buzzville

Martha's Cake o' the Month - July

Ok, folks... this is the one you've been waiting for! I had high hopes that Martha's July cake would rank highly in our household, and we were not disappointed. The cake for July is the Berry Pound Cake with Whipped Cream, and I mixed this one up for our Fourth of July celebration (yes, my posts are getting a bit behind...).

The recipe for the pound cake looked pretty straightforward - the only thing that surprised me was the amount of sugar - and my mixer made short work of the batter. The recipe makes two loaves of pound cake - here are mine ready to go into the oven:

and here they are coming out - perfectly golden:

One of the big reliefs about this recipe was that I didn't have to purchase any special equipment to make these... I already had the 2 loaf pans in the right size (admittedly a bit worn, but totally functional) and I also didn't have to hunt down any rare or unusual ingredients. Sometimes, easy is good!

The whipped cream was equally simple - just whip the cream with a touch of sugar for sweetness. Martha's presentation called for both cakes to be covered in whipped cream, and then a bed of raspberries placed on one and blueberries placed on the other:

This would be great if we had been serving the dessert at a party, but since it was just the three of us, I decided not to cover both loaves with whipped cream so that they could get soggy. Instead, I sliced the pound cake and embellished each one. Here is a sampling from chez buzzville:

The red, white and blue scheme was very festive, and we've been getting *incredible* berries this year! How did it fare? Unanimously, this cake was buttery, moist, and light. Combined with the cream and berries, it's the perfect, light dessert for the warm summer days we've been having. It went especially well with the barbecue we feasted on for the 4th. Later, we also served it with warm, sliced peaches smothered in whipped cream, and it was just as yummy. I definitely rate this recipe the easiest to make thus far, and, combined with the delicious results, this probably gives it an overall top ranking. Let me know if you decide to make it - I'd love to hear what you think!

Martha's Cake o' the Month - June

Well, here we are... it's June, and that means that we are half-way through Martha's Cake of the Month project! I have a teensy confession to make: I didn't make the June cake in June. I hope you'll forgive me! I actually made this cake in May because Brynne really wanted a chocolate cake for her birthday. I scanned the recipes for the cakes of the month, found the recipe for the Cocoa Buttermilk Cake, and decided to make it a couple of weeks early. We've found this monthly cake project can be harmful to one's hips, so I figured one less cake this year might not be such a bad thing!

I also fear I'm going to sound like a broken record... Let me preface the description of this cake by saying that I love dessert! Unlike my grandmother, who can make 1 piece of See's candy sustain her for weeks, I would love to have dessert for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! Now, genetics have played a mean game here, and I am apparently not able to live on cupcakes alone, so I try to show a modicum of restraint and feed myself healthy foods, interspersed with the occasional treat. So, what's the broken record all about? Well, this cake was too much! I know I've said this before in this challenge, but Martha must really like desserts that make folks like me (admitted dessert lovers) feel sick! You may start to think I have something against Martha (and god forbid she find these reviews!)... au contraire! I am nothing but a huge fan of hers, and I've basically worshipped her from afar - really! But, I think that her love of sugar and fat together must not agree with me. I need the ratio of fat to sugar in a recipe to remain balanced - as one goes up, the other must go down! Otherwise, my body seems to react very poorly - jittery, can't sleep, feel lethargic, etc. Well, enough of that - on to the cake!

I really liked the sound of this one - I thought that the "snap" of buttermilk would be really nice with a rich chocolate cake, and the flavors would be nicely balanced. I used good cocoa and a whopping 18 ounces of Scharffen Berger dark chocolate (that's 9 bars!) for the frosting. The cake recipe went perfectly and the finished cakes were beautiful. The frosting was also quite simple to make, and I was pleased that I didn't have to resort to any double boiler action - not that this is that hard, but I always get a bit nervous when I have to mix very hot things with cold things and not have some kind of disaster.

