Baked And Churned

Category: cake

  • Fourth Of July Cupcakes

    Fourth Of July Cupcakes

    We were invited to a family BBQ this weekend, so I decided to make some Fourth of July cupcakes. They are just plain vanilla cupcakes, but I decided to revisit a technique I used when I made my wife’s unicorn birthday cake a few years back and color swirl the frosting and the cake.

    I followed this recipe from Life, Love, and Sugar. I didn’t actually need the instructions for doing the color swirling, but I hardly ever make cupcakes and didn’t have a go-to recipe of my own. The TL;DR is that you simply split the batter and the frosting into thirds and color them separately. I dropped a few tablespoons of each colored batter into cupcake cups and swirled them with a toothpick. This is probably the scariest part because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out until it’s baked, and really, bitten into. You need to swirl it enough to get the effect, but not so much that you mix the colors up and end up with grey cupcakes.

    Swirled Batter
    Swirled Batter

    The trick for the frosting is to lay out plastic wrap and make stripes of your colors on it. You then roll that up and put it into a piping bag. Then, when you pipe it out, ta-da, it’s a multicolored swirl. Obviously, I went with red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July Cupcakes.

    Frosting Stripes
    Frosting Stripes

    I had some consistency issues. The frosting was too warm after the time spent dividing and mixing it, so I refrigerated it. Then it got too solid, so I had to warm it again.. etc, etc. So the piping came out pretty messy, but the effect still worked well.

    Finished Cupcake
    Finished Cupcake

    The swirl effect in the cupcakes actually worked really well!

    It Swirled!
    It Swirled!
    Nom Nom
    Nom Nom
  • Espresso Martini Trifle

    Espresso Martini Trifle

    I made an Espresso Martini Trifle for my wife birthday this year. For some reason, she decided she wanted a trifle, something I’d not only never made, but quite possibly never even eaten before. We are on a bit of an espresso martini kick, so that seemed like the perfect flavor.

    A trifle is often positioned as a fairly easy no-bake recipe, and it was hard to find a recipe for actually making everything from scratch, so I had to improvise and combine assorted recipes.

    Espresso Martini Trifle
    Espresso Martini Trifle

    So what’s a trifle?

    A trifle is a (mostly British/UK) layered dessert. The bottom layer is a coffee “jelly”, which is basically jello but as trifles are British recipes always call it jelly. So what do they call what we call jelly? I have no idea. This is basically just sugar water gelatin and some espresso powder. My wife isn’t big on things with odd consistencies so I was a little worried she wouldn’t like the jelly, but it actually turned out to be one of her favorite parts.

    Decorations
    Decorations

    On top of that was a layer of chocolate cake. For the cake layers I just made a nice moist sheet-cake. Something like this, but to be honest I don’t remember what recipe I actually followed. The cake layers are all brushed with a 50/50 mixture of Stoli Vanilla and Mr. Black liqueur. Most recipes for something espresso martini flavored call for Baileys, but we find it cloyingly sweet and prefer Mr. Black for the coffee flavor. The next layer was chocolate custard. A lot of recipes say to buy custard, but of course, I wasn’t about to do that. Trusty Bird’s Custard Powder to the rescue. Then I just repeated the cake layer and another custard layer. Some fresh whipped cream on top finished it off.

    A serving of espresso martini trifle
    Once served there’s kind of no way round it looking pretty messy.

    Because my wife likes over the top when it comes to her birthday cakes I went with a bunch of gold and silver leaf to decorate, along with some edible shimmer powder, sprinkles, and some fun balloon candles.

    It was a big hit, even the parts I wasn’t so sure about, basically the jelly and the custard. I was pretty surprised everyone liked the jelly, it actually turned out to be me that thought it was weird and didn’t like it that much.

    I think this is a great bake to try. It really allows you to put differing levels of effort in depending on how much time and motivation you have. You can find recipes where everything is store bought and you basically just assemble and chill, or you can go all out like I did and make every element from scratch.

    After serving the Espresso Martini Trifle
    After serving the Espresso Martini Trifle
  • Chocolate Raspberry Birthday Cake

    Chocolate Raspberry Birthday Cake

    I made a Chocolate Raspberry Birthday Cake this year for my wife’s birthday. Chocolate is her favorite and she requested some sort of berry or fruit with it. I originally found this recipe for Drunken Cherry Chocolate Cake that I intended to use, but I found it impossible to find cherries in the middle of January. Plenty of raspberries were available and surprisingly they were even on sale, so I decided to go with that.

