another cake!?

yes, this soon. My younger son asked me to bake a "birthday cake" for one of his co-workers. He decided it should be chocolate (it's the tradition cake here for birthdays) and so I baked it, using the Hershey's cake recipe.
And what to frost it with? Well, none other than the chocolate frosting I have tweaked to make it more powerful than normal chocolate icing;) One problem - I could not find the corn syrup, an important part of this recipe. So okay, I thought, I'm make buttercream frosting. Well, I didn't have the ingredients on hand to make a chocolate buttercream. I thought, oh heck, won't need it until Wednesday, so I'll just let it go until tomorrow.
Than it occurred to me I will probably be working late tomorrow and won't be in the mood to fool around with frosting when I got home. So it's marshmellow frosting to the rescue.
Yup, you may know it as "7 Minute Frosting" or "Boiled Frosting", I just call it marshmellow because that's what it tastes like. And I've been making it for a very long time, so I think I can call it what I like;)
With a cup of sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of cream of tartar, some vanilla, hot water and the powdered whites of eggs, it's pretty simple to put together. (You could use an egg white, but I don't think that's recommended anymore). This is a recipe your really need an electric mixer - unless your hands are much better than mine, which is possible. It takes 7 minutes of intense beating to make these ingredients into this fluffy frosting.
But now I got to wait until Wednesday to see how it's received.......

3/21/10 baking action

I managed to make my youngest sister's cake and apparently it was acceptable. I haven't heard any complaining about it (yet;)). I still have bread left over from what I made Wednesday, so I won't make any for dinner tonight.
So far I have made brownies, big surprise. I put some orange flavoring in them. I considered putting icing on them because I have icing left over from my sister's cake, but I didn't. I might end up eating the icing by itself;) Or maybe saving it for another cake down the road.
The cake this week follows the orange theme, the infamous "Cheeto cake". Although I did not find an an orange cake mix to begin with, I did add orange juice for the liquid in the cake. I also baked 3 layers, I don't usually do that. I still have to frost it using the buttercream frosting. That will be orange, also. It won't be as dramatic looking as the "Cheeto cake" but it should be good.
I should (and I might) make some small egg cakes and freeze them for Easter. I have the pan, it has 9 egg shaped cavities for cake. I tried doing the milky way cake in it, but it doesn't work out so well. The little bits of milky way that doean't completely melt stick to the pan no matter what I have tried.
I don't have too much to add to this. I am trying to think of a suitable dessert for Easter dinner, bit so far only came up with lemon cake. There's nothing wrong with lemon cake, but I love chocolate and I don't believe lemon and chocolate work well together. It gives me something to ponder...

Brownies this week

A great cook knows what ingredients she/he has on hand and makes sure to plan the cooking around it. She/he knows pretty much to the ounce how much flour, sugar, yeast and all that stuff is in the pantry.
A good cook knows what's in the pantry, He/she might not be able to tell you if it's a 14.5 ounce box of currants or a 15 ounce box, but he/she knows that the ingredients needed are at hand.
Than there's me. I thought I had plenty of granulated sugar. At least, it seemed I had a five pound bad tucked away somewhere. But, as it turns out I didn't. And I had already melted the butter and threw about a half a cup of semisweet chocolate chips in the melting butter as my experiment this week.
What to do, what to do? I went to my favorite cookbook "The Joy of Cooking". I knew that if anybody could save this recipe, it would be the Rombauers. And I was right. The advice was to substitute one cup of brown sugar for 1 cup of white sugar. I wasn't quite sure how it would work, but much to my surprise, it did work.
The brownies came out a nice cross between cakey and fudgey. I would say it was a success - at least to me. The food critic hasn't tried it yet;)
As to other baking, I have my fovorite yeast dough rolls rising so I can pop them in the oven. I also baked my honey a strawberry swirl cake, using the basic "Cheeto cake" method. I used a yellow cake mix instead of a strawberry one. I also took some frozen strawberries and cooked them down to a sort of strawberry paste. Part of this I used to flavor the buttercream frosting and part I used as the "icing" between the two layers of cake. He hasn't tried it yet, but he won't complain. He's afraid if he does, I'll never cook for him again.
My older son's birthday was yesterday and he requested his favorite, ice cream cake. Yes, the Carvel kind. Hey, that's what he wanted. I would have noticed the lack of sugar sooner if I had to bake a cake for him.
I was hoping to wait until next grocery shopping day to get more sugar, but I can't. My youngest sister's birthday is Tuesday and she will not settle for a Carvel ice cream cake - it has to be chocolate with chocolate frosting. And don't mess with any of the ingredients. I can't change the way the frosting is made and I can't change the cake recipe. She's very picky when it comes to that.
Anyway, that's it for me this week.
_enjoy_

