Cake Posts

The orange chiffon cake topped with cream cheese icing and orange sections

This cake is also from the Grandma’s Best recipe book.

I’ll warn you straight away, this’ll be a long post.  Now, I say this at the beginning, because this cake marks a number of firsts for the year as well as at least on big learning experience.

To begin, this marks the first weekend that I have made two cakes instead of just one.  There are two reasons for this: one, we had two occasions this week where cake was welcomed; and two because I know that this is shaping up to be a very busy year so I know that I will not be able to truly make one cake every week.

This week, the occasion was H’s cousin’s birthday.  A very charismatic and skilled 16 (now) year old, he wrote me a brief but convincing email telling me that he’d be honoured if I baked a cake for his birthday.  Naturally, my ego patted, I was compelled to do so.

So, Saturday morning, I fired up the oven, and the hand blender (thank you Keith and Michelle) and went to work.  I don’t think I’ve ever actually had a chiffon cake before this one, but it is similar in preparation to an angel food cake and uses the same tube pan.

Learning experience for the week! The tube pan is not greased when baking a chiffon or angel food cake as the batter has to climb the walls of the

Pointing out the broken bits of the freshly baked chiffon

pan when cooking, so once it is cooled it is cut from the pan.  Some how during last weeks Angel Food Cake I did it correctly, but this time it didn’t quite come out of the pan in one piece.  The key is to cut the edges of the cake while it is resting in the pan, instead of what I did which was to cut it out while it was hanging from the pan.  What happens then is that once enough of the cake has been freed, gravity pulls the rest of it down wherever it is weakest.  It wasn’t ruined, despite what I told H immediately following.  I removed the pieces that were left attached to the pan and rested them atop the fallen cake and I frosted right over the whole thing.  To my knowledge none of the eaters noticed…

Another first was that I crumb coated the cake before completing the frosting job.  I had never heard of this before the Ginger Cake.  During the eating, Sarah, a wedding cake maker, suggested crumb coating to reduce the number of crumbs showing on the outside of the cake.  I was skeptical how I would do, but after trying it, I will swear by it!  Basically, you take the frosting that you’re going to use to cover the cake and thin a small amount of it (with milk for a cream cheese icing).  Then in a very thin layer, you cover the whole cake.  It doesn’t matter if some crumbs stick to it, so you don’t have to worry too much about it as this provides a base for the finishing layer.  Leave it like this in the fridge for an hour and then go to town with the rest of it.  The crumb coat just hardens right over the cake and provides a firm base for the rest of the frosting.

In all, I am happy with all of the things I learned by making this cake, and the necessary experience I have gained for future cakes, but I was not particularly impressed with the cake itself.  I suppose having two cakes in one week and having it follow a wonderful cheesecake, I shouldn’t be surprised that one would be less grand.

This is the first piece of the cheesecake being served

The recipe I chose for my first cheesecake is one from Grandma’s Best.

It has been agreed, at least between H and me, that this is the best cake so far!  The two of us and H’s mom were invited to a nice family dinner at my parent’s house and offered to bring dessert.  I do enjoy a good cheesecake and most certainly this was a good one.  Often I have found that there are sort of two different textures, one being sort of solid and the fancier ones being softer.  This one turned out to be of the softer variety.

The base crust was sort of non-traditional.  Instead of a graham cracker crust it was a mix of brown sugar, finely chopped pecans and rolled oats and it was delicious!  The main cake was, of course, cream cheese but there were two mashed up bananas that added a very complimentary flavour.

A very common (or so I’ve heard) problem with cheesecake is that after cooking, cracks form on the top.  This recipe had worked that one out by adding a third layer of a sour cream and sugar mixture that was certainly a perfect finish.  Keith and Michelle had suggested floating the springform pan in a water bath by first wrapping it in turkey bag as that had worked in their cheesecake endeavors, but I didn’t get to try that one this time.

In the future, to add a bit more to the style, I think I would spend a little more time packing in the crust.  It cooked in very well, I just felt that the aesthetics of it could have been better if I had evened it out at the beginning maybe with a spoon instead of my fingers.  Also, after removing the springform, I would maybe spend a minute and smooth out the top corner instead of leaving it jagged as it turns out fresh from the pan.

I think this one will be a tough act to follow!

Angel Food Cake with blueberry sauce and a dollop of whipped cream

This week’s cake was an Angel Food Cake from James McNair’s Cakes.

Though the cake turned out great, and I had at least one taster tell me it was delicious, it could have easily gone awry.  The ingredients included the whites of 15 eggs beaten.  As I have no experience with separating egg whites, I very nearly ruined the entire cake.

My learning experience for this cake was to separate eggs by first separating them into a small bowl and once the yolk is free, pour the white into the mixing bowl.  Maybe I should take a step back.  In order to properly beat an egg white, there can be no oil or fat in the mix.  this includes the egg yolk.  If one breaks even a small amount, the cake will fail. Naturally I broke the fourth yolk right into the bowl of egg whites and had to start again.  Luckily H and I like a scrambled egg dinner once in a while.

The second tip I got during the egg separation was to separate the egg yolks by using my hands instead of the shells.  Since the shells have jagged edges, there is a much better chance of having a yolk break when using that then your smooth hands.

The angel food cake fresh from the pan

With the whites separated, the rest of the recipe was much simpler.  Mostly mixing.  I wasn’t sure how it would turn out when I poured the batter into the pan, since it didn’t take up much space, but it rose tremendously during baking.

Once it was complete, I made up a blueberry sauce (we have some blueberries leftover in our freezer from the summer) by boiling the berries in some water and mixing with corn starch then adding sugar to taste.  To serve, I put a scoop of sauce and a dollop of whipped cream.   We compared it to the flavor of a packaged mix and found this one to be much heartier but also less grainy and a lot tastier.  The one thing we have to do now is find a purpose for the 15 yolks… (H is suggesting a creme brulee and that sounds great to me).

Fresh Ginger Cake

For the first cake, I went for a more difficult ginger cake from James McNair’s Cakes. I had never heard of it before, but it looked good. It started out well, I had all of the ingredients and the recipe. After that it went down hill for a bit. I started mixing until I realized that some of the ingredients needed to be at room temperature. So I pulled out the aforementioned items and started grating the ginger. This is the second thing I would change were I to do it again is that I would use a food processor to grate the ginger. One cup of ginger is a lot to hand grate.

After the butter had warmed up, I could go back to following the recipe as written. Hand blending butter did not go as well as I had expected. I kept at it and it did eventually blend correctly. Once I had completed the mixing, I looked at the time and found that the wouldn’t be out of the oven until after I had intended on being asleep (work comes early in the morning). At that point, I did some research (or H did) and found that I could store the cooked, non-iced cake for up to two days at room temperature wrapped in plastic and foil.

Ginger cake fresh from the oven

I spent a part of the afternoon of the second day making the frosting and then spreading it. It turns out it works and I have completed it. It tastes great, much better than I would have expected a cup of ginger and lime zest would taste in a batter. In all, it felt bad as I was making it, but it worked out really great for the first cake. It took longer than I expected but I learned a lot for future endeavors.