For cake #1, see joseph's blog around April.
It was L's birthday, and since I haven't figured out how to silk screen yet, the cake had to do. After the interpretive dance I did to the song, the matching birthday cake was brought out...much laughter ensued before and after.
Here is the recipe:
Rich Yellow Cake
Martha Stewart Cookbook: Collected Recipes for Every Day. page 528
4 cups sifted flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 sticks butter (room temp.)
1 3/4 cup sugar
6 egg yokes, well beaten, (room temp.)
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups milk (room temp)
Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter, flour 2 8-inch cake pans. (I didn't do this. I had to use pie pans, but I did butter and flour them) Line with parchment paper. (I didn't do this either, because last time I used parchment paper it started burning in the over. My mom came over and said next time I should do it and that it works really well.)
Sift flour and baking powder. (I never do this. I have never owned a sifter.)
Cream butter until fluffy. Add sugar gradually and beat until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg yokes and add vanilla.
Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture, alternating with the milk. Stir the batter until smooth.
Pour the batter into the prepared cake pans and bake for about 45 minutes. (The cake rises a lot so don't fill all the way to the top.) Cool the cake in the pans for 10 minutes and then cool on the counter.
Thoughts and feelings: Really dense and a little flavorless. Next time maybe cream the butter more??? Also the recipe called for 2 tsp vanilla and I used about 3 tsp vanilla. If I make it again, I will use 4 tsp vanilla. I am not really sure how to fix this recipe...maybe a kitchen aide or electric mixer??? We didn't have ice cream. That might have helped, but a good cake should stand on its own. Especially this one.
Frosting:
Dark Chocolate Ganache
Recipe: America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. A friend is letting me borrow this. I love the show but haven't ever used a recipe.
Makes 1 1/2 cups
3/4 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter
6 ounces high-quality bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (I used about 7 or 8 ounces)
1 tablespoon cognac (I used rum)
Bring cream and butter to simmer in saucepan over medium-high heat. Place chocolate in blender. Add hot cream and rum. Blend for about three minutes or until it is smooth. Transfer to bowl. Let sit at room temp for an hour.
Thoughts and feelings: we used semisweet chocolate chips from Ghirardelli. They recommended Hershey's Special Dark. The icing was thin but good. I think we should have just eaten it and skipped the cake. A good variation might be to add a teaspoon or so of finely ground coffee beans depending on what kind of cake you have.
Other things I learned: I need a piece of paper so I can keep track of how many cups I have added. Someone once told you are either a good cook or a good baker. I wanted to prove them wrong. To be a good baker, you have to be very exact and precise. I think I am going to have to work on that...
8 comments:
I've definitely heard that you're either a baker or a cook. Baking requires more control and less free-lancing, while cooking allows you to be more experimental. I think as a physicist that I'm a better baker (I like to measure everything out and get it just right), while Steph is better at cooking up something with whatever is in the fridge.
I am a cook, my brother is a baker. Pete is whatever he wants to be at that moment, but usually he comes down more on the baking side of things.
Here is what I have learned about Martha Stewart over the years: her recipes are bland and poorly tested. If you get NetFlix (or similar), rent the Alton Brown's "Good Eats" episode about baking. He goes into the science of it and I think it might hold the key to the Martha's problems.
Truly excellent cookbooks test 100% of their recipes before publication. Most cookbooks seem to best between 50-75%. I would be surprised if Martha's people test more than 25%. My brother made a Gourmet Mac'n'Cheese recipe of hers that called for three cups of chopped scallion. Aren - being a baker - was inclined to comply, but after chopping one cup of scallion decided it was clearly a misprint. The recipe made about six cups of Mac'n'Cheese total. Someone should have caught that, and if they tested their recipes, they would have.
Okay, upon further review, I feel I may have been a little harsh on poor Martha. I would like to state, for the record, that one of my favorite cookbooks is The Joy of Cooking. It is, in my opinion, a cook's cookbook. It's bland and boring, but tried and true. The Joy is the starting place that allows neophyte cooks to experiment and become good cooks. So I probably shouldn't harsh on Martha so much.
