The Breakfast of Champions

Coffee cake is simple, unassuming, and not to be confused with layer cakes that happen to be flavoured with coffee.  That's right England, I'm talking to you.  (Et tu, Mary Berry?  I'm sure that cake is tasty, but... *sigh*).  The real beauty of coffee cake, however, is that it is a 'breakfast food'.  You can eat it first thing in the morning and feel no shame!  Not that I usually feel any shame when eating cake for breakfast, but some people might...  For those people: rejoice!

This coffee cake recipe is very straightforward, and can be found in the Recipe Box.  Where it came from originally, I do not know; a friend of my mom's gave it to her, and she gave it to me.  Maybe the friend made it up?  As she called it 'German Coffee Cake', however, and not something like 'Great Granny's Coffee Cake', I suspect it probably came out of a magazine or cookbook.  The original recipe (as I received it) recommends a 1/2 cup butter and a 1/2 cup margarine.  I think that there might be some idea (or fact, who knows? clearly not me) that margarine makes for a moister cake than butter does, because it is a hydrogenated oil and oil (liquid at room temperature) can at least lend the impression of a wetter cake because it's never a solid.  Margarine is a solid though, and I don't think it makes any difference.  I used one full cup of butter.  Yayyyy butter!

One thing that separates this coffee cake from the pack is its use of cocoa powder.  Lots of cakes use cocoa powder, it's true, but this is the first one I've met that just tosses it on top and throws it in the oven - no muss no fuss!  I was fairly concerned it was going to burn up there, exposed to the elements, but it didn't; it made a nice semi-chewy crust.  It also had a layer inside which sank to the bottom a bit, not sure why (I did run a toothpick through it to catch bubbles - that might have done it), but that was almost the best layer, the part you want to make sure of having in the last bite.  Mmmm...

It looked lovely in the oven (and I should know: I checked it six thousand times expecting it to be burnt):

And yeah, I admit to sneaking a bite or two before breakfast.

My, my good ol' Apple Pie

I'll try to keep this post short and sweet, like a good pastry crust... (insert pity laughs here).  This week was National Cake Week, and in honour of the occasion (apart from entering the competition), I naturally decided to bake a pie.  Not a cake that looks like a pie.  An actual pie.  What can I say, I'm a baking rebel; it's just how I roll.

Rebellion was only half of the impetus for pie, however.  It's fall, harvest season, and my supervisor brought a couple sacks worth of apples from his tree into the department, of which I was happy to make off with a fair few.  What makes a better pie filling than free fruit?  Plus it has turned cold and drizzly outside, and there's nothing to counteract that wintry weather feeling like warm apple pie.

I asked my mom for her recipe for apple pie, which is consistently delicious, but since she explained the steps using phrases such as 'you add the sugar until it looks right', I thought it wise to look up a recipe with measurements for my first solo go at this pastry.  I picked Martha's Old Fashioned Apple.

I have a behemoth deep dish pie pan and so used one and a half times Martha's recipe for pâte brisée shortcrust pastry, but I ended up with extra dough at the end of the day and could probably have done with one times the recipe.  No worries though, I had extra apples leftover too, and all together had just the right amount of everything to make a small pie for breakfast yesterday morning...

The shortcrust was not too labour-intensive; the worst part of it was making room in my tiny tiny fridge to chill the top and bottom crusts once they had been rolled out.  I don't have a food processor so just cut the butter and flour mix by hand.  It's recommended to do this with a pair of knives, but since my mixing bowls are metal and I didn't want to scratch the one I was using to death I just used my hands.  The issue with this approach is that it warms the butter, which is undesirable as the flakiness of the pastry comes from the little bits of butter that remain in the cut dough; when the dough bakes these bits melt, creating holes in the structure of the dough and leaving it with that flaky consistency.  By using your hands you could warm the butter to the point of melting completely into the dough.  I therefore cut the cold butter into small pieces to begin with, tried cutting them into the flour a bit with rubber spatulas (a failure) and then was just careful to not work the dough too much.  Using my hands also meant the dough was holding together pretty well before I even added any water, so when it came to that step I added a bit less than recommended.  I chilled the dough in two pieces overnight, and was pleased in the morning to see it full of little specks of butter.

