[food] notes on cake

[kaberett]

Today we made scones, with me rubbing fat into flour and directing the operation and A doing most everything else; they are the best scones I have ever been involved in making and I am delighted to have learned where to actually make improvements. (Briefly: I was overly alarmed by the portion of the instructions that goes "mix dry ingredients and wet ingredients together as quickly as possible, and handle the dough as little as possible".)

Tomorrow I am definitely going to make the familial hazelnut-and-chocolate cake for myself, Adam's wariness about it notwithstanding.

Once I've finished that (or possibly before, depending on how we're feeling) we'll make a round of pear bread, because Ocado were very insistent about selling me two kilos of pears for £3.23 and I'd just turned half the previous bag into a tub of Ruby Violet's pear sorbet.

Other cakes of which I am particularly fond, from my archives, should you feel moved to bake: brownies modified nach Geschmack, pineapple upside-down banana bread, Kardemummebullar (though really those wanted starting tonight to be food tomorrow, ah well). In the category of "I know I like this but I have yet to get around to making it": Bündner Nußtorte.


I would be delighted to hear tell of your favourite cakes, with or without recipes.

Comments

[redsixwing]

Yummmm. That hazelnut and chocolate cake sounds delicious.

US!biscuit recipes have much the same admonishment, about handling the dough as little as possible. I've found that a small amount of handling is not the end of the biscuit.

I am fond of Victoria sponge cake, which is one of the few recipes that works just fine here at high altitude. I mix in either ~40 grams of cocoa powder or ~20 grams of matcha if I want something different.

If I'm really going all out, I'll make Ruins of a Russian Count's Castle, which is at least a half-day affair thanks to the meringues.

[watersword]

I recently made black bottom cupcakes (do not recommend the chocolate chips in the cheesecake filling) and an orange poppyseed cream cheese pound cake (very recommended). The red wine chocolate cake in mini-loaf form is probably my mother's favorite thing I have ever baked.

Someday I'm going to have a springform pan and I will master cheesecake.

[wildeabandon]

My favourite cake is a rose, raspberry and almond roulade from the book Persia in Peckham. I can't find the exact recipe online, but it's basically this one, but with a splash of rosewater added to the cream.

[jesse_the_k]

OMG that looks delicious and it's incidentally gluten-free.

[rugessnome]

There's a (n obviously out of season except maaybe in the southern hemisphere or much nearer the equator) zucchini-chocolate bundt with coffee in one of my vegetable cooking books that is a bit of a project but marvelous.

(Similarly, since I've been (intentionally) cooking so much out of Still Life With Menus, the applesauce cocoa cake there is actually a big chocolate-spice flavored thing. Applesauce cake, to me, mentally=casual thing probably in a square pan, so there's a little dissonance with the name)

An apparently obscure pan-"middle-Eastern" book my local library has, offered an orange tahini cake I made a few years ago and have been thinking about doing again, having found a copy second-hand. (I think I took two attempts to get something reasonable because I was cutting the quantities in half or more and made a grievous error in the first batch.) It was a pretty casual loaf cake.

Several years ago, I did Crescent Dragonwagon's Rose of Persia cake (rosewater, cherries, and lemon) for my birthday, but it did not totally sell me on besan in pound cake.

(What I really meant to do, but didn't, this year, is the "lunar" eclairs from Still Life With Menu, with ricotta-lime-white chocolate filling)

And yeah, minimal handling is a fairly standard US-biscuit instruction. (Trying to avoid gluten development, see... though I want to say the fat is a hindrance to gluten anyway)

(by the way, have a happy birthday.)

[jesse_the_k]

I just made some besan-adjacent almond chickpea fava-bean shortbread cookies, with excellent results, to my surprise and delight.

[jedusor]

The only cake I've been able to make recently was an apple cake that turned out astonishingly well considering the circumstances: I'm quarantining in my partner's studio apartment with approximately one foot by ten inches of counter space, no measuring tools or bakeware, and very little room to store ingredients. I creamed butter and sugar in amounts that looked about right, added an egg, eyeballed some Bisquick with a little cinnamon as the dry ingredients, chopped up an apple that had been approaching middle age, and baked it in a ceramic bowl. It took me off-guard by being delicious!

[booksarelife]

Impressive!

[alexwlchan]

Happy day of birth and cake! I have two cakes to share.

there once was a cake like a mole
to build it you first drill a hole
then fill it with cream
banana the seam
and eat the entire thing whole

It’s a Malwurfkuchen (aka “mole cake”, for non-German speakers), which my sister made this for either my birthday or my brother’s birthday a few years back (possibly both). Photo: https://alexwlchan.net/files/2020/malwurfkuchen.jpg

by a slavic lake called the bled
upon whose snow i did tread
i ate a good cake
which many there bake
and its layers i did indeed shred

I visited Lake Bled in 2018 during the off-season, and was told I had to try the local cream cake. It was indeed very tasty, especially as it was getting cold and dark outside. Photo: alexwlchan.net/files/2020/bled_cake.jpg

[booksarelife]

Just a heads up that the second link is giving me a 404 error

[shewhostaples]

When we were children, our birthday cakes were baked in a roasting tin (yer basic chocolate sponge recipe) and then cut into the shape of the appropriate numeral.

