Pop-up Ty

popty, n., Welsh - bakery.  From Welsh pobi, 'to bake' and tŷ, 'house'.

pop-up tŷ, n., Gibberish - a mobile, home-based bakery, most likely to be found in Aberystwyth during the month of August.

Baking outside of the warm (sometimes hot, depending on how long you've been preheating the oven) confines of your own kitchen can be cumbersome.  Adjusting to a new layout is one thing, but unfamiliarity with the temperament of the oven (every baker knows they can be finicky) and a potential lack of tools can be more seriously problematic.  That is why, knowing that I'd be spending nearly the entire month in a student dormitory, I promised there would be no baking in August.

I lied.

It's hard to say no when someone asks nicely for cake.  It's harder to say no when you're sitting in the pub having a few pints.  So I said yes, realizing that I would need to select a simple cake and borrow equipment/a kitchen.

I based my cake selection on cream cheese frosting, because it's as easy as it is delectable.  Then I decided on chocolate cake, as it would give a similar effect to red velvet, but without the hassle of actually making red velvet.  I googled the pairing, and found this recipe, which was originally created by Ina Garten.  It seemed like a simple recipe, and I'm a fan of using coffee to enhance the flavour of chocolate cake, but I was really sold on it for the illegitimate reason that the blog's author lives in Corte Madera, which is a lovely town housing one of my favourite shopping centres...  I did say the reason was illegitimate.

Arranging baking facilities took a bit more planning.  The cake was to be for a reading group held at a friend's house, but unfortunately his kitchen was not the best-equipped for baking.  In the end I encroached on another friend's hospitality (and her baking pans and mixer) to bake the layers a day early (that is pop-up ty #1), and made the frosting on the night of the meeting in the less-baking friendly kitchen (pop-up ty #2).  Even if I had been home, I would have preferred to bake the cake itself ahead of time, in order to freeze it.  If I haven't mentioned it before, it is much easier to split frozen cake layers (if you choose to split them) than room temperature layers, because as nice as moist, fluffy room temperature cake is, it isn't terribly stable.  It is also a lot more crumbly than frozen cake, so frosting while frozen means fewer crumbs in the icing.

Down to the baking.

The recipes for chocolate cake and cream cheese frosting can be found in the Recipe Box, or find both on Marin Mama Cooks.  This recipe presented a trick for chocolate cake that I'd vaguely thought about in the past, but wasn't sure would work.  The trick is flouring the baking pans not with flour, but with cocoa powder.  Powdering the pans.  Makes them sound a bit like Victorian ladies...  In any case, I wanted to try it, and did that first.

Next you mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl, and the wet ingredients in another.

(Note: The wet ingredients haven't been mixed yet in this photo, I thought the various ingredients repelling each other were interesting).  This recipe calls for buttermilk, but if you don't have that on hand you can use approximately a tablespoon of white vinegar in a cup of milk as a substitute.  Allow the vinegar to sit in the milk for a few minutes to curdle, stir, and proceed with the recipe as written.  The recipe also called for two extra large eggs, but since I had medium eggs I used three.

The recipe as found in the blog then directs to add the wet ingredients to the dry, and I'm not sure why.  I did not do this, and I wouldn't recommend it unless, perhaps, you were stirring very gently with a spoon and adding the liquids a very little at a time.  If you're using any sort of electric mixer, as soon as you turn it on in a bowl-full of dry ingredients you're going to see a dusty explosion and, when the cloud clears, find yourself and probably everything else covered in a fine layer of cocoa-flour...  It seems unwise.  Mix only until just combined.  I was especially leery of over-mixing with this recipe, since I'd seen from the blog how liquid it ends up, in part because of the cup of coffee that is added after the wet and dry ingredients are combined.  I used a pour-over brewer, brewing directly into a measuring cup to make and measure to coffee.

Pour the hot cup of coffee into the batter and combine.  Don't be worried if it looks really runny; although it would be (to me) fairly concerning to see a batter so liquid, it evidently is supposed to be that way, and it does bake normally.

The resultant cake is very moist, but not dense.  I did adjust the oven for one layer, turning it down and extending bake time, but I believe that was because the oven was not a convection oven.

In the end I didn't have time to split the layers (I had to get to the text the reading group was working on, as it was [nominally] the reason the meeting was being held), but that allowed me to put a thicker layer of frosting between the cake layers, and extra cream cheese frosting is certainly no hardship.  The reading group was happy, and so was I.  Watch out for a pop-up tŷ opening in a kitchen near you.