Unseasonal Simnel

In Marzipan Judas, I said that the morals to the story were 1.) Don't forget your icing sugar; 2.) Don't forget the egg glaze; 3.) Don't get cocky and bend over carrying a cake in one hand. On the first two points, see below, but as regards the third... it seems that I am destined to drop simnel cakes.  I did not bend over carrying this one.  No.  This one made it all the way to its final destination, up some stairs and back down them, and then SPLAT.  Perhaps it's the weight of the fruitcake that causes the fall, but it's also the weight that saves it.  As the sole witness to my (second) slip-up said: 'It bounced'.  Well, there we are.

The only relevant wisdom I have to instill in this update, really, is that icing sugar certainly does make the going less tough, and that brushing the marzipan with an egg wash before grilling it does improve the cake's appearance.  I maintain, however, that a kitchen blow torch would be an improvement on the grill, because even with the wash the grilling is still unevenly distributed due to the top of the cake being higher at points and lower at others; the taller points will always burn faster, and the lower points persist in developing pale, crusty spots.  A blowtorch would allow much more control.  In terms of making a photogenic cake, I also found that making one and a half times the recipe gives the cake a very good height.  It also means more to eat, of course, so where's the downside?

I also learned that while eleven or twelve marzipan balls are traditionally used to decorate the cake, representing the eleven apostles, or the eleven apostles plus Jesus, some families will also make a thirteenth marzipan ball.  This thirteenth ball, representing Judas, is not to be put on the cake, but is divvied up and eaten before the cake is cut.  #CakeKnowledge.  Speaking of which, if you're wondering what that poster is - good!  Watch this space.

Marzipan Judas

Simnel cake is a traditional fruit cake served at Easter in the UK and Ireland, and with Easter upon us, trying my hand at this cake seemed like a good enough excuse to fire up the oven.  As it turned out, my hand didn't fair so well (it has the little grill mark to prove it), and the cake... had character; fortunately it tasted much better than it looked.

I used this recipe from BBC Food, but changed the fruit because I'm not a fan of raisins; I went with chopped up dried figs, apricots and prunes.  In other words, I'd barely begun and my Simnel cake was already non-traditional.  Oh well.  My version can be found in the Recipe Box.

The cake itself is very straightforward: cream butter and sugar, add eggs, mix in flour, salt and mixed spice, and then the fruit and zest.  Where things can get sticky (pun intended) is with the almond paste, or marzipan.  If I'd been properly equipped there would have been no issues, but unhappily for me I was out of confectioner's sugar to dust my rolling surface and rolling pin.  NEVER BE WITHOUT ICING SUGAR!  Ok that's extreme, but if you make this cake, or are playing with marzipan at all, you'd better check your cupboards before you start.  I made do by rolling my discs (you'll make two in total) between a piece of parchment paper (so that I could peel it off the marzipan rather than trying to scrape the marzipan off the counter) and the empty icing sugar bag, opened up flat so I could make use of the residual dust inside it.  Desperate times.

In the end working this way was more tedious than if I'd just checked that I was fully stocked with the necessaries to begin with, but it worked.  Rolling on the parchment was also handy in that it allowed me to trace a circle using my cake pan so that I knew exactly how big the first marzipan disc should be.  As this disc is baked in the middle of the cake, you don't want it to be too wide for the pan.  You should use about a third of the marzipan for this circle, and save the remainder for the topping.

The remaining marzipan should be split in half: half rolled into another disc and the rest rolled into eleven or twelve balls.  The BBC recipe recommends spreading a layer of apricot jam on top of the cake before covering it with the second marzipan circle, which I intended to do but promptly forgot (this was not my finest baking exercise on the whole).  That being said, I don't think that it's a necessary step.  The intention seems to be that the jam helps to adhere the marzipan to the cake, but at least with my cake the marzipan had that covered... (pun intended, again).

Putting a little ruffle edge on the top layer of marzipan seems to be the traditional technique, so I tried to follow the look from the BBC recipe.  I was somewhat successful.  If I'd had any confectioner's sugar on hand, I would have used it to stiffen the marzipan to achieve better results, but alas.  The more important part of the decoration, however, are the eleven to twelve marzipan balls that go on top of the cake.  I didn't realize this until a friend told me - I just got lucky when I was rolling them that I decided on twelve instead of eight or ten - but the the balls are supposed to represent the twelve apostles.  Or rather, the eleven apostles, or the eleven apostles plus Jesus.  No cake for Judas.

With the cake fully topped, it was time for the exciting part - the grill.  The cake is meant to be put under a hot grill for 1-2 minutes to lightly brown the marzipan.  If you have a small kitchen torch, that would be an easier (probably better) way to achieve the same result.  In yet another of my failures with this recipe, I didn't think to brush the marzipan with a beaten egg before putting it under the grill, despite that step having been in the recipe, and wondering about it too late when the browning was spotty and blistered-looking.  Instead, I turned the grill up to 350F (180C), managed to burn my hand on the rapidly-heating grill, and popped in the unglazed cake.

When I took it out after two minutes the balls had some nice colour to them, but the rest of the marzipan looked pale and blistered.  My solution was to cover the balls with foil to keep them from burning, and to put the cake back in the oven.  I don't know if adding an egg glaze at this point would have helped.  Another two minutes, and the browning was on more widespread, but not even.  I gave up.

And then I dropped the cake.