My best cake was a Paris-Brest (I got the choux pastry to work first time!) - I have subsequently found that Mary Berry lied to me, leaving out the hazelnut praline, so this was more of a giant chocolate éclair, but none the worse for that, and countertony doesn't like nuts anyway.

[lebannen]

Simnel cake = best cake. But apparently the way my mum makes it is not necessarily the way other people make it, so:

It's a fairly light somewhat spiced fruit cake with a layer of marzipan baked through the middle of it. It's probably a different recipe than my mum's usual light fruit cake, but the important points are that 'nuts' and 'mixed peel' ARE NOT FRUIT and as such have no place in this cake (and indeed mixed peel is not a thing that needs to be in any kind of cake). You put half the mixture in the tin, you put the marzipan on top, you put the rest of the mix on top of that and then cook it. You don't need to put any more marzipan on the top.

This cake keeps well and is sufficiently solid to survive being posted, which is handy if e.g. everything is lockdown and your daughter has returned home alone a week before her birthday. (I considered putting some of it in the freezer, as I am not usually someone who eats a whole cake on my own but ... yeah no, the cake was eaten).

[angelofthenorth]

Current favourite cake - grapefruit drizzle...

[ewt]

My go-to cake recipe is a chocolate cake, but very adaptable:

1.5c flour
1c sugar
2 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp cocoa powder
1c water
1 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice
6 tbsp cooking oil

Mix dry ingredients, add wet, pour into cake pan or loaf tin or whatever, bake 35-ish minutes in a medium oven (I think I usually use 160ºC).

I often do this with fruit in it. I have done it without cocoa on a number of occasions; I often use a tablespoon or so of rosewater or orange blossom water to make up the 1 cup of water. It works well enough with various types of gluten-free flour, or with half the flour swapped for oatmeal. It's vegan by default. It's moist and sweet enough to not need icing. I can literally make it with a mug, a wooden spoon, and a loaf pan if that's all the dishes that are available, using the mug to measure, eyeballing the smaller amount ingredients, and mixing the batter in the pan.

This morning, though, I made cinnamon buns. Not the dry "cinnamon rolls" that I seem to be able to find here, but a sweet yeast dough with egg in it, rolled out flat, buttered, then with brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves sprinkled on. Roll it up, use thread or a knife to cut it into wheels, put into a pan (I used a rectangular pyrex roasting dish), let rise for a bit, bake until just barely done because it's *supposed* to be gooey. Top with cream cheese icing if you fancy it (I did).

I use this cheesecake recipe, modified: I use mascarpone instead of ricotta, and Waitrose essential full-fat cream cheese (or equivalent), and I do everything in metric measures of 250g because cheese comes in that or 500g amounts so it's convenient, and sometimes I use nine eggs instead of eight. Also, I think Leon Hirschbaum's oven must have run cold or the creamcheese here is different, because I have to turn the temperature down straight away rather than baking it for an hour at the first temperature. (I do the thing of not opening the oven for an hour after turning it off, though.)

[highlyeccentric]

Ohhh cake. Many of my favourite cakes are now lost to me, due to gluten intolerance. Jan's Chocolate Mudcake, an old lazy person's staple, has proven versatile, however, as has the King Arthur Wartime Chocolate Cake. The Epicurious banana coconut muffins are pretty good too, although results turn out to be variable depending on flour mix.

[sfred]

My mum used to make a Roman apple cake, topped with cinnamon and crunchy sugar, which was delicious and moist and not too sweet.

[hairyears]

My favourite cake is Dundee Cake, and I seem to recall that you have reinforced this particular vice.

[ludy]

From around 9 years old i became the cake maker for my family (Gran did most of the family cooking but mostly sensible things like stew. Mum was always not-much-of-a-cook although she loved recipe books and would occasionally experiment (mostly badly) and Dad's work hours meant he only did breakfasts and lunch). I used the Ladybird book of making and decorating cakes which was basic but had recipes that always worked. Other people's birthday cakes were usually a vanilla sponge with appropriatly coloured butter-icing (i love butter iceing). And for my own i would do a mint and chocolate sandwich (one half green and mint flavour one half chocolate) with cocoa butter iceing. I usually find chocolate sponges to be insufficiently chocolaty but in combination with the mint it really works

[booksarelife]

That mint and chocolate sandwich sounds amazing!

[booksarelife]

I’m a bit late to the party, but my mom made a wonderful chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting this past weekend, which was delicious! (I think it was a from a Mrs. Fields’ cookbook) There were also some edible butterfly decorations on top, but as my sister described, they tasted sort of like the tiny, white, round Communion wafers that some churches have, so no one ate them.

My mom also makes a wonderful banana cake and a really good prune cake (this one is baked in the kind of pan you’d bake brownies in and has no icing or frosting, but is excellent)