Turtle Cake = Fail

How disappointing that the first recipe that I failed at was for my dear mother's birthday cake.  Thankfully, she has been able to taste many of the cakes that I have made so all isn't lost... but still, it was the woman's BIRTHDAY for Pete's sake!

I tried to make a turtle cake.  I used my basic chocolate cake recipe and filled the pan with half of the batter and baked for 20 mins.  Then I took it out and layered with caramel and pecans.  I poured in the rest of the batter and baked for another 25 minutes.  The cake was not bad... but it was not great either.  What needed to happen was the layer of caramel and pecan's needed to be doubled.  Also I used jar caramel because I was in a pinch.... next time I melt down caramels with heavy cream.  Then the top needed a second layer of caramel and pecans.

I will try this one again as it was the perfect selection for my turtle sundae-loving mother.

I won't post the recipe here because well, it was kind of sucky.  And of all the cakes posted here on this blog, this is not the one you should make.  Look for a revamped Turtle Cake soon.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Flourless Chocolate Torte

I've been getting a lot of my inspiration from Pinterest again.  A while back I pinned a flourless chocolate cake that I decided I needed to try.  I have some anti-gluten friends and loved the idea of having this recipe in my back pocket for them.

Flourless Chocolate Torte

4oz. Semisweet chocolate, chopped (I used Ghiradelli)
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup organic sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tablespoon confectioner's sugar


1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Prepare a 9 inch round pan, I grease and then dust with cocoa powder.

2. Using a double broiler pan or some concoction of the sort, melt chocolate with butter.
Then allow someone to lick the spatula clean:

2. Remove from chocolate from heat and mix in sugar, cocoa powder, eggs, salt and vanilla extract. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake for 40 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

3. Cool pan on wire rack for 10 minutes before using a knife to loosen the sides of the cake and turning over onto your cake platter.  Dust with confectioner's sugar.  

I served this cake warm with lime sorbet.  The husband and the boy said that this was their favorite cake now (this is starting to sound familiar).  The inside texture was the perfect combination of fudge and brownie-like.  The nicest thing about this recipe that was that it was quick and easy and produced well above average results. 

Let me know what you think! 

Double Broiler

What you don't have a double broiler?  Guess what?  Me neither.  I suppose if I were making a lot of candy or melting wax or something a perfectly fitted double broiler would make sense.  But really, who has room for all of these things in their kitchen.

So if you don't have a double broiler, don't worry there are options!

See! This is my double broiler:

Lemon Bundt

I'm on the fence.  For Easter I made four cakes.  Does that mean I am off for four weeks?  My goal was to bake one cake per week and blog about it but I did work extra hard on Easter so I'm going to use one more Easter cake for this week's blog post.

In addition to "lamby" I made a lemon bundt for our Easter dessert.  But because I had my hands super full I didn't take pictures of the process just the end result.

I heard good things about the lemon bundt from family members. I did try a slice but I've decided that I'm not a real lemon fan. I need lemon combined with something else... maybe a couple handfuls of blueberries would have been a good addition.



Lemon Bundt:

1 cup butter
1/2 cups sugar
2 tsp. lemon extract
1/3 cup fresh squeezed lemon
3 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2/3 cup milk

Glaze:

1 cup confectioners sugar
1 tsp. lemon extract
2 tablespoons milk

Garnish:

lemon rinds

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350. Prepare bundt pan with grease. In a medium mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt.

2. Cream together butter and sugar. 

3. Add eggs one at a time beating well after each one is added. Add extract, lemon juice and milk.

4. Once liquids are combined add your mixture of dry ingredients and mix on medium speed for 2 minutes.  Pour batter into prepared bundt pan.

5. Bake at 350 for about 1 hour until cake tester or toothpick comes out clean.

6.  Cool on wire baking rack for 10 minutes.  Use a knife to loosen edges of cake from pan and invert onto wire rack.  Let cake cool.

7. Make glaze by combining confectioners sugar, lemon extract and milk.  Drizzle over cake.  I then garnished with lemon peels.

