Ganache Mise en Place

Sugar Syrup (pre-caramel)

Cream mixed into caramelized sugar

Caramel Ganache

Mise en Place for cake, minus the oil

Adding the first batch of egg mixture

Almost done!

Yum!

Jay said “Who names these cakes? With caramel in the name, I expect to actually be able to taste the caramel. It’s good, but it’s not caramel. You should put that in your post.” His complaint might be my fault, though. I may not have cooked the caramel quite long enough for fear of burning it. I thought this cake was nice and moist and delicious, regardless of how much caramel flavour there was.

I have to admit my scepticism about a shortcake that had no biscuits or scones involved, and instead used a génoise, but since a génoise is pretty quick and easy to make, and it lets me use my husband’s shiny new stove again to heat the eggs, I wasn’t going to argue.

Ingredients for genoise

As I alluded to above, the first step is to heat the eggs over a double boiler. As far as I can tell, this gives them the ability to hold the bubbles better. What bubbles?

These bubbles:

Whipping the eggs

Like all the other heavenly cake bakers, I love watching the eggs and yolks transform from a bright yellow foam to a fluffy, almost white, creamy thick um.. batter? meringue? I’m not sure what you can call this.

Almost done...!

After a bit is sacrificed to the beurre noisette, and then the flour is folded in, followed by the butter mixture, you pour it into your molds. I had to use a bit of a hodge podge, because I don’t have a maryanne pan, nor do I have pyrex custard cups.

Ready for the oven

Then put all of them into your new oven, and watch them carefully in case they bake differently due to the different sizes. Luckily, somehow, mine all were done at once.

I love that I can actually see in the door!

I had cut cavities in the 4 small ones, and served them with whipped crème fraiche, when we had a couple of friends over, but I completely forgot to take a picture of that. So, I assembled another one on my way out the door this morning, snapped a picture and shoved it in my lunch.

Work snack.

Can’t beat that for a mid-morning treat!

PS: can anyone tell me, do marionberries taste anything like mulberries? A couple of the pictures from the other Heavenly Cake Bakers’ blogs made me think of mulberries, and I know where I can find vast quantities of those, it just requires a visit to my uncle’s house to pick them before the baby skunks get to them.

Tomatoes

My husband just emailed me the above picture from his blackberry. Looks like I know what we’re doing tonight! That’s from about a 4 x 20 ft section of garden.

I think this week’s heavenly cake bakers choice was perfect timing. It’s definitely quick and easy, but it also involved heating a sugar syrup on the stove, so I got to use the new gas stove, as well as my new oven. We don’t have our cabinets yet, but everything else is in the kitchen. My good friend Matt and his girlfriend came over on Saturday afternoon and helped us move the new appliances in, as well as move the fridge and our old extra free-standing cabinet back into the kitchen from the dining room, so we can cook again!

Mise en place is more important than ever, when your ingredients and tools are spread throughout the house.

Mise en Place

Once everything is ready to go, it’s time to start the sugar syrup. I think the gas stove is going to take me a bit of getting used to, but there’s lots of time for that.

Sugar Syrup

Once the sugar is caramelized, you pour it into the cake pan, then arrange the fruit on top of it.

Fruit in the cake pan

For the batter, start by combining the dry ingredients, then mix in the butter until moistened and ‘clumpy’.

Dry ingredients + butter

Mix in the egg and vanilla, then spread over the fruit.

Ready for the oven

This is the first time in my life I’ve owned a brand new oven. When I moved out for grad school, I rented for a few years, then when we bought this place, it came with appliances. While the oven was fairly new, it was bottom of the line, and had been used so had some of that grime that never really comes off. Not this one! It’s all mine!

Hey, I can actually see through the door!

It’s not quite properly nestled into its permanent home between cabinets yet, though.

It looks so... lonely

We do have one base cabinet unit that we purchased about 4 years and an address ago. We bought this when we moved into our rented townhouse after we got married, because the kitchen there just didn’t have enough counter space for two people who love to cook. Heck, it barely had space for 1 person who loved to cook. Don’t worry. That wire coming out of the wall is shut off at the breaker — it’s for the under cabinet lighting.

