The Cake Cycle

Sometimes, caking can be a vicious cycle.  A sweet, fluffy, deliciously vicious cycle.  It doesn't always happen, but for example when you make Swiss meringue buttercream to ice one cake, you have to make cake pops or cupcakes to use up the leftover.  You probably also have to make something (pastry cream) to use up the egg yolks left from making the buttercream.  Incidentally it was egg yolks, the remnants of my angel food endeavour, that induced my latest cake cycle.  Maybe it was a lack of imagination that led me to use them to make pastry cream for the second time in a few weeks, but I prefer to think of it as a reflection of my new-found love for the silky custard.

Since I've already posted about pastry cream, I won't spend much time on it now.  It is worth mentioning, however, that though I commented before that I never saw it reach a creamy salad dressing consistency, this time I did, and I removed the saucepan from the burner at that point.  On a practical level it shouldn't have been surprising that the pastry cream would turn out a bit thinner when it was cooked for a slightly shorter period of time, but given that the recipe said to remove from heat at the point of salad dressing, and given that the expectation for pastry cream is for it to be thick, it was a bit unexpected.  So, at the risk of winding up with vanilla scrambled eggs, in future I think I'll continue whisking over heat a bit longer.

Anyway, what to do with the pastry cream?  My original plan was to make a fruit tart for a cocktail party I was going to, but I was too pressed for time (and feeling too lazy) to make my own tart shell.  So I bought one, a cheap one, the first kind I could find in any of my local grocery stores, and I suffered for it.  Or rather, my tart suffered for it.  The overall effect wasn't terrible (the other party goers said they liked it, but possibly they were being kind, or possibly they'd had more cocktails than me), but it could have been much better.  I'd purchased a second shell to fill with the remaining pastry cream, but opted not to use it after the first one.  Instead, since the pastry cream was a bit thin, I looked online to see if there was a recipe that involved baking pastry cream.  I found the gâteau Basque.

I debated between two recipes, one from NPR and the other from Culinary Concotions by Peabody.  The latter was based on a recipe from The American Boulangerie, and I was drawn to it for that reason; the cookbook has a good reputation, and I'm a fan of Bay Area cuisine.  NPR's recipe didn't involve separating any more eggs, however, so I went with them instead.  Everything about making the dough was straightforward: whisk the dry ingredients (minus the sugars - white and light brown), beat butter and sugars, add eggs, vanilla, dry ingredients...  It was the fact that I was making a dough for a cake that was strange.  Nevertheless, with the baking powder and the beating of the butter and sugar, it was clear this was no pie crust; it was more like cookie dough.

Both recipes said to split the dough and roll each half out individually between two pieces of saran wrap or parchment paper.  Both also said to refrigerate the dough, but disagreed about whether to do this before or after rolling it out.  I was impatient and thought with a greater surface area the dough would cool faster, so I rolled it first.

And then I stuck it in the freezer.

I wouldn't recommend leaving the dough in the freezer for long (neither of the recipes recommend it at all), but it worked to firm the dough up quickly, and then I transferred it to the refrigerator for a bit to ensure that it would be workable.  If I'd been faster in getting everything else ready I might not have needed to make the transfer at all, but despite being impatient I was operating fairly slowly.

If I had been making a traditional gâteau Basque, with pastry cream or jam alone, I wouldn't have had anything left to prepare.  I wanted to take my cue from Peabody, however, and use pastry cream and jam.  I like to make things complicated.  Especially given that I had no jam.  But I had frozen fruit!  And though black cherry is the traditional filling, blackcurrant/redcurrant/blackberry/raspberry jam sounded delightful to me.

I use the term 'jam' loosely; I really just adapted the recipe I'd recently used to make coulis, thickening it with more berries, more sugar, less water, a longer cook time, and a tiny bit of cornstarch.  It didn't turn out terribly thick, but was perfect for the intended use.  It would've also been great for pancakes.  Or waffles.  It really made me want waffles...

The most difficult part of this whole cake was getting the bottom layer of dough into the cake pan.  I wasn't 100% sure about the logistics of doing it for one, and for two I rolled the layer out a bit more after pulling it from the refrigerator, which I think softened and warmed it just a little too much.  The dough should be malleable so that it can be formed to the pan, but not so soft that it tears apart when you try to fit it in there.  That was an issue for me, worsened, I think, by rolling the layer a little too thin.  Over-rolling also meant too much overhang, which caught on the sides of the greased pan as I was trying to lower it in, resulting in small tears on the sides.  It wasn't the end of the world though, I simply pressed the tears back together and evened out the overhang, removing the excess.  Then I added a layer of my berry concoction, a layer of pastry cream, and the top layer of dough, which I had a much easier time of, having learned from my experiences with the first.  Then I carefully unstuck the overhang from the sides of the pan and folded it over the top layer of dough, attempting, with varying degrees of success, to pinch it like a pie crust.  I incised the dough in the evidently traditional cross-hatch pattern and baked until golden brown, foregoing the egg wash because, again, separating eggs.

