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Easter-over Bakes

Easter-over bakes! I’m Jewish (with an emphasis on the ish), and my wife and the rest of the family are varying flavors and levels of Christian. This year Easter and Passover happened to overlap, so of course I needed to bake for both. The first of the Easter-over bakes is the Passover one. I went with the traditional macaroon. Not to be confused with macarons or Macron.

Macaroons for Easter-over

There are lots of recipes out there for kosher for Passover cakes that are made with matzoh meal or some other flour substitute, but I’ve never liked any of them. My two Passover go-to’s as a kid were always the macaroons or the fake fruit slices, and well, I’ll just buy those. Fot any Jewish cooking or baking my go-to for recipes is Tori Avey and I followed this one. The only slight change was that I substituted arrowroot for the potato starch since I didn’t have any on hand.

Macaroon for Easter-over

Easter

The next of the Easter-over bakes was the Easter one. The most iconic choices are some sort of lamb-shaped cake or hot cross buns. I’m not a huge fan of either. I’d gotten Giuseppe’s Italian Bakes cookbook recently and had been looking for an excuse to bake something out of it. This was the perfect opportunity. Maritozzi seemed perfect. They are a bit hot cross bun like to me, replacing a spiced bun with a fruity enriched dough, and of course, delicious fresh whipped cream in the center.

Maritozzi for Easter-over

These were really good. It’s a fairly simple, but time-consuming process. You start with a pre-ferment and do assorted different rises to get the delicious final bun. I won’t share the recipe – you should buy the book! – but I will point you to this free one from King Arthur to get an idea of it.

Maritozzi for Easter-over

May 10, 2023
Strawberry Yuzu Birthday Cake

I made a Strawberry Yuzu Birthday Cake for my wife. Her request was “something with yuzu”, and I had free reign from there. Yuzu and berry seemed like a good match from the research I did, so I decided on strawberry. I always try to go all out to impress her for her birthday bakes. Here are a couple of past examples. I’ll cut straight to the reveal..

Yuzu Strawberry Birthday Cake

Recipes using Yuzu weren’t the easiest to find, and many results weren’t in English, but I basically copied this one from Masterchef Australia. It left out a few key bits of information on timings and temps that I had to wing, which made for a very Bake Off feel. Yuzu itself also wasn’t particularly easy to find, but Amazon to the rescue. I ordered this, and this. I’d love to use real fresh Yuzu for something someday, but even in Asian groceries, I don’t think I ever remember seeing it. I decorated it with a few fresh strawberries, and liberally with gold in both leaf and flake form since my wife loves gold. I think when it comes to celebration takes, you can never really be over the top on decorations. Of course, there were also candles for serving..

Birthday!!

And finally, here is what a slice of the cake looked like when served. Everyone loved it, especially my wife, which of course is what was most important since it was her birthday.

Yuzu Strawberry Birthday Cake Slice

March 27, 2023
Christmas Bake Photo Dump

I haven’t had the time to write up recipes from Christmas, but I figured I should at least post some photos of all my bakes, so here we go…

Panettone Slice

Straight Challah

Rhubarb-Strawberry Tart

Rhubarb-Strawberry Tart

Panettone

Panettone

Snowballs / Mexican Wedding Cookies

Lunabread Cookies

Aged Fruitcake

Aged Fruitcake

Cookie Tower

Cookie Platter

Round Challah

Round Challah Sliced

January 28, 2023
Lime In The Coconut

I put the lime in the coconut! For my in-law’s joint birthdays (they are like 3 days apart) they requested a coconut cake. I didn’t just want to make plain coconut cake so I brainstormed ideas with my wife. She suggested a lime/coconut cake as a good combination.

Since I’m also trying to do a GBBO bake-along I decided to incorporate lime macarons into the cake as a decoration. The overall idea was lime macarons decorating a coconut cake, and possibly a lime buttercream layer between the layers of cake. Well, here is the story of how 4 different failures led to the cake I actually made, which miraculously was still a tasty hit.

Lime in the Coconut

First, an embarrassingly simple failure. I made the first set of cakes following this recipe from Cooking Classy. I have no idea what I did wrong, but I ended up with sad layers about a quarter-inch thick. So I threw those away and quickly mixed up a second set. I didn’t have the right amount of coconut milk left but at least I was able to make two decent 9″ rounds of coconut-ish cake. They sunk more in the middle than I would have liked, but they were way better than the first attempt.

Macarons

Next, I started on the macarons. I went through a period of making macarons every week and got pretty decent at it, but I haven’t actually made any in a couple of years. Well, you can guess what happened. The first batch of shells was horrendous and all went in the trash. Then the second was less horrendous but mostly went in the trash. The third set finally gave me enough to use.

Next up was the filling. I made a lime curd since I was making lime macarons. Well, the curd never thickened to a usable consistency. I tried assorted ways to thicken it and nothing worked. I was basically left with runny lime preserves. Without enough limes or time to try a new batch, I was in trouble. But wait – I had an idea. I’d follow the advice of the great Harry Nillson and put the lime IN the coconut!

Lime in The Coconut

Final Product

So the new plan was a coconut(ish) cake, with a layer of lime preserves(ish) between cake layers, buttercream all around, covered in shredded coconut, with macaron shells as a decoration. So that’s what I did. I assembled the layers with the preserves in the middle. I piped a ring of buttercream around the edge of the first cake layer to create a wall to keep the runny filling on the cake. In addition, I used alot of buttercream all around the cake to make up for the fact that even my second attempt cake layers didn’t come out all that uniform. For the final touch, I used a stencil I had and added sprinkled cocoa powder to write out happy birthday.

Despite all the failures along the way the cake was delicious and well-received. It even looked really nice in presenting it. It wasn’t until you cut into it that you could see there was a lot of lipstick on this pig to make it look good, as the pictures below will prove.

Lime in the Coconut

Lime in the Coconut

December 5, 2022
Red Velvet Mini Cakes

I decided to bake along with the Great British Bake Off again this season, as I did in 2020, and started with Red Velvet Mini Cakes. From the week one options, my wife requested Red Velvet from the technical round. I then decided to make mini cakes instead of one large cake. This basically made it a combination of the technical and signature rounds, since the signature challenge was mini sandwich cakes. I’ll probably mostly end up making the technicals in this bake along because they always seem to be the most interesting challenges, but ultimately it will come down to what my wife and I actually want to eat most. And yes, for those of you that are watching, I am going to tackle the controversial Mexican week, but I’m definitely not going to be making tacos for it.

I basically followed this recipe from Southern Living magazine. To stay true to the technical I also referred to Paul’s recipe, especially for the presentation (crumbs on the side, etc.). I made one large(ish) sheet pan of red velvet and used a three inch biscuit cutter I have to cut out circles. I then cut those in half to create the two layers of the cake.

Mini Red Velvet Cakes

They came out pretty nice. As you can see above I definitely had some inconsistency in the decorating, especially the piping of the flowers. It basically comes down to two things, one, I’m just not great at it, but also, two, I kept the frosting in the fridge while I let the cakes cool and it ended up freezing. I was then impatient and put the piping bag under warm water to unfreeze it. This ended up giving me a less-than-ideal consistency and causing problems getting perfect flowers. Nonetheless, the red velvet mini cakes tasted amazing, even if they just looked “ok”.

Crumb Detail

Nom Nom

October 14, 2022