Engagement Cake!

This is what I was working on for the better part of last week--a two-tier engagement cake for our friends Joe and MK. It was quite the experience trying to construct this cake. I had no idea what I was doing so I e-mailed back and forth with my friend Katie for instructions...28 times. I still turned a sizeable chunk of fondant a hideous brownish-red color (and died my hands a lovely shade of pink that lasted two days), but luckily Nic had convinced me to buy the jumbo size fondant at Michael's. I was so scared of coloring the fondant after that though that I tried to stick to simple colors...and I ended up making what would have been a beautiful baby shower cake. Too bad it was for an engagement.


Then we carried the cake to a great restaurant downtown for a little get together with some of Joe and MK's friends. And the waiters for some reason decided to put candles in the cake. Candles? So now it looked like a birthday cake. Actually it looked more like a cartoon explosive... Can you see how the candles are coming out at an angle? Sometimes you can't win.

The lovely Jaime took this picture (and the one at the bottom of the cake slices). I wish all my blog photos could be done by a professional. ::Sigh:: She also took a picture of my face when I saw that they put candles in the cake. It wasn't a pretty face.




Luckily despite the odd coloring and the candles the cake tasted great. So great in fact that after serving us our slices the rest of the cake seemed to have disappeared in the kitchen. Hmmm. The bottom tier of the cake was pumpkin with butterscotch-pecan filling and brown sugar icing (for MK, who loves all things pumpkin) and the top tier was chocolate with raspberry filling and icing (because Joe prefers chocolate).

The pumpkin cake was really dense but delicious, and the butterscotch filling and caramelly brown sugar icing were the perfect compliment. The recipe came Culinary Concoctions by Peabody, and for the sake of brevity, I'm not going to retype it. I didn't change anything, but I did double the cake portion of the recipe to make two eight inch cake layers (I had a little extra because the originally recipe is for a 9 inch cake), and I swapped pecans for the walnuts in the filling.

The chocolate cake was light and airy with a deep chocolate flavor. This cake was so good, I'm already looking for another excuse to make it. I like my cake on the light side of the dense-light cake texture scale, and I really love how simple this cake is to make. My Grandmom's original recipe tells you to just throw all the ingredients together and mix until combined. I complicated things a little, but I'm betting that it works just fine Grandmom's way. The only other changes I made to my Grandmom's recipe was to add a little salt and to use hot coffee instead of hot water.

The raspberry filling came from Katie, and the recipe is over here, but I only used it as an icing because I was covering the cake with fondant. Normally, I would ice the cake with a simple chocolate icing or glaze.

Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:
1 1/2 sticks of unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
3/4 cup cocoa
1 3/4 cups cake flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
3 eggs
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups hot coffee (or water)

Directions:
-Preheat oven to 350 degrees and position the oven rack in the center of the oven. Grease a bundt pan or two 8 inch cake pans.
-In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar together for 2 minutes on medium speed, until smooth.
-In a separate bowl, combine the cocoa, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
-In a cup combine the hot coffee and the vanilla.
-Set the mixer to low, and add the dry and wet ingredients, alternating. Beat for 2 minutes on medium speed.
-Pour the batter into the prepared pan (or divide evenly between the two prepared pans) and bake on the center rack in the oven for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
-Let the cake cool for 15 minutes in the pan(s), then flip the cake onto a wire rack to cool the rest of the way before icing.

Layer Cake, A Testament to My Intelligence

I don't really bake cakes, mainly because they're kind of impractical, especially if you are a household of two. I guess I could bake cupcakes, but unlike everyone else on the planet, I have not been swept up in the all too enthusiastic cupcake trend. Plus, I think of cake as a dessert that only really goes with birthdays. But since my dear friend Taylor was celebrating a birthday this weekend, I promised to make the cake. A lemon layer cake to be exact. The taste and texture turned out perfectly, and the recipe came from my friend Katie, but none of that is as interesting as my attempts to actually assemble the tasty, perfectly-baked cake and fluffy frosting. Consider this a tutorial on how NOT to put together your layer cake.