Temporary cabinet

I can’t wait to get rid of that thing. On the other end of the spectrum, I love our new windows, and the fume hood we picked out. We bought all of the appliances so far in the ‘clearance’ (aka scratch and dent/floor model) section of a local appliance store. As far as I’m concerned, pre-existing scratches just mean that I don’t have to feel guilty the first time I scratch something.

Range and fume hood

You don’t realize how amazing it is to have a sink in the kitchen until you spend a month doing dishes in the basement in a laundry sink with the dish drainer on top of the washing machine. I’m so grateful to my wonderful husband that it was only a month!

Sink and fridge

Ok, enough of the kitchen tour. The cake’s ready to come out of the oven.

Cake, unmolded

Maybe someone can tell me what went wrong here. I know I didn’t quite get the sugar completely to the “caramel” point, but why did it crystallize? Rose says in the recipe not to worry if it hardens in the pan because it will re-melt during baking. I don’t think mine did, because it all stayed in the bottom of the pan when I turned the cake out.

Finished cake

No worries, though, because the cake was still delicious! I’m not sure the caramel would have really added much.

Here’s a link to a reminder of how it looked a month or two ago.

After the hole in the floor from the old stairs was repaired, we lived with it more or less like that for another month. In the meantime, progress was made in terms of getting new windows installed, etc.

Then I came home one day to this:

Tin Ceiling Removed

Next day, I came home to this:

Walls and Ceiling Gutted

Then the day after that, this:

No more floor!

We then decided to fix the problem with the unlevel cakes and the food in our frying pans sliding to one side of the stove:

Levelling the floors

It’s worth pointing out that at the doorway to the room (the highest part), the first new sistered joist was basically level (about 1/4″ off) with the existing joist. Not so much at the other corner.

Once the new subfloor was in, Jay removed the dumbwaiter (it only went down to the basement, not up to the bedrooms), and opened up the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen.

Opened up!

Next step was roughing in the electrical, plumbing, and venting:

New fume hood!

This is from earlier this week:

View from the Dining Room

Cake frosting skills come in handy when applying joint compound. Just don’t lick your fingers!

This is what we’re working toward:

Kitchen layout

“My” area of the kitchen is at the top of that diagram. There will be an under-counter oven near the large doorway. Fridge is in the middle of the left-hand wall. Dishwasher next to it. Slide in gas stove/oven combo under the fume hood, and the rest of the counter space is hubby’s. A tall pantry cabinet is on the end. The island is going to have a round pot-filler sink in it, and the other half of the island will be open, so I can put a stool there to sit and work on fiddly things like cake decorating. We ordered a cabinet to sit in the doorway to the dining room as a place to put a coffee maker and sort of as a phone table, but we’re not 100% sure we’ll install it yet. We are really liking the openness there.

We finished the painting last night, and Jay’s working on flooring today. The gas line for the stove was run yesterday or the day before (the days are running together). With any luck, we should be able to move some appliances back in this weekend, and then we just wait for our cabinets to come in!

No more fridge

The fridge (and everything else needed for day-to-day survival) has been moved into the dining room. Unfortunately, baking supplies somehow don’t qualify.

No more stove

But I have a new oven! It just happens to be sitting in the garage , waiting for the kitchen to be gutted and rebuilt from the floor to the ceiling. We’ve figured out what we want for cabinets, and have an appointment to order them tomorrow evening. We’ve already bought everything needed for re-wiring the room (who builds a kitchen with 3 outlets, including the one for the fridge?), and we have 2 new sinks and 2 new faucets waiting on standby. The ‘island’ you see in the middle of the pictures above is one that Jay threw together so we could decide whether the kitchen really had enough space for one.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my experience with the Vanilla Bean Pound cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. I baked this for my grandmother’s 86th birthday, which we celebrated this past weekend.

Mise en Place for pound cake

The batter comes together really easily once the ingredients are out and assembled. You scrape the seeds from the vanilla beans into your sugar. I doubled the recipe, so this meant 4 vanilla beans. Luckily I buy mine at Costco, so this wasn’t terribly costly, though I realize it would likely have been tastier with better beans. Since I didn’t have superfine sugar, I didn’t bother rubbing the seeds into the sugar by hand, and just let it go a while longer to mix evenly and to grind the sugar a bit finer in the food processor. Next, you mix together your dry ingredients, and your wet ingredients, then add the butter and some of the wet into the dry. Mix that up, then gradually add the rest of the wet ingredients.

