Chocolate Cake

A few weeks ago I developed an intense craving for a piece of chocolate cake. Not a cupcake, which are too often dry, or a restaurant version, dudded up with flavors and twists. Just a plain old piece of moist, cocoa-ey cake with some chocolate icing on top, served up with a cold glass of milk. I drink milk no more than once a year, so all this made for one awfully strange craving. After a few days of ignoring it, the desire only grew stronger. So I bit the bullet and made a cake.

The problem was that I didn’t have a wealth of time, nor did I have a crowd of people around to help me eat an enormous layer cake. I love to bake, but almost always find that Jeff and I can barely put a dent in a batch of cookies/bread/brownies/muffins before it goes stale. I wanted a cake that I could bake in a single baking dish, so I wouldn’t have the challenge of eating and storing a double-decker layer cake. After spending some time perusing recipes online and in my cookbook collection, I settled on an Ina Garten recipe that received an extraordinary number of rave reviews on the Food Network website. With 1/2 cup oil and 1 cup buttermilk, it seemed to have enough of the right kinds of liquid to keep it moist. I baked it in two 8×8 baking pans so that it would be nice and thick, which would aid in keeping it moist, and topped it with a single layer of frosting. You could also half the recipe quite easily. I enjoyed being able to make two cakes with one recipe. I was able to keep one for myself and give one away – to my best teacher friend Emily, who deserved a sweet treat after bringing home her new baby, Rachel.

Daring Bakers Cheesecake

It’s Daring Bakers time! I missed March’s delicious-looking spinach lasagne, but I’m back in the swing of things for what I hope will be the rest of this year.

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

For this challenge, Jenny gave us tons of culinary creativity. She encouraged us to experiment with a variety of flavors. After sorting through the many ideas floating around in my head  (nilla wafer crust, cassis, fresh raspberry sauce…. or chocolate wafer crust, espresso flavored cheesecake, chocolate sauce… or chocolate wafer crust, nutella swirl, frangelico, chopped hazelnuts…the possibilities were endless) I settled on what, looking back, was a rather surprising choice given my own personal tastes. How could I not have remembered that I really don’t care for caramel? I blame this on the fact that I was still reeling from the completion of my boards and was trying to make this cheesecake for a work gathering scheduled for a date only a few days after the dust had settled.

A Daring Baker’s Valentine

I had to skip the January DB challenge due to intense work-related projects that are still consuming every spare moment of my free time. However, I did manage to squeeze in the February challenge because it was a fairly quick challenge that I made as the dessert in our Valentine’s meal. It was also the perfect opportunity to pull out my 10 lb. bar of Guittard my mom so wisely gifted me at Christmas.

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

I chose to do raspberry champagne sorbet to go with the cake rather than the vanilla ice cream. A few years ago we had a flourless chocolate cake with some champagne sorbet at Bella Monica, a most delicious Italian restaurant tucked into a nondescript shopping center in Raleigh. I followed David Lebovitz’s recipe from The Perfect Scoop and it turned out, well, perfectly. It complemented the cake very well and was quite festive being red and full of champagne.

Below you’ll find the recipes for the cake and the sorbet. For other variations on the ice cream/sorbet component check out the creations of the other Daring Bakers.

Hot Chocolate Cakes

It feels serendipitous that this was the next recipe I had planned to share with you and that I’m sharing it today. Because today is a SNOW DAY for us NC residents for whom a real blanket of snow is an every-few-years-at-best occasion. Of course if I were writing this earlier today I would not have an attitude quite this chirpy because I was actually none-to-happy about this long awaited snow day falling on this particular day. You see, it caused my GRE testing session to be cancelled, which is quite frustrating given the fact that I had spent the whole weekend preparing and had taken the day off work, which ended up being closed as well.

Snow!

But a whole day watching the snow fall while cuddling with J and the kitties has brightened my spirits. That, and the memory of these hot chocolate cakes. I tell you, this recipe is a keeper for so many reasons. I was searching for the right dessert to serve at our Christmas lunch and had just decided on something that felt a little uninspired when my December issue of Cooking Light arrived (very late… mix-up in distribution?) Immediately I knew that I’d scrap my plans in favor of the cover recipe, ramekins filled with some sort of chocolate souffle cake. By the time I turned to the page that contained the recipe I was smiling ear to ear. Because not only was this dish perfect because of the individual portion size, the festiveness, and of course, the chocolate, but it was also designed to be made ahead! Music to my ears given that we were hosting a holiday open house the night before and I had to work the morning of the lunch.