Okay, so when you bake a cake in two round cake pans, the tops come out a little bit rounded. No surprise. So you're supposed to remedy that for proper stackability by shaving off some of the dominess. Well, I'm cheap and hate wasting stuff, so I did minimal shaving. In fact, I took off so little it didn't really do much except let me taste the cake before I served it. Then I started spreading frosting to "glue" the layers together. Okay, going good so far. Then I plop the top layer on, and start frosting the outside of the cake.

At this point I realized something clearly wasn't going according to plan. First of all, the space between the layers was more like an abyss. Second, the icing probably needed more confectioner's sugar or less lemon or something because it was a wee-bit on the runny side and was pooling at the base of the cake. The only thing I could think to do was throw the whole thing in the fridge and hope that that would make the icing set, or something.

About an hour later Nic took the cake out of the fridge and tried to help smooth out the icing. The only reason it looked somewhat presentable was because he did this. My attempts only further damaged the cake's appearance. So I sliced up some lemon, and we decorated the cake in an attempt to distract the eye from the mishapen cake and its melting frosting.


At this point, I called my mom while I was waiting for everyone to come over for dinner and explained to her my cake decorating dilemma.

"I think I should have shaved off more of the rounded part of the cakes so that they stacked better," I said.

"Well yeah, you should really shave the bottom layer until it's flat," she said. "But at least you don't have to shave the top layer since it's already flat."

"It's already flat? What do you mean?"

This is the point where I realized that instead of stacking the cake the way any normal person would, with the flat part of the second cake on top of the first cake, I (for some yet unknown reason) stacked the cake rounded side to rounded side. I think I was thinking that I had to do this so that the top of the cake would be flat. (And look at that cake again, the top IS perfectly flat!)

"I thought you were supposed to be smart," my mom said. (The other quotes were sort of an approximation of the conversation, but that right there is an exact quote, albeit said while she was laughing at me.)

Also, that icing definitely need less lemon juice or more confectioner's sugar because by the time my friends got there to eat the cake, the lemon had separated out of the frosting and formed pools on top of the perfectly flat top and along the sides. Chris called it a "Hurricane Katrina" cake, i.e. flooded.

But hey, it still tasted good!

Pumpkin Cake w/ Apple Streusel

My friend MK loves pumpkin. So I knew that I had to incorporate it into her birthday cake somehow. Luckily, I found this recipe in a cookbook I borrowed from the library recently, The New Whole Grains Cookbook. This has to be brief because I am about to run out the door on my way to Baltimore. I only made a few changes, namely I used three apples instead of four, I used gala apples instead of granny smith, I added pecans to the streusel topping, and instead of 2 tbs. of pumpkin spice I made my own spice mixture. So if you want the original recipe you can make those changes back.

The result was a pumpkiny, spicey, pretty heavy cake. You only need a very small slice. But it taste very much like fall, with the two main in-season baking ingredients both part of this cake.

Pumpkin Cake w/ Apple Streusel
Adapted from The New Whole Grains Cookbook

Ingredients:
3 tbs. + 1/2 cup unsalted butter
3 gala apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
5 tbs. granulated white sugar
1 tsp. + 3/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/8 tsp. all spice
1/8 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. baking soda
3/4 cup canned pumpkin puree
1/3 cup sour cream
2 large eggs
1/4 cup chopped pecans.

Directions:
-Preheat oven to 350 degrees and butter and flour a 9" spring form pan (should be at least 3" deep).
-Dice 1/2 cup butter and let it come to room temperature.
-Melt 3 tbs. butter in saute pan, and saute the apples over medium high heat until soft, about 5 minutes. Add 3 tbs. of white sugar and 1 tsp. cinnamon to the apples. Toss and cook until the liquid is thick and bubbly.
-Combine flour, brown sugar, and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the diced butter and mix until the butter is broken up into little pieces. Measure 2/3 cup of the mixture into a small bowl for streusel.
-Add 2 tbs. white sugar, 3/4 tsp. cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, all spice, cloves, and pecans to streusel topping.
-To the stand mixer bowl, add baking soda, pumpkin, sour cream, and eggs. Beat until smooth and pour into pan.
-Top the batter in the pan with the apples, then with the streusel. (I didn't end up using all of the streusel. I just added until the apples were covered.)
-Bake for 40-5o minutes or until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. (Apple and streusel on the skewer doesn't count.)
-Cool and serve.