I rolled both pieces out to approximately 1/8" thick, rearranged my refrigerator, and chilled the very large discs while I set about peeling and cutting the apples and making the filling.

Martha's recipe calls for the juice and zest of one lemon, and while the zest might have added something I think the juice was primarily meant to prevent the sliced apples from browning.  The juice might have helped flavour-wise if I'd had very bland apples, but I didn't; mine were very tart and very juicy.  So since I like the apple filling to have a bit of colour anyway (and in any case it looks brownish once the cinnamon has been added) I skipped the lemon, and instead tossed in about a teaspoon of lime juice that I had on hand, just in case.  The apple-lime scent wafting off the apples before I mixed in the sugar and spices did smell enticing.

This brings me to one other departure that I made from the recipe, which was to whisk the sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and flour together before tossing them with the apples, in order to prevent clumps and to get an even distribution of flavours over the apples.  If I had realized before baking just how much liquid really was in my apples, I would also have tossed in about a tablespoon of corn starch to firm the filling up a bit.  I did this for my breakfast pie and it really helped.  When cutting the first pie, however, even after cooling for an hour, the juice in the filling poured out of the slices and into the pan, and I've watched enough Great British Bake Off now to develop an eye twitch at the mention of a soggy bottom.  Nobody wants to see that.

It looked nice in the pan though!  The top crust needed to have air vents cut in, but I wanted to make it a bit more decorative and to expose some of the filling, so I cut shapes freehand with the blunt side of my knife before covering.  To get the centre right, I marked a circle about the size of the top of the pie into the dough using a plate.  The line was faintly visible going into the oven, but not coming out.  I also topped it not with granulated sugar but with thicker sugar crystals, which gives the top a nice crunch - my mom's trick.

I baked at the temperature and for the time called for by the recipe (375F/180C, for about an hour), but about a half hour in thought the top was browning too rapidly, so I covered it with foil to deflect some of the heat.  Then I checked it ten minutes later and took it off, and ten after that put it on again.  I suffer from indecisiveness.

The pie was not too tart, and not too sweet.  (I was especially glad of the latter, because I disagreed with Paul Hollywood when he said in this Bake Off series that American pies are too sweet; I say he's been eating the wrong pies).  The pie was, I think, a nice contrary choice to celebrate National Cake Week.

'A Hedgehog loaded with apples...'

You may have heard of the 'office feeder'.  You may have met one of these sugar-loving creatures, or in fact, you (yes - you!) may even be the office feeder.  I myself am a department feeder.

Fortunately mine is a department that knows how to eat, and there were weekly cakes during term time well before I arrived.  Truthfully, I didn't bake that much before I started in the department.  Sure, I decorated cakes, but given that that was my day job it probably would have been an issue if I hadn't.  No, my current baking habits were born from a wish to keep decorating, were driven by a departmental need for cake and flourished as a tool of my procrastination.

Obviously the procrastiblog comes out of that same toolbox, but I digress.

With a department so supportive of cake, I wanted to make one representative of it for our latest potluck.  (That's right: I am not the only feeder).  I've done this before, but it's been awhile.  And this time, I had hedgehogs.  Normal people probably don't look at hedgehogs and think about Myrddin (or Merlin) of Welsh legend, but I can't help myself.  Specifically I think of Geoffrey of Monmouth's portrayal of his prophecies, and even more specifically, of this:

'A Hedgehog loaded with apples shall re-build the town and, attracted by the smell of these apples, birds will flock there from many different forests.  The Hedgehog shall add a huge palace and then wall it round with six hundred towers... The Hedgehog will hide its apples inside Winchester and will construct hidden passages under the earth.'  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1966), pp. 178-9.

It's not for me to put myself into the mind of the medieval author... well, not into Geoffrey's mind anyway, but the man must have had a pretty amazing imagination.  That, or someone behind some of his source certainly did.  Now tell me, will you ever look at a hedgehog again without thinking of him having apples on his back?  Good, I didn't think so.

Needless to say, my cake for the department was going to be decorated with apple-bearing hedgehogs.  In order to have a cake bearing hedgehogs bearing apples though, I had to make the cake.

For my layers, I wanted browned butter cake.  I always knew I liked butter, but I never knew that I could improve it until my sundaynighttreats friend let me in on the little secret of browning.

