Cake Posts

Pan Honey Cake which looks more like a square than a cake

This cake came from The Best of Baking.

However, despite the title of the book, this may be the first cake that failed.  Both Heather and I were in agreement that this was not the best one.

The picture in the book makes it look amazing, with fancy patterns on the top.  There are cherries, nuts and candied peel decorating the surface, making it look both beautiful and tasty.  The candied peel was almost invisible on the surface of the actual cake, but they might have been due to overcooking slightly, thus making the cake a darker brown colour than intended.  The nuts and the cherry did seem to work the intended way, but as I didn’t use sliced almonds and tried to slice them myself and the cherries didn’t slice very well either, even they didn’t look perfect.

Despite all of the downfalls, some very nice friends did say they enjoyed it, but that might be that they are just very polite.  Regardless of how this one turned out, the next one is bound to be incredible!

Cherry Spice Cake topped with pecans and cherries

This recipe, again, is from James McNair’s cookbook.  I admit, I took a long time to post about this cake but that is not because it wasn’t a good one I just haven’t had a lot of time.

I chose this one because Heather had made it once before for her mother’s birthday.  I thought it was very good and thought I’d try my hand at it.  It may look a little crooked in the photo, but that didn’t detract from the taste!  The cake itself was pretty straight forward, albeit a bit fancier than a chocolate or a white cake.  The really interesting part for me in this one was the icing!

It is quite involved, beginning by caramelizing sugar (that was a first for me) and then adding it to whipped a sugar, butter, egg mixture at hardball temperature.  It worked beautifully and the colour in the icing came from the caramelized sugar.

The mix of maraschino cherries and pecans blended very well with the sugar icing and add to the overall presentation.  I guess one complaint I had was just how sweet it turned out to be.  I think I’m beginning to reach my sugar limit and will be eating fewer pieces of the next cakes that I make.

One slice of my impossible cake

This recipe came from this website but I believe it was originally from a PBS cooking show recipe.  I specifically searched this recipe out because of a recent trip Heather and I took to Mexico.  While we were there, we had the pleasure of eating this “impossible cake” at a restaurant we dined in one night with some friends.  The maitre d’ told us how his sister had cooked it for us earlier in the day and it was an excellent taste to remember our trip to Mexico.

This past weekend we were getting together with the same group of friends and I decided as a surprise, that I would attempt to make this as my cake for the week.  I prepared most of the week for it (not that it took a ton of preparation but I am in the midst of two straight weeks of work).  In any case, one of the souvenirs that Heather brought back with us was cajeta, a Mexican caramel made from goat’s milk, and I was very proud to be able to use it, since it’s much more difficult to get around here.

Back to the cake story: I then attempted the baking.  In all it’s not too difficult, three separate layers that get layered in a pan and once it’s cooked two of the layers have switch places; hence “impossible”.  Sounds simple, but I had difficulties.

A slice of the impossible cake as eaten in Mexico.

First, this mixture calls for a 10 inch round, three inch deep cake pan.  I certainly don’t have one of these, but I thought I could make do with a 10 inch round springform pan lined with foil to prevent batter from leaking out and water from the water bath from seeping in.  Second, because I’m Canadian, I have trouble converting between ounces and millilitres.  So instead of 14 oz of milk, I put in 20.

The outcome was delicious but it looked like soup with a cake floating in it.  A springform pan does work, but 20 oz of milk does not.  None of the taste testers complained however, so it was something of a success.

Top view of the frosted Yellow Cake with Honeycombs

This cake is also from James McNair’s recipe book.

I think I should have started the year with the colour cakes.  After having an angel food cake and a chocolate chip coffee cake, yellow cake just seems that much less exciting.

My enjoyment of this cake may also have been dulled some by my frosting job.  I wanted to go easy on it, so I went with a butter cream icing.  It marked the first cake this year to have one as most of the others had cream cheese icing.  It’s pretty simple to make; blend butter and icing sugar before adding a bit of milk and vanilla.  However, I didn’t have quite enough powdered sugar so I looked into substitutes.  The recommendations were grind granulated sugar and some corn starch.  After blending for 10 minutes, my sugar was finer, but not powder fine, and therein lies my mistake.  I went with it anyway.  So though it looked nice, the texture was very grainy, and, in my mind, less pleasant.

I had only compliments on the yellow cake, however.  Either I’m too critical or my friends are very nice.  H and I were invited to a cereal and old cartoon party, which was a blast, so I decorated the cake with pieces of Honeycomb to fit the theme.