That was a first for me.  Thankfully it didn't fall all the way to the ground, just into some furniture, and since it was a sturdy fruitcake the only real damage done was to the top.  So much for trying to improve its appearance.  I reshaped the squished balls, minus one escapee (we'll call him Judas), and put it back in the oven with a new foil hat.  It only helped so much.

In the end this was definitely a 'substance over style' cake, but there's nothing wrong with that.  It was very tasty with the marzipan layer in the centre, and I was really pleased with the fig-apricot-prune combo.  It was also fun to try a new occasion cake, but the morals to the story are: 1.) Don't forget your icing sugar; 2.) Don't forget the egg glaze; 3.) Don't get cocky and bend over carrying a cake in one hand.

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

This last Christmas I was given a slew of baking and cake decorating tools (hooray!), and among them was a rolling pin from the Little Venice Cake Company line of tools.  I'd been itching to try it out, though not to the extent that I wanted to make a buttercream cake that I could layer the test-rolled fondant over (because everyone knows that you can't roll fondant without using it to cover something).  Rolling marzipan was an alternative, but my default with marzipan is to make a princess cake, and I felt like something different.  I decided on a chocolate orange loaf cake with orange mascarpone frosting, covered with marzipan.

In retrospect, it sounds like a bit much.  I meant well.

The cake wasn't bad, but it also wasn't my best.  The sides of the cake itself came out quite tough, although they were not burned.  I didn't feel as though I had it in the oven too low for too long, but that seems to me the most likely explanation.  To top it off (*ba-dum ching!*), I made the frosting too sweet for my own tastes and it may have been better with a layer of marzipan on the top only, rather that covering the entire cake.

So, now that I've sold it!...

The recipe that I found for the cake appears on Better Homes and Gardens, but is duplicated here, with the credit going to Nigella Lawson.  I suspect that Nigella's cookbook is the original source since the recipe calls for golden syrup, which to my knowledge isn't terribly common in American recipes.  It also calls for dark brown sugar, but I used light brown because that's what I had on hand.  My adaptation can be found in the Recipe Box.

I got as many lumps out of the brown sugar as possible first, then beat it into the butter before adding the golden syrup.  After beating in the golden syrup, I added the combined dry ingredients.  I had already zested two clementines and set that aside.

The zest and squeezed orange juice are meant to go into the batter last, though now I'm struggling to remember if I mixed those in before the eggs.  If so, I was probably trying to lessen the amount of time the eggs were beaten in an attempt to stop the cake from sinking in the middle (see below, and note: it didn't work).  The recipe also says the batter may look curdled; I didn't find that, though it didn't look wholly appetizing...

Fortunately it didn't bake ugly.  The blogger writing about Nigella's recipe said to expect a dip in the centre of the cake - that it even appeared that way in the cookbook - so I was unsurprised to find one in my bake.

The mascarpone frosting experienced a similar transformation from yuck to yum.  When I was imagining this cake, all I really wanted to do with the mascarpone was to add some orange zest and juice to it (and it is this version that I've added to the Recipe Box).  Unadulterated mascarpone tastes to me like cream: smooth, heavy, spreadable whipped cream.  I thought adding a flavour to it would be enough, but in checking how other people make this type of frosting I found that either heavy cream or butter is almost always added (depending upon the desired consistency and weight - Martha even adds cream cheese), and so is powdered sugar.  This recipe from The Hairy Bikers was the only exception, but in the face of all the others I thought I'd better add something, and since I hadn't checked the recipes prior to shopping and butter was all I had, butter it was.  I beat the butter first, and added the zest and juice to that before mixing in the mascarpone.  It looked gross.

Combining the beaten butter with the mascarpone drastically improved the frosting's appearance.  Mascarpone is temperamental, however, so be careful not to over-mix; this temperament is why I chose to mix the orange with the butter first.

I spread a thick layer of the frosting over the top of the cake, and then domed it like an elongated princess.  I liked the look; this cake may have been more successful aesthetically than it was taste wise.

Returning to the reason for the cake: the rolling pin.  My sister, who had used one of these rolling pins before, warned me that the marzipan (or fondant, whatever is being rolled) needs to be very level; any bumps or unevenness will result in the pattern transferring to some areas (the higher ones), but not to all of them.  This makes the rolling pins somewhat less convenient than the texture sheets that you can buy to similarly impress images onto fondant/marzipan, but which, since they are flexible, adapt to lumps and bumps.  That being said, ideally the fondant/marzipan will be level anyway and so there shouldn't be too many problems.

I chose to use white marzipan for this experiment, rather than the natural off-white to slightly yellow coloured variety.  As seen in the photo, the pattern is visible, although perhaps not as visible as I would have liked.  I tried to highlight it by brushing it with some white but sparkly lustre dust, but unfortunately this did not have much effect.  I'm not sure if coloured marzipan would have produced better results (I look forward to further experimentation), but coloured lustre dust probably would have been a better highlighter.  As it was, however, the pattern was very pretty and lent a subtle elegance.  I also did not have any trouble with it disappearing when I covered the cake.

If you haven't tried it, there is a lot of smoothing involved in covering a cake.  The bottom edges and corners (if there are any) need to be gently stretched and fanned out by smoothing so that the fondant/marzipan covering the sides of the cake does not become wrinkled or doubled over; all this smoothing and stretching can result in pattern loss, whether it is a depressed pattern, as with the texture sheets, or in relief, as here with the rolling pin.  Happily, this pattern survived the process intact.

With the cake covered, all I did was put a bow on it.

And served it, of course.

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.