Ready for the oven

You end up with a fairly stiff batter, which I spread into 2 8×3″ pans. Two 7×2″ pans would have been better, but I used what I had. As you can see in the picture below, I ended up with a rather lightly coloured crust, but I assure you that it was fully baked.

Baked cake

After brushing with a bit of syrup (I reduced the syrup quantity, because I thought it might overdo it a bit to syrup AND frost a pound cake), it was time to make my frosting. I chose the vanilla mousseline from the Miette Tomboy, because it’s been calling my name. It looked SO good from the first moment I opened this book. It didn’t disappoint.

Mise en Place for Mousseline (plus sugar syrup)

Like most classic buttercreams, you start by making a sugar syrup. Then beat the egg whites to a stiff meringue (adding cream of tartar and sugar at appropriate times). Once your eggs are stiff and your syrup to the appropriate temperature, beat the syrup into the meringue. Keep beating until no longer hot to the touch. Then, we put the meringue in the fridge to bring it down to 70 degrees, and start beating the butter, to bring it up to 70 degrees (Fahrenheit).

Components for mousseline

Mix the meringue into the whipped butter, add the vanilla, and you have yourself a delicious creamy mousseline buttercream.

I decided to pretty mine up a bit, since it was for grandma.

Completed Cake

My freehand piping skills leave a bit to be desired, but I figure I just need some more practice. I’ll get to that in a month or so, with any luck!

Fairytale Cottage

My husband and I both agreed about this one — not a favourite. I don’t know whether it was because of the extremely uneven shape of my cake, or just the fact that it wasn’t torted and frosted, but we both found it to be rather dry and bland, even after 24-48 hours after syruping it. It was much improved by the addition of some leftover syrup from strawberry preserves I made last weekend, though! Thanks for the pointer to the method for the preserves, Desserts Divine! I also used the ice cream recipe from there…

…which brings us to this week’s topic: Ice cream cake! I told my husband this week’s theme, and mentioned that I’d never made an ice cream cake before. He said “Didn’t you try one a couple years ago?” “Nope, not to my knowledge.” “I guess I’ve never had a real home made one, then.”

I had a rather distressing baking night while making this, but looking back on it, it doesn’t seem like anything really went all that badly. At the time, though, I was too harried to really take many pictures.

Mise en Place

I immediately ran into the same concern as one of my other baking friends over at My Sweet Life. I was convinced that I must have goofed up the math on the cocoa and boiling water combination, because it was way thicker than anything I was used to from a recipe of Rose’s. I redid the math, made sure it was right, and forged ahead, though. So, you add that to egg yolks and oil, and beat it up to a nice glossy smooth buttercream-like consistency. Sift over the dry ingredients, mix them in gradually, and you end up with something kind of the texture of a brownie batter. Add the vanilla, and the egg whites, and it’s more or less the thickness of a good creamy soup. It also smelled EXACTLY like the batter from my mom’s chocolate cake recipe. Hers is a one-bowl recipe of her own design, and you add boiling water (or coffee) at the end of the rest of the mixing. I’ll have to post it sometime, if I get her permission.

The batter is then supposed to go in a 10×2″ pan. All I have in 10″ round is a 3″, so I had to make do. Actually, now that I think about it, I may have misread, and used the pan instructions for the sandwich, but the batter amount for the cake. Oops.

Batter in a 3 inch deep pan

The top of my cake had some really weird bubbling, but after taking it out of the oven, it subsided too quickly for there to be anything really worth taking a picture of. I attributed it to the too-deep pan. I’ve also noticed lately than when I bake anything with a thin batter, I get an off-centre slightly undercooked part, at the side of the pan closest to the front of the oven. This side of the cake is also almost always thicker than the back side. Do ya think maybe my oven and/or floor is unlevel?

Ah well. Torting the cake, and stuffing it into my 9″ springform pan went smoothly. My homemade strawberry ice cream from homemade preserves thawed and spread nicely over the cake, too. On went the top layer, then it was into the freezer, and time to make the chocolate snowball hot fudge sauce. I ran into trouble here, too.