Chocolate-Mint Cake

When I was brainstorming cake flavors for my sister’s birthday the first idea that crossed my mind was actually a chocolate chip cookie cake. She and my mom joke that when they went on college tours together they rated the schools based on the quality of the cookies sold in their dining hall. I wanted something a little more special though, so I decided on a chocolate mint cake. She loves mint in any fashion, with or without chocolate. So I began searching for recipes. I had a picture of one in my mind – rich chocolate cake layers flavored with peppermint extract, with some sort of white-mint icing layered in between. However, I was disappointed time and time again by the recipes I found, which seemed more focused on the chocolate than the mint. Finally I settled on this recipe, a chocolate cake with a mint filling and a thick chocolate glaze. Yes, I know it is very focused on the chocolate but it was the most promising recipe I found.

The December issue of Bon Appetit arrived the week after I baked this cake. And there, smack dab on the cover, was the cake I had been imagining – a four layer devil’s food cake with chocolate ganache AND white chocolate filling, slathered with peppermint frosting. As soon as I saw it I started singing the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic” (spare me the lecture about musical taste please… I can’t help it that I was a child of the 90s). Anyhow, now I have a serious case of cake envy. Here it is. Doesn’t it look to die for? Feel free to skip the rest of this and go for that as long as you let me know how it turns out.

Still reading? Ok. The best part of this recipe for me was the discovery of the chocolate bar I chopped up to place in the cake batter in place of the chocolate chips. I bought it on a whim at Whole Foods in an attempt to make the cake minty-er. It had just the right balance of mint, chocolate, and crunch. Maybe I was so busy eating the leftover scraps of it that I overcooked the cake. Those of you who have eaten my baked goods before know that I always err on the side of underbaking, so this was quite unusual for me. Suffice it to say 65 minutes was waaaay to long for this particular recipe. I’d start checking it after 45 minutes. The other part that just didn’t work for me was the milk chocolate layered in the middle of the cake. I realize that this amount of dark chocolate is too much for some people. In that case, choose another cake. I just didn’t like combining that tinny flavor of milk chocolate (and I used good quality bars) with the richness of the bittersweet glaze. The glaze however, was awesome, and the cake would have been fine if it hadn’t been dry due to my error. If I tried it again I would either swap out the milk chocolate for dark in the filling, make extra glaze and use that in the middle, or just skip the filling altogether.

It was pretty though… Not a total flop, I suppose! Sorry I didn’t get any photos of the inside. We took it with us to Pop’s. They were nice enough to cut and plate it for all 20-something of us. I felt too guilty to ask to take pictures and the lighting was terrible at our table.

Red Velvet Cake

We had the pleasure of hosting a pre-birthday celebration for my uncle’s 60th a few weekends ago. His three adoring daughters gathered friends and family together to celebrate with him. On the night everyone arrived they planned a spread of his favorite things that could have fed us for days. That’s without the copious amounts of pizza we added to the mix. Of course, I begged them to allow me to make the cake. Thankfully, they acquiesced and mentioned that red velvet is his favorite. This worked out perfectly, as I had pulled this recipe back in July but decided to make a s’mores cheesecake instead. I kept it in my file, knowing that it had potential for a future celebration.

Better Late Than Never

It’s been quite a Thanksgiving. We’ve been on the road for more hours than I care to count, but it was worth it to be with our families. Consequently, I missed my Daring Bakers post yesterday.  I was too swamped to set it up before I left. Luckily, I squeezed in the baking part a few weekends ago. I made two other cakes that weekend, too, so if incredibly sweet, dense, caramel cake is not up your alley, look for some other options in the next few days.

Happy Birthday to You

I just started six, yes count them, six posts that I’ll be sharing in the next few days. I got a bit behind in my posting because we are still figuring out Jeff’s new camera. It’s been a bit challenging figuring out the easiest way to get the photos from his computer to mine. However, I’ve still been cooking and now I’ve recruited him as my partner in crime to help me snap some better photos. 

When I first met Jeff it was our senior year in college. We lived in the same apartment complex and ran into each other a few times. One of the first things we talked about was my love of all things culinary, so naturally Jeff asked what my signature recipe was. I stumbled around, trying to find an answer, and eventually had to just sheepishly mumble, “Pasta?”