I prepared the cakes for the frosting and began to spread 1 cup of frosting on the bottom layer as instructed. Almost immediately I thought something was wrong... I had some crazy amount of frosting in my bowl, and 1 cup of it was pretty skimpy on a 13" x 9" bottom layer. But, I'm pretty faithful to instructions when I do something for the first time, so I just spread it thin. I placed the top layer on and then spread another 4.5 cups of frosting on the top and sides. Once it was chilled, it was ready to slice and eat!

Remember when I said the frosting amounts seemed off? Take a look at the picture of a piece of the cake... tiny layer of frosting in the middle, and then a good 1.5" of frosting on the outside! For those of you who haven't yet made this cake, may I recommend you spread 2 cups on the bottom layer instead? This was kind of crazy... it made it such that each bite was basically all cake or all frosting, but none had a nice balance of the two.

So, how was it? The cake was yummy - chocolatey and moist (thanks to the buttermilk) with an overall good texture. The frosting is what put us over the edge. Too much frosting that was too sweet and too rich. The funny thing is that the frosting is a cream cheese/sour cream base, so we really thought it would be good with the cake. The only thing I can suggest is that my use of ultra dark chocolate overpowered the cream cheese and sour cream - they just couldn't fight back!

As with the other cakes that didn't sit so well at chez buzzville, this one (minus a few pieces for Brynne's birthday celebration) went to work with Jerry where it was rapidly devoured. (As an aside, one of Jerry's colleagues who sampled this cake calls it "the brown cake" in a not-so-flattering way... just so you know we're not the only ones who were less than satisfied!)

You sticklers have probably already noticed that I didn't make the Scrolled Tuiles to decorate the top of the cake. Well, no one was graduating at our house, and I really didn't need to have another recipe to contend with, so we opted out of the tuiles. As for next month, I have high hopes! No buttercream and lots of berries... sounds fantastic to me!

Martha's Cake o' the Month - May

Yes, here I am again, posting this month's cake at the last possible moment. I guess old habits are hard to break! Martha's cake recipe for May is the Teatime Coconut Layer Cake. I was really looking forward to this cake because it sounded light and refreshing - perfect for the warm weather we're getting into. Had I read the recipe more carefully, I probably could have surmised that "light" does not really describe this cake, but that realization came later.

As with previous cakes, this recipe calls for an incredibly well stocked kitchen. In this case, 3-9" round cake pans are called for in order to bake the 3 layers at the same time. I have one 9" pan, and I decided to make do with just one. You'll see that this decision resulted in uneven cake layers, but I'm not sure that really mattered to me all that much! Mixing the cake recipe went smoothly and produced an airy white cake - largely due to the 14 (!) beaten egg whites that were folded in. I attempted to visually estimate 1/3 of the cake batter with each round, but not surprisingly, the last cake was a bit on the small side. I could have measured out all the batter and divided by thirds, but I was afraid that I would break down the egg whites too much in the process.

While the cakes were baking, I cooked the coconut syrup (basically a simple syrup with coconut cream and extract added in) that was to soak the 3 cake layers. There isn't any coconut flavoring to the cakes themselves, so I was hoping that the syrup would generously add coconut flavor to the cakes. Since I was cooking the 3 cakes in sequence, I also had enough time while they were baking to mix up the buttercream. Let me rewrite that to read BUTTERcream - yes, 8 whole sticks of butter are called for in this recipe. Remember when I said this cake wasn't so light after all?!?

(As an aside, let's do a wee bit of math here. The entire cake recipe is supposed to serve 10 to 12 people. Let's be conservative and say that we'll cut smaller pieces to serve 12. That means, if we assume all of the buttercream is used to make the cake, that each person will consume 2/3 of a stick of butter with their piece of cake. Now, I'm not one of those folks who advocates a low-fat diet - not at all - but lordy!)