Between the wonky edges and the wash-less... crust?  Is it a crust if it's cake?  This cake was rustic.  It was also lovely.  The layers did rise, although not too high, and were soft and a bit crumbly.  They weren't dry, although I think they did benefit from the moisture of the pastry cream.  Overall it was dense, but not heavy.  And it will be repeated.

May the cake cycle continue.

The Best Laid Egg Whites

Between the pastry cream and Martha's Versatile Vanilla cake, my brandy princess cake left me with seven egg whites, which I in turn left to languish away in the refrigerator.  I didn't mean to do it.  Honestly, I very nearly made meringues one night, until I saw the bake time (two hours) and thought that it probably wasn't a project for 11pm...  After that, the End of Term sucked away my time, as it is wont to do, and before I realized it the widow to use the whites had closed.  Different people will tell you different things about how long refrigerated egg whites will last; many say 2-4 days, although Joy of Baking says 7-10.  If I hadn't planned to share the results of my egg white-based baked goods with other people, I might have been inclined to accept Joy of Baking's estimate.  For fear of making someone sick, however, I opted to share the whites with the drain instead.

Clearly my first mistake had been refrigerating the eggs instead of freezing them; frozen egg whites will last forever.  (Not literally, please don't take that literally).  My second mistake was deciding that I wanted to use the egg whites to try making angel food cake.  A normal person, upon finding the egg whites unsuitable for use and the impetus for baking therefore nullified, would have said 'Ah well' and moved on with their life.  Not me.  Once the notion had taken root, I was going to make that cake.

Not only did this mean that I had to start over with the egg whites, it also meant finding the right cake pan.  I briefly considered trying the recipe in a regular round springform pan, but researched the reason for using a tube pan or loaf tin and learned that, because the cake is so light, the outside would bake too quickly for the inside in a standard round.  Since nobody wants a burned edge and a raw middle, I would need a new pan.  Luckily for me, I was able to find an inexpensive springform pan with optional tube and standard flat bottoms (points for the multi-purpose feature allowing me to justify the purchase just a little bit more).

The recipe I chose was another one of Martha Stewart's; even if I'm not 100% certain about her as a person, the lady knows her stuff.  Or her team does.  Either way, every recipe I've tried from her site has ended delectably.  With recipe in hand, and armed a new pan and a fresh dozen eggs, I set to work.  (As a side note, here's a video showing how to properly separate eggs.  I'm sure that you already know how to do this, but just in case...  I've recently seen a youtube video in which a girl separated her eggs by cracking them into a bowl, transferring them to a sifter, and shifting them around until most of the whites, and some yolk, were, er, sifted out.  Creative, perhaps, but not effective).

To start, I don't own a sifter (good thing too, or I might have tried to separate my eggs with it), so I just whisked the dry ingredients together and that seemed to suffice.  I did follow Martha in beating the meringue to stiff peaks, although I had seen other angel food recipes that said not to beat them quite that far.

I was more trepidatious about folding the dry ingredients into the meringue.  When I told my mom that I was going to bake an angel food cake, she shared a story about a childhood birthday failure.  One year, she requested angel food cake for her birthday.  My grandma, a great baker, baked her... two.  The first one fell.  My initial thought was that maybe grandma wasn't a big drinker and didn't have a bottle laying around to hang her cake on (see below), but no, according to my mom it fell when she opened the oven door.  While not certain, I think it's possible that she'd been too vigorous in the folding process and accidentally deflated the meringue.  Consequently, I took extra care in cutting through the centre of the meringue and in folding it lightly over the dry ingredients, which I had sprinkled evenly over the meringue by whisking them out of the bowl.  And it worked!  The cake didn't fall flat when I opened the oven door, nor did it fall out when I hung it upside-down over a bottle to cool.

I was a bit suspicious about this upside-down cooling, which is indeed meant to keep the cake from falling, but was pretty happy about this new use for empty bottles (also handy as rolling pins) and the retro baking technique.