What do you do when you need heavy cream, and all you have is milk? Well, you look for a substitution. Joy of Cooking told me that I could substitute 1/3 cup butter + 3/4 cup milk for 1 cup of cream. I figured since all you’re looking for is some liquid and some fat in a sauce it wouldn’t turn out too badly, and I was right. Except it was awfully runny… and there was a whole lot more than the 1 cup the recipe said it would make. Have you guessed where I goofed, yet? A substitution for 1 cup of cream is not the same as a substitution for 1/2 cup of cream. *facepalm* So, I melted and combined some more butter, chocolate, cocoa and vanilla, and whisked it all together. I was feeling rather sorry for myself over a heap of dishes when my husband came into the kitchen and wondered why I didn’t seem happy. “Nothing’s going right tonight. I shouldn’t bake in the evening after a day out in the sun weeding.” “What’s gone wrong? What can I do?” “I accidentally substituted for 1 cup instead of 1/2 cup of cream, so I had to get out more stuff and make a double batch of hot fudge sauce.” “Um, sweetie? That’s not really a problem.” I had to laugh. I think he’s probably right.

Cake!

We both really like this cake. I found it neat how it’s almost like you get two different types of cake in it, in addition to the ice cream, because some of the ice cream layer melted into the cake below, and gives it a different texture. With the hot fudge on top, it’s a definite hit. Fortunately, it will keep well in the freezer, and it won’t make the trip well to work, so we don’t need to feel too badly about not sharing.

Chocolate Covered Strawberry Cake

I loved the chocolate covered strawberry cake. We had a couple of friends over for a campfire in our backyard, and they and my husband all seemed to like the individual components, but didn’t think they worked amazingly well together. They all thought the chocolate overwhelmed the strawberry, which I guess matches what many of the rest of the baking group said.

Coconut Cheesecake

Don’t mind the funny blotch. The condensation from the plastic wrap dripped and seems to have lightened it. I’m not a big fan of coconut, but I needed a cake the week it came up on the schedule, so I figured I might as well try it out. Why did I need a cake? Well, some of the people from our office in Virginia were up for a visit to our headquarters, and I’ve received a few complaints from one of them that no one ever breaks the build when he’s in the main office. We have a tradition that if someone checks in bad code, causing the overnight build to fail to compile, they buy doughnuts for the rest of dev. When I break the build, I bring homemade cupcakes or cake. That hasn’t happened in quite some time, but I regularly bring in the results of my cake baking escapades anyway. The Virginia guys are on the email list that I notify when I have something to share, so I figured I should bring in something just for them while they were in town. Everyone seemed to like it, and it disappeared quickly enough that I had to snag a piece and stash it in the fridge in the kitchen with a sticky note on it for the visitor who had complained, since he was in meetings all day and would have missed it otherwise!

I took one particular compliment from one of my co-workers. He’s recently moved to the other end of the building because we’re running out of space, so he didn’t quite make it to my cubicle before the cheesecake disappeared. He said “It’s ok. I really don’t like coconut, but I really like your cakes, so I thought maybe this would be the one that would change my mind about coconut.”

On a side note, I had a really hard time finding cream of coconut. Our liquor stores don’t sell anything non-alcoholic, and our grocery stores don’t sell anything alcoholic, so finding appropriate mixes for drinks is a challenge. I ended up buying coconut cream, and adding simple syrup to try to get it to something approaching what I thought cream of coconut might be like.

Today’s cake is the Génoise Rose, which I haven’t baked yet, but I might do that Wednesday afternoon, depending on available time. I hope Marie and the rest of the heavenly cake bakers will excuse my tardiness. We’re currently in the process of trying to gather up some quotes for kitchen cabinets, and we have 2 appointments on Wednesday with 2 different cabinet places, and a more detailed consultation tomorrow night with a third.

Kitchen’s back to “usable” space, now that the hole in the floor has been filled in.

Floor AND a new window!

I think my husband might be right...

...maybe I shouldn't bake tonight.

I think he's mostly worried I might get distracted and fall into the basement.

Besides... my baking supplies are in the dining room.