The buttercream recipe went pretty smoothly as well... I had a moment of panic when mixing when I thought it was going to separate, but perseverance won out and it was soon creamy and fluffy. I proceeded to soak each of the 3 layers with the coconut syrup and begin the assembly process. After soaking each cake layer with syrup, buttercream is layered onto the cake, followed by a sprinkling of coconut.

Once all 3 layers are stacked and ready, the "crumb coat" of frosting is applied and then the cake gets chilled.

The recipe calls for the next layer of frosting to be applied, and then the cake gets chilled again before the decorative frosting begins. I didn't have the frosting tip called for to make the same design in the recipe, so I improvised with a small basketweave tip. I found that there was a lot more buttercream than I needed to decorate the sides of the cake - either I was too stingy while icing the layers, or the recipe is designed to make more than is needed. Given the math we did above, let's hope the recipe makes more than we're supposed to use! So, given that I had extra buttercream, I decided to have some fun and practice my piping on the top of the cake, which would eventually be hidden by a layer of coconut. Here is the silly lattice design I ended up with:

It isn't very pretty, but I was using it more as an exercise in piping. I don't have very steady hands (be thankful I'm not a surgeon!), and this is very apparent in the not-so-straight piped lines. I quickly hid the practice top with the called for sprinkling of coconut, and the cake was finished!

The verdict? Both Jerry and I thought the cake itself was tasty - moist and light - but I didn't really notice the flavor from the coconut syrup. The buttercream definitely tasted like coconut, but it was just too much. Perhaps it was because I *knew* how much butter was in the recipe, but I just couldn't eat more than a small amount of the buttercream. Both of us finished our cakes with a pile of buttercream left behind. Because of the name of the cake, I was expecting light and coconut-y. If I were to make this again, I would add coconut flavor to the cake itself and make a whipped cream based frosting to keep it light and airy - like the cake.

This cake was another time consuming project. I spread it out over 2 days so that I wouldn't go too crazy, but I wouldn't recommend this one as a spur of the moment dessert. And, I'm not the only one taking on the cake of the month project - see other folks rising to the challenge!

Martha's Cake o' the Month - April

I realize that I'm just under the wire on this one, and pretty darned lucky to be in the time zone I'm in at that! I procrastinated on the April cake because I was terrified... the Martha cake for April is petits fours. I've always thought of petits fours as something one might be served at a wedding or when going for tea - and I mean real tea - like high tea at Harrod's or something like that. It also seemed like a tremendous amount of work... making one cake can be tough, but making dozens of tiny cakes?!? I presumed this would only be something a professional baker could or should undertake. So, I waited until the last possible moment to get this one made, and I'm happy to say that my fears were largely unfounded.

Let's get down to brass tacks... the recipe for April is Spring Shower Almond Petits Fours, and as usual, some special items were required to make it just as she had it photographed in the magazine. First off, the recipe is supposed to be cooked in a 12" x 17" baking pan, but I already had a 12" x 18" pan which I anticipated would work just fine - so what if my layers are a tiny bit thinner! The recipe also called for gum paste cherry blossoms to decorate the tops of the finished cakes. I was not quite ready to shell out that much money for a cake we'd just be eating ourselves, so I planned on coming up with an alternate decorative plan.

The mixing and baking of the cake went just fine, and then it was time to assemble the layers. I cut the cake in half, spread cherry preserves on one half, and stacked the other cake half on top. After chilling the layers for a bit, I cut them into 1.5" squares (more or less - or good enough for government work!).

It was now time to glaze them with the sugar glaze. This was by far the most time consuming and frustrating part of the process... each petits fours is supposed to be completely covered with the glaze, and this is much more difficult than it sounds! It took me (and Jerry for part of the process) at least 1.5 hours to get them fully covered in the glaze. Now I know why Krispy Kreme has a conveyor belt system for glazing all their doughnuts!

