Eat To Your Health

I've been going on a bit about lard lately, so I thought that I should take a break from cake and dedicate this post to all those little piggies out there.  They deserve it, because:

Pigs are cute!

Spiders (named Charlotte) love pigs!

And... Bacon!

(I have not made a cake out bacon.  Or with bacon.  Or shaped like bacon).

Also, April Fools! - (shhh, your groaning is killing my moment) - this post will not be dedicated to our porcine friends, deserving as they may be.

Instead, I'd like to capitalize on the recent news that Earl Grey tea is good for your heart and talk about an easy recipe for Earl Grey Chocolate Cake with Lavender Honey Mascarpone Frosting.  The recipe for the frosting is in the Recipe Box, as is a recipe for chocolate cake.  But here is the disclaimer for this post: I used box cake.  This is not another April Fools.  If you are offended by the use of box cake (some people are!), please read no further.  Alternatively, just substitute a scratch chocolate cake recipe for Betty's if you prefer.

I turned to Ms. Crocker (whose history is pretty interesting, I just discovered) for help with this cake because, while I often find that I've run out of one thing or another when I go to bake, on this occasion I was out of nearly everything.  Including time.  Under the circumstances, a box cake was the easiest way to meet my cake-baking needs.  Truth be told, however, the cake came out so well that it made a repeat appearance the next week, unchanged, mix and all.

To make Earl Grey chocolate cake, all you need to do is substitute tea for the liquid called for in the recipe; Betty wanted 250ml or approximately 1 cup, and the same goes for the chocolate cake recipe in the Recipe Box, with the tea being substituted for water in the first case and for coffee in the second.  I let the tea steep for at least 10 minutes - the stronger it is, the more detectable it will be in the flavour of the cake.  I used Teapigs' Darjeeling Earl Grey, which is my favourite and not just because of the dachshund.

After brewing the tea, proceed as directed by the box or recipe.  As with all chocolate cake, I recommend dusting the pans with cocoa powder instead of flour.

The mascarpone frosting isn't much more complicated than the cake.  In fact, the most difficult part might be getting your hands on some lavender extract.  I found mine at a spice shop when I wasn't looking for it, so I don't have any experience actively seeking it out, but I imagine that it should be readily available at such specialty retailers.  Once you have the extract, mix one teaspoon of it together with four teaspoons of honey.

Next, combine the lavender honey with the mascarpone (500g), mixing until completely combined but stirring gently - mascarpone can freeze up and become grainy if beaten too vigorously.  Once combined, fill a piping bag with the frosting and pipe onto the first layer of cake.  If your frosting has become too melted in the mixing process, set it in the refrigerator to chill for a few minutes before piping (if you leave it for long enough, it may separate a bit and need a little more mixing, but that is fine).

If you would prefer not to involve a piping bag, you can speed the process up even further by simply spreading a layer of frosting with an offset spatula.  By this point, however, I'd saved so much time on the cake already that I felt like getting a little fancy.  Before adding the next cake layer, I also drizzled some plain honey over the frosting.

Add the top cake layer, and repeat the icing process.  To finish it off, I drizzled some more honey over the top and then sprinkled it with some dried lavender petals, which are edible.  Et voilà!

Eat to your health.

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.

Trial, Error and The Great British Bake Off

So I started watching The Great British Bake Off.  I should never have started watching The Great British Bake Off.  I've become addicted, and now not only do I want to procrastibake even more, but I'm becoming a bit paranoid when I do, questioning: Is it baked all the way through?  What if I over-bake and it comes out dry??  Have I been innovative enough???  WHY AM I DOING THIS?!

Ok, that's an exaggeration.  Obviously I bake so I can eat more cake.  In truth, it isn't even the competition aspect of the show that has been holding my attention so much as it is the tid-bits that get thrown in, both by the judges and by the competitors, that teach some tricks, techniques and occasionally explain the science behind the baking.  My favourite parts, however, are the history of baking segments, which each week feature something relevant to that week's theme.  The first episode of this season told the history of the courting cake, which I'd never heard of, but shall be attempting (not for courtship purposes, it looks yummy and unusual - a shortbread base?  Yes please!).

This is all to say that I blame The Great British Bake Off for my latest baking endeavour, which I really didn't have time for but proceeded to undertake anyway.  The Great British Bake Off, and my own warped desire for pumpkin bread in August.

I picked a well-reviewed recipe for spiced pumpkin bread from epicurious.com, but wanted to experiment with swirling in mascarpone cheese.  I knew that mascarpone could be baked as it is sometimes an ingredient in cheesecake, and I believe it is also sometimes baked in the centre of cupcake (another thing I want to try...), so I was mildly surprised to find very few recipes with mascarpone swirls.  The recipe closest to what I was imagining that I could find was for brownies.  Enter more questioning: If I can't find a suggestion of someone trying this in the vast black hole that is the internet, is there a reason?  What will go wrong??

I decided to try it anyway.

