of the most fabulous is Beth, who happens to be our preschool director.  Although the women in my office are not great about consuming baked goods on a regular basis, they really go all out on someone's birthday.  Everyone always gets a cake or a treat tailored specifically to them and we love celebrating together (and having an excuse to eat cake).  Beth loves chocolate, so I wanted to find something delicious and festive to make for her birthday.  She works so hard and is such a great person, so I really wanted to make her feel special and celebrated.

I have had my eye on this cake for a while, since I saw it on Tracey's Culinary Adventure about a year ago.  Everything Tracey makes usually looks delicious, so I knew this was one I had to try.  I did not use strawberries in between the layers as she suggests, because Beth does not like fruit with her chocolate, but I think that would have been delicious too.

This cake was fantastic.  It was very moist with a strong chocolate flavor and the icing was incredible.  You could not really taste the white chocolate, but it make it richer and sweeter than your typical cream cheese frosting, which complimented the cake well.  I finished it off with rainbow sugar, which added a tiny bit of crunch and a festive look.  I would highly recommend this cake for a great celebration in your life.  Here is the recipe.  

The other thing this cake celebrated was the second anniversary of our blog!  It is somewhat hard to beleive that we have kept this thing going through living in four different cities and two countries over the past two years, but we did.  I feel like we have all come a long way as bakers and I am looking forward to many more delicious treats in our future!

A Delicious Any Occasion Cake

The other day, I was going through my blog reader and this cake jumped out at me.  Nicole, who writes the blog Baking Bites, described this as a good any occasion cake.  Normally, I am not the biggest fan of yellow cakes. First, if I am going to eat cake, it might as well be chocolate, and second, yellow cakes often seem to be lacking in flavor, making them only a vehicle for the frosting (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

This yellow cake was amazing.  It had a lot of good flavor and was very light and moist, possibly from using cake flour and buttermilk, both of which I have found add lots of yumminess to cake.

The frosting on this cake -- chocolate cream cheese -- was also delicious.  I added more cream cheese than the recipe called for because I really like that tang in my cream cheese frosting.  I also used low fat cream cheese, since that is what I had around and it worked out fine.  

The only trouble I had with this cake is that I forgot to put parchment in the bottom of the pan (or I was just lazy -- I won't tell you which) and it stuck big time, even when the pan was buttered and floured.  I think I lost about a half an inch, which was ok, because this cake rises high.  The moral of the story -- parchment paper your pans before baking!  

I took this cake to a meeting, where it was a big hit.  I think it would also be great as the base to any kind of birthday cake.  But Nicole is right -- this is a great any occasion cake, even when you just want a slice of cake after dinner.

You can find the recipe here, on Nicole's website.

A Very Elmo Birthday

I never thought I would be one of those moms who says things like, "My baby is growing up" and "it goes by so fast."  That was before my baby turned 2.  2 is old.  It is like an actual person, and not just a baby.  Being two, he now has many, MANY opinions.  When I asked him what kind of cake he would like for his birthday, he immediately said Elmo.  He has not stopped talking about the Elmo cake for months.  He is a huge fan of Elmo (mostly from books though) and could not wait for this cake.


I found this Elmo pan by Wilton, which had all the instructions for how to decorate it.  I had every intention of piping the fur and then...our AC broke and it was 110 degrees outside.  Try working with buttercream in that kind of heat and you will see that spreading it on and throwing it in the fridge is all you can hope to do.  When I put some in a piping bag, it melted from the heat of my hand. 


This is my first attempt at any major decoration and I am really happy with how it turned out.  When my son saw it, he got super excited and kept saying "Elmo cake, Elmo cake" over and over again.  That is success in my book.  Time really does go by fast. Two years ago, he was just born, one year ago he had never eaten cake before and now he has opinions on what kind of cake to have!  There, I said it.  I am one of those moms.    


One birthday party was obviously not enough (said with a hint of sarcasm).  He also had one with my parents and one at school, as well as one at synagogue. For the party at school, I baked cupcakes and tinted the frosting orange (per my child's request) and then I found sugar Elmos to put on top.  The kids really enjoyed them and I think they look pretty cute.

For the cake, I made one recipe of the cake from Dorie's Black and White Chocolate Cake.  I baked it for 40 minutes, since the pan was deeper than just a layer cake pan and it came out really great.  You can find the recipe here.

For the cupcakes, I used Martha Stewart's One Bowl Chocolate cupcakes.  They were good, but a little tough.  I think it is because I doubled the recipe.  Luckily, 2 year olds don't care.  You can find the recipe here.

For the buttercream, I used Martha Stewart's fluffy vanilla frosting.  Yummy.  I did cut down the sugar a little bit so it would not be too sweet.  The recipe is here.  I tinted it with my awesome gel food coloring from King Arthur Flour.  That stuff is amazing.  You don't need much and you get great color.

I also made strawberry cupcakes, which I will post about on the 15th as part of the Martha Stewart Cupcake Club.