Here is the glazing in process:

After they were glazed and chilled for a bit, I decided on a simple decorative touch - running a thin stream of glaze over them in a contrasting color. And so, here we have the finished product:

I know... still not as elegant and sophisticated as Martha's, but I don't have the staff of bakers and food stylists that she does! How did they taste? Well, I think both Jerry and I were ready to love them - we're both huge fans of almond-y stuff (can't get enough marzipan around here!), and almond and cherry is a fantastic combination. These definitely lived up to our expectations - very moist cake (thanks to the almond paste) and the cherry filling was not too sweet or too heavy for the tiny cakes. We give these petits fours 2 thumbs up, especially with a nice cup of tea in hand. And, other than the long glazing process, these really weren't to difficult to make! Maybe I'm ready to host a nice, formal garden tea party, complete with crumpets and petits fours!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We just finished up with our traditional dinner of corned beef and cabbage, and now we're ready to sit down and cozy up with a movie and some St. Patty's Day treats. Hope you all had a great day!

 

Martha's Cake o' the Month - March

I'm so thrilled to be a bit ahead of the curve and to have already completed the March cake from Martha Stewart's 12 months of cakes! It's really not like me to have finished something so early, so I hope you don't come to expect this in the future...

I anticipated that the March recipe, the Cardamom Streusel Coffee Cake, would be much simpler than the January and February recipes, and I was right - no spectacular mishaps, no beating my oven with a sledge hammer, and no tossing the finished product in the garbage! Success at last! It was also a relatively simple recipe in that I was pretty well equipped to bake it with what I already have, with 2 minor exceptions. The recipe called for cardamom pods, and I only had ground cardamom, so I placed an order for beautiful white cardamom pods from my favorite supplier of spices and seasonings, Penzeys. I know that I probably could have used my ground cardamom, but I wanted to replicate Martha's results as closely as possible, so I went for the real deal. I also needed to purchase an angel food cake pan with a removable bottom. (Note: One side effect of completing the 12 Months of Cakes project is that my kitchen will now be prepared for every possible baking scenario... 8 ramekins? Check! Angel food cake pan? Check!)

 

Armed with all the necessary ingredients and materials, I began to make the cake. This cake is made up of 2 recipes - 1 for the cake itself, and 1 for the crumb layer that is on top and in the middle of the cake. Both recipes called for tons a bit of softened butter. I was so pleased with myself when I remembered an old "Good Thing" from Martha herself: to help butter soften more quickly, grate the cold butter with a cheese grater! Lo and behold, it worked like a charm, even with the chilly weather we've had for the past few days!

I toasted and ground the cardamom pods, assembled the components for the crumb layer, and mixed the batter for the cake. Everything went into the pan easily, and I had a little help cleaning up while the cake was in the oven.

We pulled the cake out of the oven and it looked perfect. The only tricky bit was figuring out how to turn the cake out and then flip it over again so that the crumb layer was back on top. We ended up with a bit of a crumby explosion during one flip, but not nearly as bad as it could have been! The cake was finished and cooled enough just after lunch. Jerry made up a capuccino and I my cup of green tea - perfect accompaniments to the warm coffee cake on a rainy day.

The end result? It was delicious... It's certainly not the "wow" dessert like the 2 previous months, but this is a cozy comfort treat perfect for brunch, a tea party, or your stitch & bitch snack. I particularly liked the cake layers; they were extremely moist - almost like a bread pudding - which I think is probably because of the yogurt in the cake recipe. I definitely recommend this recipe as one that is super yummy and not terribly complicated to whip up.

My friends over at Sweet Little Treat have set up the Year of Cakes Flickr group for any other bloggers interested in the challenge. Check out what everyone else has been up to over there!

Martha's Cake o' the Month - February

I know you've all been sitting on the edge of your seats, anxiously awaiting the next installment of my experiment - baking each of the monthly cakes from Martha Stewart Living's January 2006 issue. Well, the wait is over! Once again, the process was a challenge, albeit for different reasons, but the end result far more pleasing than the January cake.