As great as angel food cake is (a cake with no butter?!), it was still going to need something to accompany it.  Since it is so unusual for me to bake something healthful (as far as that is possible with baked goods) I didn't feel like going for ice cream or whipped cream.  Fresh fruit would have been nice, but was expensive and still would have required something to add a bit of moisture.  Frozen raspberries were on sale though, and it occurred to me that turning them into a coulis would add the moisture I was after and would eliminate the worry that the berries might become mushy when thawed.  I went with a recipe from food.com, but took Martha's direction to boil the berries with the sugar and water.  When the sugar was dissolved and I could really smell the raspberries, I poured the whole lot into the blender.

And got this:

The tart coulis was a very nice complement to the sweet, airy angel food, and overall the poorly-planned procrastibaking was worth the self-imposed hassle.  Even if the exercise did result in a dozen leftover egg yolks...

Of Cocktails and Cake

What is the appropriate cake for a cocktail party?  At this, the End of Term, such a question should perhaps not be foremost in my mind, nevertheless... this blog is called Procrastibaking for a reason.

This time last year I was entrenched in the minutia of editing and consumed by word count, so how exactly I managed to make one of my most artistic cakes to date, I couldn't say.  Well, that's not entirely true; I think it was twisting fondant snakes into torques and playing with edible spray paint (maybe especially playing with the edible spray paint - take that lustre dust) that helped me keep what was left of my sanity.

As it turns out, those little aerosol cans can spray quite far and a fair number of inedibles came out looking like they'd been touched by Midas, but the end result was worth it.  The cake was for our departmental cocktail party, and was decorated accordingly.  I mentioned twisting torques, and while this type of ancient jewellry may not be fashionable today, believe me, for the nerdy they were pretty cool to see on a cake.

And that was how I solved the cocktail cake quandary last year: decorating for theme.  Sadly, despite delusions of marzipan manuscripts, there just wasn't time for elaborate decorating this year.  So what to do?  Well, what do all cocktail parties have in common?  Booze.  And what tastes good in cake?  You know the answer.

Brandy was my booze of choice, and it inspired a pairing with vanilla.  Vanilla cake is simple enough, and this time I went with Martha's Versitle Vanilla.  I still needed a vehicle for the brandy, however, and though whipped cream seemed like a likely choice, I was afraid that if I added too much extra liquid (and I wanted to be able to taste that brandy) the whipped cream might break down or weep.  That's when it struck me: pastry cream.  A traditional princess cake with layers of pastry cream and whipped cream, made non-traditional by the infusion (ha!) of brandy.  The fact that the brandy bottle advertized a 'velvety taste with hints of almonds' was, ahem, marzipan on the cake.

This was my first attempt at making pastry cream from scratch, and my sister warned 'it's a bitch'.  I used a Real Simple recipe and didn't actually find it too troublesome, although the advice to whisk constantly 'until the mixture has thickened to the consistency of a creamy salad dressing' was fairly unhelpful; if there was a 'creamy salad dressing' consistency between 'liquidy' and 'Ah! Get it off the burner before it turns to scrambled eggs!' I sure missed it.  Constant whisking, a constant eye on the pan and constant readiness for rapid (I mean rapid) thickening is enough though.  I was pleased with the end result!  The leftovers were delicious in a bowl with whipped cream...

the finished pastry cream

Whipped cream is simple enough to not normally merit discussion (unless we want to talk about how tasty it is), but a bit of experimentation came into play this time when, predictably, my loathsome local grocery store was out of whipping cream.  I'm fairly ignorant about the various types of creams, but a quick google search suggested that heavy cream could be substituted, and I'm happy to say that it was a great accident in the end.  The heavy cream turned out a thick, lush cream that supported the weight of my four layer princess cake with ease.  Importantly, it also took in the brandy with no problems.  I did add some of the finished pastry cream to the whipped cream to stabilize it, but I'm not convinced that was necessary.

I had intended to dam the layers of pastry cream with whipped cream to prevent the pastry cream from seeping out, but after mixing the brandy into the pastry cream this proved a necessity because adding enough brandy (for my taste) made the pastry cream a bit loose.  Even so, it held up just fine from stacking the layers and covering through to being cut into at the party.

That is, until the end...

and that, children, is your cake on cocktails

As shown, the cake was unceremoniously demolished.  Given that, and the fact that a senior member of the department was heard complimenting the cake a week later (I'd point out here that maybe procrastibaking is productive, if it gets your name out there, but the key is compliments to the cake), I feel safe in proposing that the appropriate cake for a cocktail party is an alcoholic one.