TWD: Blueberry-Brown Sugar Plain Cake

The great recipes just keep on coming for Tuesdays With Dorie. This week we made Blueberry-Brown Sugar Plain Cake! I do most of my more complicated baking on the weekend, but I generally bake on a least one weeknight (usually Wednesday) and this is exactly the type of recipe I like to make: something that can be put together in the time it takes dinner to cook, can be dumped into one pan, and does not need to be frosted. Something that will feed Josh breakfast for a few days is also often in the criteria for midweek baking and this will definitely do that. (In full disclosure, this particular recipe was actually made on Monday night.)

Anyway, since somehow I’ve managed a record three posts in 24 hours, I will not continue to yammer on too much about this cake other than to say we liked it! I’m actually considering forgoing my usual healthy breakfast tomorrow in favor of eating this cake, which says a lot about it. We rated this cake an 8 for Deliciousness and a 3 for Effort (though I was surprised that a "plain cake" involved whipping egg whites separately), for an EDR of 2.666.

Many thanks to Cindy of Everyday Insanity for selecting this lovely cake. You can find the recipe here on her site and visit the TWD site to see how the other bakers liked it.

ABC: Favorite Buttermilk Cake

This month the Avid Bakers Challenge Group made Favorite Buttermilk Cake from Baking for All Occasions. If you don’t have access to this fantastic book, the recipe can be found here. I haven’t managed to post an Avid Bakers Challenge recipe since January, though I have made a couple of selections since then, and I thought this was a terrific one to jump back in with. This is an excellent cake to have in your repertoire: simple, but very tasty and lends well to various accompaniments. I have in general been very impressed with the recipes from Baking for All Occasions. It reminds me a lot of Dorie's book, in the sense that there are a very diverse selection of recipes, that you can tell have been well-tested and have detailed instructions.



Since there was not a frosting or garnish assigned with this cake, I decided to go with chocolate frosting. I had planned to make one from Baking for All Occasions, but it had unsweetened chocolate in it and somehow I didn’t have any in my kitchen. Josh offered to go to the store. I decided that given the number of cookbooks and baking supplies I have, a trip to the store wasn’t necessary and I made a recipe from The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, which proved to be a wonderful combination. We rated this cake an 8.5 for Deliciousness and I gave it a 3 for Effort, for an EDR of 2.83. I can’t wait to see the other combinations the ABC group came up with for this cake!

Chocolate Buttercream, from The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook (I made a half recipe for an 8x8 cake)

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, very soft
1 tablespoon plus one teaspoon milk
6 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled to lukewarm (see note)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar

In a medium-size bowl, beat the butter until cream, about 3 minutes. Add the milk carefully and beat until smooth. Add the melted chocolate and beat well. Add the vanilla extract and beat for 3 minutes. Gradually add the sugar and beat until creamy and of desired consistency.

Note: To melt chocolate, place in a double boiler over simmering water on low heat for approximately 5-10 minutes. Stir occasionally until completely smooth and no pieces of chocolate remain. Remove from heat and let cool for 5-10 minutes.

Devil Dog

I think Eloise would be eager to tell you that the day before our wedding was the most boring day of her life – really, she’s dramatic like that – and she was being ignored. We both work, so we have a dog walker take her on an off-leash outing in the middle of the day and then after work we run her (and by “we run her” I mean Josh does, since she pulls me too much). Even though I was off work the few days leading up to the wedding, I had planned to have our dog walker come as usual, as I had a lot pre-wedding tasks to take care of. Unfortunately, our dog walker had a family emergency and was out of town that week. We managed to keep Eloise on her regular exercise schedule most of the week, but found ourselves a little short of time on Friday. Watch our dog go from mildly perturbed to absolutely incensed:


This is boring….pay attention to ME!!



Okay, good, someone’s petting me.



They’re both home, why am I not going for a walk!



Maybe if I push enough they’ll give in.



I’m going crazy!


She really does look kind of crazy there. I guess we learned what happens when she doesn't get enough exercise. It's a good thing we only get married once! And we did finally manage to take her on a run that day.

TWD: Caramel Pots de Creme (sort of)

I’m back! We had an absolutely spectacular wedding and a wonderfully relaxing honeymoon, and now we’re back to real life, which I think is awfully nice, too (I actually really missed my kitchen while we were away and was so happy to be back in it). I promise that I will have photos and stories, but for now, I have ice cream. This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie selection was Caramel Pots de Creme, which sound good to me, but seriously? Every time I make some kind of pudding/spoon dessert, no matter how small a quantity, it never gets finished. So I figure that since the ingredients were the same as ice cream, I might as well turn this recipe into ice cream - and it worked!



The original recipe, which you can find here on Peggy the Baker’s site, calls for two whole eggs and five yolks; I omitted the two whole eggs and kept the rest of the ingredients the same. After all the ingredients were combined, instead of pouring the custard into cups and baking it, I put the mixture back on the stove and cooked it until it reached 170 degrees, chilled it, then put it through the ice cream maker. Around this time last year the group made Burnt Sugar Ice Cream, and despite two attempts, I never quite achieved the deep color and flavor that ice cream was meant to have. I think I have now finally made real burnt sugar ice cream.

This recipe rated an 8 for Deliciousness and a 3 for Effort, for an EDR of 2.666. Many thanks to Peggy for hosting this week. I look forward to catching up and seeing how my fellow bakers fared with the actual recipe!