The cake for February is the Triple Chocolate Mousse Cake - an appropriately indulgent cake for Valentine's Day, I thought! Like last month, this recipe was composed of several recipes - a cake recipe for the base, and 2 different chocolate mousse recipes for the top layers. I won't get into too much detail as to why our cakes became double chocolate mousse cakes, it might horrify the most powerful amongst you and do permanent damage to others, but let's just say it involved a very sick toddler, sticky chocolate all over the floor, and a brand new and scarily powerful small appliance. Enough said!

The baking of the cakes was simple enough, if a little bit annoying in that I had to seek out 8 3.5" diameter ramekins which I now own for eternity. The recipe performed beautifully, and the miniature cakes were beautiful cooling in their ramekins. On to the mousse... I started with the bittersweet (darker) mousse and everything went well until it was time to pipe the mousse onto the cakes. At that point, my sick little one decided she could no longer be entertained by daddy, toys, books or anything else, and that only mommy would do. So, I placed the fluffy mousse into the refrigerator to wait until I was able to come back to the assembly job. Big mistake! By the time I was able to return to the job, the mousse had been chilled so much that it was no longer "pipe-able". In fact, it was much more the consistency of buttercream. I grabbed my trusty offset spatula thinking that I would apply the mousse as I would frosting, but quickly learned that mousse, even when very cold, still does not behave like buttercream! I then decided to embrace the look I was getting (more "rustic", less "sophisticate") and go with the flow.

The first mousse was done, then the aforementioned disaster with the milk chocolate mousse was upon us. I will say no more.

Given that my little cakes were now looking much more like cupcakes than triple layered mini masterpieces, I decided to continue with the look and top them with delicious Guittard sprinkles (jimmies) instead of the chocolate shavings as directed by Martha. The end result? Incredibly rich, chocolatey and completely delicious. Although my version was not truly complete or as refined as the source recipe, my little cakes were a fantastic epilogue to a stressful, but filled with love, Valentine's Day.

For your reference, this is what the cakes were intended to look like:

and this is the more rustic, handcrafted version from chez buzzville:

Other notes:

1. a tough recipe to take on unless you have several uninterrupted hours on your hands (key word being "uninterrupted")
2. scotch tape does not adhere to parchment paper... save your cursing and try masking tape from the start!
3. all of the individual components taste fantastic - consider you now have recipes for a yummy chocolate cake, dark chocolate mousse, and milk chocolate mousse that you can use individually as well!

fruity pebbles

Continuing the Valentine's Day theme, today Brynne and I whipped up (pun intended) a batch of the grapefruit meringue hearts featured in this month's Martha Stewart Living. Meringues are funny treats, and I don't want them all the time, but they're fun to have every now and then. Unlike the recipe, I made them all with grapefruit zest (rather than half orange and half grapefruit).* They were pink before I cooked them, but then turned a pale tan color after cooking for 3 hours. So, if you want yours to be pink, add more coloring than you think you need to compensate for the browning during cooking. Here is a tray of hearts, ready for a sweet welcome home for Jerry after his long commute this evening:

* those of you who aren't citrus fans, I *promise* that the next thing I bake won't be citrus based!

sweets on the brain...

My last post about the Martha cake baking experiment got me thinking about other challenging baking projects... I remembered *the* most impossible, but amazing cake that I made a few years ago for my sister-in-law's baby shower. Quilting is big in my husband's family, and I knew that my sister-in-law would receive several quilts for the baby at the shower. That was the inspiration to make a cake that looked like a quilt. We started by testing various cake recipes on a small scale (and asked lots of friends and family to taste with us!) until we arrived at the winning recipe: the lemon ginger cream cheese pound cake with lemon mousse filling from The Whimsical Bakehouse. Since the shower was to be held in the summer, we figured a light, lemony cake would work well.