In the end, the bread turned out pretty well, and I've added the recipe to the Recipe Box.  All in all it's pretty simple, but I made two missteps while figuring it out.  The first may be obvious to many bakers, but I'd never learned that you shouldn't grease and flour a pan with oil; butter is the way to go.  I was feeling lazy, I already had the oil out, and I thought 'Yeah why not?'.  The reason why not is because the flour becomes absorbed, at least in places, by the oil and beads up on the bottom of the pan.  I don't really know what would have happened if I'd decided to bake with the pan in that state because I opted not to, but I suspect it wouldn't have been very pretty.

The second misstep was over-beating the mascarpone.  I first beat the sugar into the cheese as per the brownie recipe, until the cheese was smooth and creamy.  Then I added the ground ginger and, as I was beating, saw the cheese begin to granulate.  I immediately realized that of course, like cream cheese, mascarpone can probably be over-beaten.  A quick check online informed me that yes, indeed it can.  So I beat the egg yolk by itself and carefully stirred it into the cheese mixture, which seemed to work (at least it didn't make it worse), but what I should have done in the first place was to beat the egg yolk with the sugar and ginger, and then mix the mascarpone into that.  Lesson learned.

First I prepared the bunt pan (again, with butter), and then made the bread batter.  I combined the dry ingredients first so they would be ready for me after I'd beaten the sugar, oil, eggs and pumpkin.

Then I actually beat the sugar, oil, eggs and pumpkin.  Mmm, pumpkin...

Finally I prepared the mascarpone mixture.  As I said, be careful not to over-beat the cheese; having come out a bit granulated, my swirls survived by could have been better.  It seems, however, if the cheese is over-beaten and curdles it will separate when baked.

I poured a layer of pumpkin batter into the bottom of the pan first, and then put dollops of mascarpone mix on top.  Next, because the cheese was thick, I swirled the mascarpone with a fork rather than a toothpick. Then I repeated these steps two more times, so that the top layer was swirled with mascarpone.  The photo above was taken halfway through the process, and note that the mascarpone doesn't look smooth.

It baked nicely, and actually more quickly than expected.  I baked at 325F (160C) rather than 350F because of the cheese, but even at 350F the recipe said to bake for one hour and ten minutes; I pulled it out at about one hour and five minutes, having resisted the urge to pull it out at one hour.  I think it would have been just about done at an hour.

No ivory swirls of cheese are visible in these slices, although there were some in a couple of others when I sliced the whole thing up.  Primarily the swirls appear as darker, moister streaks in the bread, and I'm not sure if that is because I over-beat the cheese, or if that is how it would always bake.  In any case, the swirls are discernible when eating the bread because you get a nice mild pop of ginger, one that I find to be a good complement to the pumpkin spices.  I think I'll have another slice now...

Cake Ballin'

In this episode I'll cut the rambling and get to the baked goods: calvados cake balls.  Cake balls are simply cake pops minus the sticks, and despite what late-night tv infomercials (my favourite part is where you start with cake mix and 'add kids') or assorted baking stores might try to sell you, you don't need a special tray (or kids) to make them.

Real cake pops are not baked, but rather are truffle-like balls normally made by crumbling cake and combining it either with cream cheese frosting, or, for something not quite so sweet, plain cream cheese (the haters at The Huffington Post might try this).  In this case, however, I decided to experiment with using mascarpone cheese because I thought the flavour would provide a nice compliment to the calvados, and also that it might make for a lighter cake ball.  Well, the calvados cake balls with mascarpone didn't get me any dates at the pub post-play (a very enjoyable outdoor performance of Much Ado About Nothing), but they did get good reviews, including a silent 'oh wow that's good', mouthed by an actress who had stolen one from our picnic spread mid-scene.  (Sure, her theft was a diversionary tactic, but still, I'll take what claims to fame I can get!).

Sorry, it seems I'm not great at not rambling.  I tried.

Here's the cake.

Step 1:  Bake a vanilla cake.  You can make a box cake (just add eggs and oil, no kids required), or whatever recipe you like.  I made the Versatile Vanilla again.

And don't forget to run a quality control check.  Very important.

Step 2:  Crumble the cake.

Cake balls (or pops) are an excellent way to use up leftover cake ('There's no such thing!' you argue, but let me finish) if, for example, you've baked two rounds but are only making a three layer cake (although if you'd rather just eat that fourth layer yourself, you'll find no judgement here).  They're also a good way to make use of cake that has burned (cut off the bad bits) or is stale, because the cream cheese (etc.) adds plenty of moisture.  Cake balls are the French toast or Welsh rarebit of the cake world.

Step 3:  Mix in calvados to taste.  (Feel free to quality control that too).

Step 4:  Add mascarpone.  (And maybe more calvados).

Step 5:  Beat until the crumb mixture comes together and begins to resemble a dough.

Step 6:  Roll into balls and place on a tray or baking sheet.

Place tray in the freezer.

Step 7:  When the cake balls are frozen, chop and melt dark chocolate.  Don't forget, if melting chocolate in the microwave do so in short bursts (approximately 10-15 seconds, depending on microwave settings), stirring in the intervals.

Step 8:  Using a skewer or fork, dip the cake balls in the chocolate, allow the excess chocolate to drip off, and return to the tray to set.  You may need to re-warm the chocolate during this process.  Once all the balls have been dipped I like to return the tray to the freezer, but you could also stick them in the refrigerator.

 

Step 9:  Consume!  Or if you're feeling generous, pack them up to share.