TWD: Basic Marbled Loaf Cake

In this household we divide baked goods into three general categories: categories are breakfast, snacks, and desserts - with many subcategories and crossovers, of course. We are pretty benevolent went it comes to breakfast and typically can convince ourselves that most loaf cakes are breakfast fare. However, even Josh admitted that this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie selection, Basic Marbled Loaf Cake was a stretch - not that it’s stopping him. It looks unassuming, but the version I made, peppermint, contains half a pound of chocolate, which is kind of a lot for a breakfast food.



Dorie offers lots of fun flavor combinations for this cake and singles out the peppermint as her favorite. The peppermint version also contains white chocolate, which I enjoy baking with occasionally (and happen to have a stash of), so I figured it was the one to try. I made a tester ramekin, which was a good decision since the cake got huge in the pan, and it was excellent straight from the oven with ice cream.



Though we thought the cake was tasty, it was a skosh dry, so its Deliciousness rating is a 7. Many thanks to Carol of The Bake More for a great selection this week. You can find the recipe here on her site and visit the TWD site to see what other enticing flavor combinations the creative bakers came up with.



Dessert Watch 2011: A few weeks ago I mentioned that Josh had decided that there would be a dessert moratorium the two weeks before the wedding. Well, we’re 11(!) days away and the no-dessert rule has been revised, for a couple reasons. Instead of going cold-turkey on desserts, Josh has been bringing fewer snacks to work and having smaller portions for dessert. The rule is it has to fit in the dessert bowl, rather than the cereal bowls he typically uses. I took a photo of the bowls to show the difference in size.

TWD: Cornmeal Shortbread Cookies

I did not manage to make last week’s Tuesdays With Dorie selection, Tourtely Apple Torte, but luckily this week we had a less time consuming recipe, Cornmeal Shortbread Cookies, and I was able to fit it in. Although soft chewy cookies are the generally the cookie category of choice in this household, a nice buttery shortbread is also nice from time to time, and these are exceptionally good shortbread. Not only does that the cornmeal give them a nice crunch, there are wonderful undertones of flavor from the lemon zest and almond extract. The flavor combination kind of reminded me of the stupendous Swedish Visiting Cake the group made last year.



Josh and I took a little break from wedding-related tasks last weekend to celebrate our four-year anniversary of dating (we figured that since we’re about to get married and will have a new anniversary, it would be our last year to make an occasion of it) and made a jaunt up to Sonoma on Saturday afternoon. We’d heard that the caterer we’re using for the wedding also has a café at a place called Cornerstone Gardens in Sonoma and thought it would be fun to have lunch there. Sadly, the café had closed three weeks ago. Luckily the garden was still a lovely place to visit and the restaurant at the gardens was good. I had seen an ad in a magazine for a cake supply store in Sonoma and wanted to take a look around in hope of finding a cake topper. Yes, my wedding is less than three weeks away and I don’t have a cake topper. I totally put this off until the last minute, because if I don’t find one, it doesn’t really matter. My cake will still be pretty and taste great. The store, which also happens to be a pool supply store – hello, strange combo - did not have any whimsical cake toppers, but they did have shortbread cookie cutters, to get the authentic shortbread finger shape. I had rolled out my dough earlier in the morning and was planning on making the cookies that night, so I was excited to buy the cutter. Sadly, it could not really withstand the thick, cold dough. When I was growing up, there were several movies that my siblings and I watched multiple times; one of those was "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off." There is a line in the movie where Ferris refers to his friend Cameron’s car as “a piece of s&$@” and for some reason I was greatly amused when the line was changed to “piece of tin” in the TV version. Anyway, this shortbread cutter was a “piece of tin,” both literally and figuratively. It was cheap, so I can’t really complain. Not cheap? The olive oil ice cream we purchased, but very good with these cookies.



We rated these cookies a 7.5 for Deliciousness and I give them a 2.5 for Effort, for an EDR of 3. Many thanks to Valerie of Une Gamine dans La Cuisine for a great choice. You can find the recipe here on Valerie’s site and visit the TWD site for more cookies.

TWD: Strawberry Rhubarb Double Crisp

I never got around to making an official announcement on my blog, but Josh and I got engaged last summer (he proposed after I ran my first, and so far only, marathon on the 4th of July) and we’re getting married – in a month! We haven’t gone on any kind of crazy wedding diet or been Shedding for the Wedding (admittedly there have been a few extra miles run by Josh and I’ve tried to pick up hand weights occasionally). So even though I haven’t been blogging much, I’ve still been baking and we’ve been eating plenty of treats – in moderation, of course. However, Josh told me that the two weeks prior to the wedding, he wants to put a moratorium on desserts. I asked if that meant I could not bake at all (you know, with all the free time this procrastinator will have the two weeks before her wedding), and he said that I could make snacks, like cookies, but he is planning on refraining from large desserts with ice cream.



So it’s a really good thing this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie selection, Strawberry Rhubarb Double Crisp was selected now. It had been a while since I’d made an oozy fruit dessert, which, at least in our house, just screams for homemade ice cream. It seems that it is slightly early for rhubarb, though I was fortunate enough to find some at my local market. For some reason, I felt that this dessert took longer to put together than your average crumble (though I was multitasking with some other recipes), but double crisp is double delicious, so it’s definitely worth it!

We rated this recipe an 8 for Deliciousness and I rated it a 4 for Effort, for an EDR of 2. Many thanks to Sarah of Teapots and Cakestands for selecting this recipe at just the right time. You can find the recipe here on Sarah’s site and visit the TWD site to see if the other bakers were able to find rhubarb or if they got creative.