The first challenge was size - there were going to be a lot of people there, so I estimated that I needed to make a full sheet cake. I bought the ridiculously sized pan and then worried about how to handle all the batter! I had to mix the batter in batches, because there was no way my 1940s Hamilton Beach mixer was going to handle the quantity of batter I needed. Splitting the huge cake into two pieces was also challenging, to say the least, and Jerry and I both held our breath as we lifted the top layer so that we could fill the cake. I decided to ice the cake using fondant, and this would work well to create the look of the quilt. My sister-in-law had selected baby blue and yellow as the colors for the nursery, so we went with the same colors of fondant for the cake. I purchased tiny cookie cutters in shapes of little animals and letters, as well as a little cake decorating tool that would "crimp" the fondant to create quilting lines.

Rolling the fondant in a large enough piece to cover the entire cake was also a huge challenge - it was the first time I had worked with fondant (perhaps a mistake?!?), so I was definitely not experienced! But, in the end we got the whole cake covered in a layer of fondant. Then we created a patchwork of blue and yellow fondant squares that were "quilted" using the crimping tool. We then placed the little animal and shape cut-outs onto each "block" and spelled "Baby Rick" in the middle. Here is a picture of the finished cake, just before we packed it into the cake box and drove to the shower:

I really love baking and decorating baked goods, and I also have the tendency (as you've probably noticed!) to jump right in without knowing a thing! I've certainly had stressful baking moments, but in the end, watching people enjoy something I've made in the kitchen is incredibly rewarding - much like giving something I've sewn or quilted or crocheted or knitted or... This cake was a huge hit, and my sister-in-law burst into tears when she saw it. I knew she would love it - especially all the thought that went into it. This "quilt" ended up being the precursor to the other quilt I made for my little nephew when he was born. He turned 1 just before Christmas, and I'm thinking he may just need a new quilt soon!

cake and goodness

We had such a busy week and weekend... lots of work, organizing, cleaning, etc. You'd think I was pregnant from all of the "nesting" behavior! Maybe I'm just nesting for all of you who are expecting! Anyway, I just can't believe that January is already over, and maybe that's why I've been in such a frenzied mood - so much to do and the days are just flying by! One of the things I wanted to do this year was to bake the "cakes of the month" from the January issue of Martha Stewart Living. I thought that I could bake each of the cakes in the appropriate month, and then post a review of sorts for anyone who might be interested. No, this isn't going to become a food/baking blog - but I thought it could be fun to go through the cakes each month. So, in order to meet the January cake deadline, it was this weekend or never!

The January cake was a Meyer Lemon Cake that sounded delicious. Both Jerry and I love lemon desserts, so we figured this one was a sure hit. But, we had some math to do first... the recipes were to make a gorgeous triple tier cake suitable for a wedding. We certainly didn't need that much cake around for the 3 of us, and I certainly didn't want to make that many cakes! So, I divided the recipe by a huge amount to make just one half of one 10" square cake (each tier is made up of 2 square cakes sliced in half for a total of 4 layers per tier!). This was not an easy project: the recipes required making the cake, a lemon syrup to soak the cake, lemon curd as the filling, and buttercream to frost the whole deal! I finished each of the components late last night and quickly (not artfully!) assembled the cake. We had our first sampling last night, and I have to say it was not as good as I had hoped. Overall, the cake was too sweet, and not lemony enough. The lemon curd was fantastic, but I think the buttercream should have been lemon flavored as well. Neither Jerry or I wanted all of the buttercream (we left piles on our plates), but we wanted more of the tangy curd. Here's what our slices looked like:

So, my recommendation is to make some trusty lemon bars if you're craving something lemony for dessert. This recipe was too much work for the less than fantastic results. Of course if someone else had slaved over it, I probably would have liked it more! But, I will say that the lemon curd recipe was really good, and the buttercream recipe was much easier than others I've tried - I'll use this again, but probably flavor it with a complimentary flavor...