    First I made the chocolate cake layers and piped a border of buttercream around the bottom one.

    Cake Layers

    Then I filled the reservoir I’d just created with cherry compote that I’d made.

    Raspberry topped cake layer

    With that done I put the second layer on top of the first and iced the whole thing with chocolate icing (this was a chocolate-heavy cake).

    Iced Cake

    Of course, the final step was decorations. I tried making tuiles for the first time. They didn’t work very well, but I got a few shards I was able to use. I used a bunch of gold leaf and gold dust that I had, along with a bunch of artisanal sprinkles from my favorite etsy sprinkle maker.

    Decorated Cake

    My wife and the rest of the family were very happy with it. We were in the middle of moving when I made this cake, in fact, it was the last thing I baked in my old kitchen, so I was just happy I managed to make a cake at all. It was really dense and chocolatey, the kind of cake you can only have a very small piece of, but it was delicious.

    Finished Cake
  • Apple Marzipan Tart

    Apple Marzipan Tart

    I made an Apple Marzipan Tart for my in-law’s dual birthday celebration. They decided that my mother-in-law would pick the theme this year and she requested apple. I’d been looking for an excuse to make something from Jurgen Krauss’ (of GBBO) book The German Baking Book, and found this recipe.

    Apple Marzipan Tart
    Apple Marzipan Tart

    The Marzipan

    As you might expect, an Apple Marzipan Tart recipe calls for marzipan. You basically have 4 options for marzipan (although broadly 2 – make or buy). Option 1 – buy it. Option 2 – Make it from Almond Meal/Flour. Option 3 – Make it from sliced almonds. Option 4 – Make it from whole almonds. I decided to make Jurgen proud and go full from scratch, making marzipan from whole almonds. I followed this recipe, but I didn’t have any rosewater. Rather than simply add more water as the recipe suggests, I used some liquid vanilla to make it a bit more flavorful. Since I started with whole raw almonds, I had to blanch them in boiling water to loosen the skins, then remove them by hand. I’m not sure exactly how many almonds there are in two cups, but it felt like about ten million.

    So was it worth it? Honestly? Probably not. Maybe making marzipan fruits it would be, but as an ingredient, I doubt it made a noticeable difference. I don’t know that I would just buy in the future versus making it, but I wouldn’t start from whole almonds again. Even if you believe homemade is better, I can’t imagine there is a noticeable difference starting with whole almonds versus almond meal or slivered almonds.

    Final Product

    Apple Marzipan Tart Slice
    Apple Marzipan Tart Slice

    The Apple Marzipan Tart was a success. My mother-in-law, who had requested apple, loved it, as did everyone else. I was concerned about the ratios as I felt like there was a lot of apples and not much of the marzipan filling, but the marzipan was so sweet that you needed the tartness of a lot of apples to balance it. I can’t wait to try some more recipes from the book. I still have like 3/4 of the marzipan I made left, I think I have some in mind already.

  • Coconut Cheesecake

    Coconut Cheesecake

    I made a Coconut Cheesecake for my father-in-law for Father’s Day. Cheesecake and/or coconut are usually his go-to requests when I’m making something, so I decided to combine them. I used this recipe from King Arthur Flour. It calls for coconut milk powder which is an ingredient I’d never used before. I have used milk powder plenty though as it comes up in a lot of Milk Bar recipes that I’ve tried. Christina Tosi’s explanation of milk powder, which I imagine translates over, is that it’s used to add a milkiness to bakes without the actual liquid. Basically super concentrated milkiness. It makes a lot of sense in the cheesecake because you don’t want to add a bunch of liquid to the cheese, it’s hard enough to get a cheesecake to set nicely.

    Coconut Cheesecake
    Coconut Cheesecake

    My in-laws enjoyed the cake quite a bit. My mother-in-law really liked it, calling it a “top 5” bake of mine. I didn’t actually like it that much. It tasted good, and I really enjoyed the graham cracker and coconut crust, but, was it a cheesecake? I’m not convinced. To me, it was closer to a cream pie than a cheesecake. It was also literally a pie, which bothered me. I’ve never made a cheesecake outside of a spring form pan before.

    Coconut Cheesecake
    Coconut Cheesecake

    In the end, what’s most important is that the person the cake was made for enjoyed it, so I’d still call the cake a success, I’m just not convinced I’d ever make it again unless specifically requested.