S'more Procrastibaking

I was never a Girl Scout, or a Campfire Girl.  My family weren't campers.  I never cared; I'm a diehard fan of indoor plumbing.  As a result of this indoorsyness, however, I've come to associate s'mores not with a campfire, but with the barbeque.  It never occurred to me before that this might be weird, that not every family always made s'mores when they barbequed, but in thinking about this post I started to wonder...  Wikipedia (that font of infallible knowledge) doesn't mention barbequing in its entry for s'mores, but I'm not sure if the absence of evidence (or more specifically, the absence of Wikipedia commentary on the matter), is really evidence in itself for my family's habits being strange.  No worries though, plenty of other evidence for that.  But I digress.  The point is that when I was recently invited to a barbeque, it only made sense (to me) that the cake I would inevitably bring as my contribution should involve s'mores.

While working at the bakery I made a special-order cake decorated with marshmallows and graham crackers, but inside it was just vanilla cake layered with chocolate ganache.  This time I wanted to make a cake that actually tasted of s'mores.  My first thought was to make a cinnamon cake such as this one to give the impression of graham crackers, but when I got a box of the cookies it claimed honey as one of their primary flavours.  It was at that point that it occurred to me to see if there were any recipes for graham cracker cake out in the ether of the internet, and I learned that graham cracker cakes evidently enjoyed a degree of popularity back in the day (I'm not certain about when 'the day' was exactly, but I suspect it was the 50's or earlier).  Who knew?

I looked at several different recipes, but they were all fairly similar in that each involved using crushed graham cracker in place of most of the flour, and a meringue to raise the cake.  I chose this recipe from Allrecipes because it had the most reviews, all of which were largely positive, with the few complaints essentially boiling down to the involvement of a meringue.  Sure, meringues can be tricky at first, but what better excuse to practice them than cake?  (Or lemon meringue pie... or meringue cookies...).  The first step though is crushing the graham crackers.

Combine these with the other dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt and, in the original recipe, ground pecans.  I'm not 100% certain if these are added for flavour or texture, but I want to lean towards the latter...  I had plans to replace them with extra graham cracker because I thought there was no hope of securing them without going to a health food store and paying a fair bit of money, but on a whim I checked in the local grocery store and, much to my surprise, they had ground almonds.  Ground almonds it was!  Once the dry ingredients have been combined, cream the butter and brown sugar.  (Now I stumble on a recipe that does that!  I still maintain that it doesn't really get fluffy though, not in the same way as granulated sugar and butter).

Add the yolks and vanilla, and then on to the meringue, which (in a separate bowl) should be beaten to a soft peak.

Then cut that into the batter.  I should mention that, yes, the batter looks pretty unpleasant.  Fortunately that is no reflection on the taste, but as a result you may want to save this particular treat for another time if you've recently had a sick pet or too much fun on a night out... it might bring back bad memories.

Be careful not to deflate the meringue when mixing, or when pouring the batter into the pre-greased, floured and lined pans.

A note on the pans: the recipe calls for 9" pans, mine were 8".  I've never had an issue ignoring that kind of discrepancy in pan size before, but I guess when you play with cake batter, you're going to get... sticky?  Well I didn't, the oven did, but anyway.  Use 9" pans.  When those have finished baking (350F for about 25 minutes) and cooling, freeze them overnight so the layers are easier to split and frost.  (Frozen cake is always easier to deal with - fewer crumbs and less chance of it falling apart - and that's not specific to this recipe).

I layered the cake with chocolate ganache (find the recipe in the recipe box) that I had prepared the same night and left in the refrigerator.  You want it to be thick bordering on solid, but workable.  If it seems too hard just work it a bit with a spatula before spreading it on the layers.

After layering the cake, I frosted it with marshmallow fluff.  You can make marshmallow fluff at home, but as it happened to be available in the store I just bought it; two jars to be on the safe side, although in the end one was enough.

I half suspected that I was going to have a problem with the fluff melting, and my sister had already told me that fluff doesn't like refrigeration (it melts there too, but probably because of ambient moisture rather than temperature), so I'd performed some very precise (no not really) experimentation ahead of time.  The results?  Fluff melts at room temperature, stiffens when frozen, and holds its shape (somewhat, and not indefinitely) when covered in chocolate.  The plan?  Frost the cake, freeze it, cover it with melted chocolate, freeze it again.

Yeah.  I knew I'd have some problems.

The fluff spread as it was freezing, but once stiff I re-straightened the sides with an offset spatula greased with a bit of shortening so that it would glide over the fluff, rather than pull it off.  (This was my mom's suggestion, and it worked quite well.  A fair amount of pressure was necessary to push the frozen fluff back up the sides of the cake, and I don't think it would have been possible without the grease).  On top of that I added another layer of fluff to even out the bumps that had formed over the cake layers, and repeated the freezing and smoothing process.  (I really should have smoothed the sides out with a layer of ganache before ever putting on the fluff, but oh well).  Then I added some crushed graham crackers around the bottom edge, primarily for decorative border reasons, but also because I had the deluded hope that they might help support the fluff.

Next I melted a 300g bar of dark chocolate and poured it over the frozen cake.  I melted the chocolate in the microwave rather than a double boiler, and while this can more easily lead to burning and/or seizing, as long as you chop the chocolate fairly finely and microwave in short increments (maybe 20 seconds), stirring in between, it shouldn't be a problem.  Stirring is the key; once the better part of the chocolate is melted, stirring alone will take care of the rest.

I froze it again (as seen above - this cake sure spends a lot of time on ice for something based on a confection that's meant to be roasted), and then topped it off with a pile of marshmallows (which, surprise, I froze) and drizzled chocolate on them as well.

Here's the glamour shot before it melted:

It just about made it to the barbeque intact, and thankfully it didn't sit around there for long.

The bit that was left out for a more extended period did experience a pretty severe melting and sliding of fluff, so while the fluff was far better than buttercream for making a cake that tastes like a s'more, I may have to reconsider how to use it in future.  Or just eat the cake faster.  That would work.

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...