wow

Yeah, it's been a very long time. I figure I lost about 14 days just to the process of having 48 inches of snow outside of my house. When you are stuck in the house and not sure when you will get out to buy groceries, it makes you a little conservative as to what you bake - or at least it makes _me_ conservative in what I bake.
But there's only small piles of snow in our yard now. There are parking lots spots that are still blocked by snow, but mostly it's clear in MD.
I baked brownies last week, I used one half a cup of applesauce in the batter. This made for a more cake like brownie. I didn't add any extra chocolate (I had been melting some chocolate and adding it in) because I wanted to see how it would be without it.
I did like the cakelike texture. But I also like the fudgey texture. Now to figure out how to make a brownie that combines the best aspects of fudgey and cakey. Sounds like I need the Keebler Elves for that;)
I also made a lemon cake with lemon buttercream frosting. I used a cup of lemonade in place of the water in the directions on the back of the Duncan Hines box. I also used a box of lemon Jello to make a swirl cake, but it is not as dramatic as the Cheeto cake. Still tasted good o or so my beloved says.
I made a spice cake, not particularly thrilled with it. My grandmother would make the best spice cake. I hated the frosting, way too thick and sweet, but my older sister loved it. so we'd swap icing for cake. It was a cooked frosting. I never tried to duplicate it because I didn't particularly care for it. But my aunts and uncles still talk about it.
My older son's birthday is next week and he wants - ice cream cake. Yes, you heard me. That is his traditional cake. Last year he wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and I was stunned. But usually he gets the ice cream cake (Carvel's). But don't worry, I will be making a chocolate cake for my youngest sister's birthday later that week. so I won't get out of practice.
That's it, that's all I got...

hey

I'm still here, still hanging on. I always try to take one day at a time, but quite a few ganged up on me;)

I've been baking brownies, of course, for my sons. I've started adding 1/4 cup of melted semi-sweet chocolate chips to the Hershey recipe I have been tweaking. The Hershey brownie recipe is from Hershey's website: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yec9rl5
I have "bloomed" the cocoa in the melted butter and added the chocolate chips to that mix. I've even cut the butter by 1/2 cup and replaced it with vegetable oil. The vegetable oil does not seem to make a large difference in the taste or texture of the brownies, but "blooming" the cocoa does - it makes it a more chocolately tast. Adding the melted chocolate give the brownies a fudgey texture. I have also adjusted the baking time. I am baking the brownies for 45 minutes at 325 degrees for a 9"x13" pan. So far, this has given the best results.


I've made some bread from the Bernard Clayton Jr's

as well as the "Touch of Grace" biscuits. They always turn out well.

I have offered to make my sons chicken and noodles, but every time I do, it snows - a lot - like 20 inches or more. I didn't even offer to make any today and we're still supposed to get about another foot of snow. I guess I will continue to nimble on my brownies and drink hot tea.
I think for my honey I will make some raspberry thumbprint cookies, but I will shape them into a heart for Valentine's Day.

That's all for me, stay warm and enjoy.

oopsie

For my birthday last week, I baked a milky way cake. Yummers. I also baked a small pan of brownies, nothing special to the mix.
But this week - ahh, this week and next are when cooks are either frazzled or excited. You can either become overwhelmed by the Thanksgiving feast or look at it as a time to break out your new recipes.
Honestly, though, I don't vary much from the Thanksgiving menu. There's turkey and ham, sweet potatoes and mashed, corn and peas and cranberry sauce like my mom always made it. Sometimes she'd even let me make it. It's easy - just open a can of Ocean Spray Cranberry sauce. You could slice it up if you want or make some fancy shapes with it, but it's got to be Ocean Spray because they are the bomb. Don't bother writing me about your great grand-uncle's recipe for homemade cranberry sauce. Not going to listen. I've had homemade cranberry sauce twice and I still wonder what all the fuss is about.
The desserts will be the "usual" - there will chocolate cheesecake per Dan's request, Craig always wants strawberry junket and Will's the variable. This year Will picked the Cheeto cake. I also make bread and try to bake as much as I can in some sort of weird celebration of baking.
My mom worked full time from the time I was 6 months old. Now what does this have to do with cooking? She was, of course, always busy. So as we got older, she'd bake a batch of birthday cakes at one time, despite that the 6 kids had different birth months. But any month is a good month to get a homemade chocolate cake in my humble opinion. So I bake the little Bundt pans of different cakes - chocolate, vanilla, might go for pumpkin this year. And that becomes "birthday cakes" for my sibs and their families. Now some of them do get a cake on their birthdays, some do not (their choice). So this way I get the cakes baked in one fell swoop. And of course, the house smells great.
Anyway, I am off (in more ways than one) to prepping some stuffing bread. That will be the basis of my stuffing on Saturday as well as Thanksgiving. (The extended family comes over on Saturday, the immediate on Thanksgiving - and who else wonders in).