When you cook butter over a low heat for long enough (the recipe said 9 minutes total - it took me significantly longer), it begins to turn brown and to let off a delightfully nutty aroma.  It's that aroma that really lets you know that the brown or browned butter, or beurre noisette, is ready.  As I said, my browned butter was destined (not to push the prophecy line or anything...) for cake, but could be used for any number of things, including as a spread on some toast with cinnamon and sugar...

Moving on, I used this recipe for brown-butter cake from Seattle chef Tom Douglas, omitting his chocolate mousse.  Instead, I wanted to make a chocolate hazelnut mousse because what is browned butter to us is hazelnut butter to the French, and I wanted to make that flavour the star of the show.  Or rather, best supporting actress to the hedgehogs.  I used this recipe, found on The Food Network.  Please note, this is not a proper mousse, which often calls for gelatin, but rather a sort of nutella and mascarpone cheese frosting lightened with whipped cream.

Both recipes are pretty straightforward.  The most experimental step for me was definitely the browned butter, which, once set (I left it in the refrigerator over night), didn't look that brown...

... until I really dumped it over and found the browned bits.

Beaten, it essentially looks like butter with little nut-coloured granules.

When I say the butter was the most experimental part of this recipe, that's not strictly true.  I was also experimenting with a new set of pans.  To bake layer cakes, I had been using the same budget-brand set of sandwich tins for the last two years, and I never was able to get a level cake from them.  I was losing cake from having to level not only the top, but also the sides as the pans themselves were angled.  While this meant more cake scrapes for me to eat (or to make cake pops if I was feeling ambitious), it did mean that the finished product would come out rather small or flat.  Therefore, when I saw that a local store had some nice tins in, I broke down and bought a pair.

My new cake tins are heavy; one is probably twice the weight of both of my old tins combined.  That's what you want, weight to absorb heat so the sides don't bake too quickly or burn.  A darker metal also helps with this.  These tins, however, also have a light removable bottom.  I was somewhat leery about that at first, but after taking them home I found this helpful cake pan review from Cook's Illustrated.  They say that they found that lighter pans produce a more level cake, and I suspect that that is why my pans have light bottoms, yet retain the nice heavy dark sides.  They certainly did bake a nice tall, level cake!

Before

After

As for the mousse, the most important things to remember are not to over beat the mascarpone, which will look a bit grainy when mixed with the nutella:

And not to flatten the whipped cream when you put the two together.

Just about at soft peak.

The mousse looks a bit like pudding here, but it's fluffier than that:

I froze the cake layers ahead of time, so I split them (always easier and less crumby to do when the cake is cold or partly frozen) while the mousse was setting up in the refrigerator.  Then I layered the cake with the better part of the mousse, and frosted the outside with the rest of it.  Finally, I left the whole thing to freeze overnight so I could pour it with ganache in the morning.

I let the ganache set for a minute or two, and then smoothed the sides with an offset spatula.  Since I'd already had a pretty smooth layer of mousse underneath they didn't need too much work.

Last but not least, I topped the cake with my apple-topped hedgehogs.  I'd made the apples out of fondant a couple days ahead, which, come to think of it, was another experiment... you clearly cannot trust a word I say.

The apples were an experiment because I'd never used tylose powder before.  It's a powder that is meant to firm up or dry the fondant more quickly than simply leaving it to sit out, and since I bought some at the Cake and Bake Show I decided to give it a go.  That is why I'm not sure if it was the powder that caused the fondant to reject the liquid dye, or I just had so much of it in a tiny amount of fondant that it couldn't all be absorbed, but I wound up with some beautifully glossy miniature apples that couldn't be touched they were so sticky.  It was quite the balancing act with toothpicks to get them onto the hedgehogs, but at least they didn't need anything else to make them adhere!

With that finished, I plunked them down in a circle on the cake, giving them the appearance of a little troop marching endlessly on...

... directly to the potluck.

I'm sorry, this was a long post, but just one more thing...

In honour of National Cake Week next week (I know, I didn't know there was one either - shouldn't this sort of thing be government sponsored?), and because I would love a shiny new procrastibaking-enabling mixer, would you please head over to the National Cake Week Competition (find the full list of entries here) and vote for my hedgehog cake?  It only takes two clicks, once on the link and once to vote!  Thank you!