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.......

April 25, 2010 in baking

This is my new toy, a "Cakewich" cake pan  by Fred and Friends.


This is the first time I used it and  you can see I had a little trouble cutting the cake in half.  The box the "Cakewich" pan comes in has a white pound cake recipe, which is what I used in the pan. The pan releases well, but I think I was in too much of a hurry. I should have waited for the cake to cool a little longer. The inside frosting is damson jelly and a peanut butter icing.  It tastes pretty good, even if I do say so myself.

In other baking action, the cake of the week is another pound cake - my Aunt Roe's pound cake recipe. It's strange because you start it in a cold oven and it bakes for about an hour and a half up to 2 hours.  My sturdy tube pan was, as always, up to the task It looks pretty good, too.
The third and final thing I baked was (what else?) brownies. I followed my normal procedure of "blooming" the cocoa in the melted butter, substituting 1/2cup of applesauce for 1/2 cup of butter and using whole wheat flour. Now you're thinking "yuck", but it comes out fine. That's the way I usually make it. That way I can fool myself into believing it's a little healthy for me;)
That's all I got so far this week - _enjoy_

ta da

This is the key lime cake I made from the recipe in the April 2010 "Redbook" magazine, it's the one that has Trisha Yearwood on the cover. It's her recipe, I tweaked a few things (flavored the icing with lime, for example). My husband said it is _great_.
I also baked brownies, using 1 cup of butter and 1/2 cup cooking oil and the whole wheat flour. This gave the brownies a fudgy texture.

I made spaghetti and I made Italian bread to go with it - well, actually I made "Mr Food"'s recipe for thick crust pizza and baked it as a loaf. It had a wonderfully crisp crust.
I also tried the baked jelly doughnuts from "Bread in Half the Time". I don't think Dunkin' Donuts has anything to worry about anytime soon. They just taste like sweet rolls with raspberry jelly in them. Yeah, it's good, but not that big a deal.
I had a poor history with doughnuts. I tried frying some many years ago. They came out _horrible,_ all greasy and as black as the soles of my shoes. I used an electric deep fat fryer, but apparently it was a bad recipe or I didn't do it right. I was going to toss them but saved them for my younger son to come home. He knew I was making them and I figured if I tossed them, he would think we'd eaten all of them. He looked at the doughnut and said "Is this supposed to be chocolate" and I said "nope".....
_enjoy_
I also

baking action for Easter week

well, let's see. I baked a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting to take to my oldest sister's house. I usually take a cake and it would have been my father's 83rd birthday. He loved my mother's chocolate cake. Mine isn't as good as my mom's but it's good - at least that's what my sons say. They manage to "choke it down";).
I also baked brownies for the week, but nothing too special about them, just the "usual" tinkered with Hershey's brownie recipe. I didn't put icing on them this week. I found out that putting icing on brownies you are going to cut and take to work in a plastic sandwich bag makes more of a mess that I want. Plus, really, the icing is overkill to me.
I also made potato bread from the Bernard Clayton book. My poor book is falling apart - the spine is split and you can definitely tell what recipes I use the most. I probably should transcribe the recipe to my computer cookbook. I got a ton of them to do, though, and I get lazy. Anyway, they turned out great. I love potato bread - well, truthfully, I just love bread.
This week's baking? I'm not sure. I got a new recipe for brownies that uses cooking oil instead of butter. It's from a small cookbook I got at the thrift shop. I thought I would try something different. It still calls for cocoa, so I'm ready for that. I don't know if they will be drier or wetter - though it calls for oil instead of butter, it still calls for 5 eggs. The usual recipe I use calls for 6 eggs.
I don't know if I am going to make a cake or not. I want to, but time might slip away from me. I don't know what kind of cake I want to make, but I want to make one. And probably no bread baking tomorrow - we are going to a baby shower type of thing and I doubt I will cook a "big" dinner tomorrow. We'll see
_enjoy_

if your man can't cook

blame his mom, she probably spoiled him or something - or so this writer says...
http://www.lemondrop.com/2010/04/05/the-lost-boys-men-who-can-t-cook?icid=main|main|dl3|link7|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemondrop.com%2F2010%2F04%2F05%2Fthe-lost-boys-men-who-can-t-cook .

Washington Post "Peeps Show"

Check out the Peeps dioramas made for the 2010 Washington Post contest - they are great
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/03/29/GA2010032903934.html?sid=ST2010032904380

Peeps & Rice Krispie treats

makes peepshi-sushi?


http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/03/peeps-recipes-how-to-make-peepshi-sushi-rice-krispies-treats-easter.html

check it out...