Stay tuned this weekend for the flourless chocolate cake.  Also if you have a cake you think I should make, leave me a note in the comments!  I'd love to hear from you.

Easter Lamb Cake

When I started this cake experiment my mother-in-law brought over her grandmother's cast-iron lamb cake mold. She told me the story about her grandmother making this cake for every Easter table, an Easter tradition that even my husband remembered.  The lamb always looked nice and was surrounded by fake grass and jellybeans the problem was the the cake was inedible -- much too dry for anyone to enjoy.  My guess would be that great-grandma baked the cake on Thursday and frosted over the course of the next few days and then because it was too large to fit in the fridge with all of the other Easter food it was left out over multiple nights.  By the time Easter Sunday came the cake had dried out.

The tradition sounded so ideal and being a sentimental gal I was happy to recreate it.  However in the months that the cake mold sat high atop my kitchen cupboards it looked down at me almost as if it were laughing at me.  The cake mold knew that I would struggle to figure out how best to make it, what cake to use and the frosting and then there was the decorating!  Ugh.  I looked many times at Google's images of Easter lamb cakes.  Lamb cakes laughed at me in my sleep. To be perfectly honest the lamb cakes flat-out creeped me out!

After much research I decided that I would bake the cake in two separate halves.  Our cake mold did not have a tester hole as some of the other vintage ones did but it did have the loops to tie the mold together to bake as one.  However, without the cake tester hole how would I know that the cake was done.

I also decided on carrot cake.  Carrot cake had less of a chance of drying out and was dense enough to stand up to the frosting.  Then because I had no idea how much frosting I would need and knew that it needed to have the perfect consistency I opted for Duncan Hines cream cheese frosting.  For canned frosting cream cheese is the way to go.  Chocolate and vanilla frosting always takes too sugary and fake for me but cream cheese seems to stand up to homemade cream cheese frosting rather well, in my opinion.

When I took the baked cake out of the mold I had to make a cut on each side so that they were flat and could be "glued" together with frosting.  The neck was a little jostled so I added a toothpick for support.  I laid down a bit of frosting on my platter so that the cake would be better equipped to stand.  And the frosting began.

I was almost done when the neck of lamby started to topple!  Holy moly!  I used my two fingers to hold poor lamby together as my husband opened the fridge for me.  I propped lamby up with a container of alfredo and hoped for the best!

I thought for sure that when I opened the fridge the next morning lamby would be lamby-mess in my refrigerator but he did survive the night.

The family all talked about the tradition they remembered and while lamby still creeped me out, he tasted good!

Baking and Updating

Don't worry I baked this weekend, I just haven't found time to upload pictures or blog about them yet.  Here is a sneak peek:

Lemon Poppyseed Chiffon Cake

The last time I was at the store picking up cake supplies I tossed poppy seed pie filling and lemon extract into my cart.  I figured I could cook up a tasting cake using them.
When cake time came I checked out some recipes online to see what I could come up with and read about chiffon cakes. The combination of batter and foam makes for a spongy and airy cake.  I figured with the dense poppy seed filling this  would be a better direction to go. Because the cake was very dependent on the mixture of fats I decided I was better off following a recipe so I depended on Taste of Home's Lemon Poppy Seed Chiffon Cake with a Lemon Butter Frosting.

I really like whipping egg whites; I love the texture that it makes and the peaks that it forms. this is what my batter looked like after folding in the meringue.

I'm not great at frosting and hope that my technique improves with practice, but here is my amateur job:

I served the cake to my mom and my kids for breakfast and then again in the afternoon for friends.  Everyone liked the cake, even my favorite chocolate lovers.  I would have used about half of the poppy seed filling that it called for... the poppy seeds were just a bit too much.  I would also beef up the amount of lemon flavor in the cake.  But really, the recipe as is was very good, the foam gave the cake a texture closer to an angel food cake, which made for a lighter taste.  Most lemon poppy seed cakes or muffins that I've had were very dense but this was not the case.