I don't mean to say that bakers are automatons, they have a recipe they are following, but they also have to know what the end results are suppose to be and work towards them. Like the 3 cups vs 1 cup of scallions: a baker should know roughly how much is needed to make it all work to get it to come out right. If I want a sweeter/spicier/tangier version of something, I know what I need to do to make that happen. But a cook enjoys the fact that the end result isn't necessarily clearly defined and can use that flexibility to be more creative in the taste/texture/visual department.
Thanks for the comments! You two are so funny. Renigging or clarifying on your previous statements.
Baking seems to be an art. Here are the tips I think would help my cake, because I don't think I creamed it enough, I didn't put it in the fridge to store it for eight hours, and it is possible I overcooked it. Hopefully, a little extra vanilla will help the flavor.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4229760
Cream the solid fat and sugar(s), preferably with a stand mixer using the paddle attachment on medium speed, until light and fluffy. Okay, there I go using those vague terms of "light" and "fluffy." Here's when to stop: when you're no longer able to see sugar granules, but you can still feel them if you rub a bit of the creamed fat between your fingers. Although you can overcream (and you'll know that you have when your mixture moves from a smooth and homogeneous mixture to something akin to curdled milk), inadequate aeration (i.e. undercreaming) is far more common. As a rule of thumb, I like to see the volume of the fat increase by a third.
http://thedabblingmum.com/recipes/kitchensecrets/cakesecrets.htm
# Do Not Over Bake
"White cake is supposed to be white, not brown," my mother always said.
We dismissed all the normal rules for telling when a cake is done. Instead, we used the color test, followed by the pinch test.
When the cake loses its wet look, and when a white or yellow cake barely begins to turn golden (not brown), it's time to open the oven and pinch a small dab of the "skin" off the top of the center of the cake. If the pinch is still gooey, but you can see the cake structure underneath it (it looks like a sponge), it's done. That's when it's time to take the cake out of the oven.
Once the cake is out of the oven, that very last 1/4th of an inch of gooey cake will set from the heat coming up underneath it.
If you wait until the sides of the cake pull away from the pan, it's over baked. If you wait until a knife blade inserted in the center comes out completely clean, it's over baked.
# Refrigerate The Cake
Although cakes taste best served at room temperature, they retain moistness best when kept cool and covered.
Sorry the web links got cut off.
http://www.npr.org/templates
/story/story.php?storyId=4229760
http://thedabblingmum.com/recipes/
kitchensecrets/cakesecrets.htm
I think I definitely fall in the "cook" side of the cook-baker continuum. I like to experiment with stuff and whatnot, adding things to other things, seeing what happens, and then devouring the resulting mass of stuff.
Oddly, though, I find baking weirdly satisfying. The couple of times that I've made bread or cake I've been quite pleased that I could follow exactitude and get the right result.
Also, I like your icing. There is no pastry that can't benefit from a good slogan.
I totally agree about the vagueness of creaming instructions! The first time Pete made what have turned out to be The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever, we didn't know what we were doing, so we just kept creaming it because Mom said it would take a long time. Those cookies were perfect. The second time we thought we knew what we were looking for and didn't go long enough. Those cookies were not perfect (although very close! And tasty!). I think cookbooks should have more color pictures. "Here is what adequately creamed butter and sugar will look like. Here is too little. Here is too much." The America's Test Kitchen series are pretty good with diagrams. I like those as gifts for beginning cooks. Their suggested ingredients are often very East Coast-ocentric. (Like: who is going to look for Domino sugar when they can get C & H? But they don't even try C & H because you can't get delicious Hawaiian sugar in stupid Maryland. ::deep breath::) They also tend to be a little what I, in my my infinite snobitude, would call "Soccer Mom-ocentric" in that they don't seem to use experimental ingredients and (the one I bought at Costco anyway) prefer frozen vegetables to fresh. I think it's a great way to learn to be a home cook for a family, though. Making dinner for four 5-7 nights a week is hard. Having a cookbook with 37 ways to use frozen chicken breasts and frozen veggie medley is probably really a good idea. :) Although where dinner is concerned, it's Cooking Light that takes the cake. I love their feature where they give you recipes for a big meal and recipes for how to use the leftovers. Cooking a turkey? Make it a huge turkey and then you can have sandwiches, curry turkey salad, turkey soup, etc. and you don't have to really cook for four days! Hooray!
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