Month: February 2011

Sticky Toffee “Pudding”

This is a cake I’ve been looking forward to making for a while now, and it’s finally come up in the rotation in the Heavenly Cake Baker’s group. As a kid, I seriously disliked most Christmas “pudding” types of desserts, though I always loved the sauces that go with them. I think for me, it was a perceived association with fruitcake, which I still dislike to this day, though I’ve since gotten over my dislike for Christmas pudding. Friends of my parents who have become good friends of mine used to make Christmas pudding every year. They would even send it across 2 provinces in the mail to New Brunswick on occasion to get it to my family years when we couldn’t make it to Ontario for Christmas for whatever reason. Anyway, this week’s cake is “Sticky Toffee Pudding”. It’s made with pureed dates, so you don’t get any chunks of fruit in the cake (which is the part I used to dislike). Also, it contains beer, which is never a bad thing. 🙂

More specifically, mine contained Waterloo Dark beer. The recipe called for stout, but since we keep Waterloo Dark in stock, and we really like it, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

The Beer of Choice in our home

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Marble Velvet Cake

This week is free choice week with the heavenly cake bakers, and once again, I let my husband choose the cake. It’s a bit of a cop-out on my part, to be honest, because I just don’t like making decisions. I point him at the list of cakes and tell him to pick something that has a link on the left hand side, but no link next to it. This week, he picked the Marble Velvet Cake, which is one of the cakes Marie made before the rest of the group joined up. I also made the quail egg indulgence cake, only with chicken eggs… but it wasn’t very photogenic, and I don’t really have a lot to say about it. To me, it was just a basic pound cake, maybe a little more rich/moist, but otherwise nothing special.

Marble Velvet Cake

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Mud Turtle Cupcakes (and some catch-up)

Yes, that’s catch-up, not ketchup, thank goodness. I don’t think ketchup would be very good with mud turtle cupcakes. I had a single lonesome banana turning brown that I had to use up, so I took the opportunity to knock another cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes off my “to bake” list: Chocolate Banana (stud) Cake. The cake component turned out beautifully.

Isn't that cake gorgeous?

I almost feel like I ruined it a bit with my sloppy frosting job, but the taste of that ganache, with a touch of banana liqueur was so totally worth it.

Chocolate Banana (no) stud cake

I didn’t bother with the chocolate chip “studs” because I remembered a few of my fellow bakers saying the chips detracted from the soft texture of the cake. The rest of the Heavenly Cake Bakers’ group baked this cake last summer while I was in the middle of kitchen renovations.

Anyway, enough about catching up… What was this week’s cake selection? It was the mud turtle cupcakes. I asked my husband how he felt about turtle chocolates this weekend and he said “I don’t think I’ve ever had one. Remember, I didn’t really have a sweet tooth growing up.” Ah, well, we’ll fix that. 😉

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