Start by chasing your ingredients down from the increasingly annoying boxes they’re in all over the house, and measuring them out, then putting them back away. Sigh momentarily about the delay in your cabinet order, then move on, because you have to admit, it’s a more functional kitchen than it was before you tore the old stuff out, even without cabinets and counters! At least I didn’t need to make beurre noisette, because I have a stash in the freezer. See my peanut butter ingots post for how I make it in a large batch for convenience.

Mise en Place

Next, mix the egg whites into the dry ingredients (sugar, ground almonds, best for blending/”wondra” flour, baking powder).

Mixed in the egg whites

Add the vanilla, and mix again. Then, spend some time slowly drizzling in the beurre noisette and melted butter, taking it as slow as you can, so that you maintain a nice emulsion. I think my egg whites were a bit on the cool side of room temperature, because the batter seemed a lot thicker than it was for the peanut butter ingots, and I suspect that was due to some of the butterfat solidifying as it was mixed in.

After drizzling in the butter

The instructions say to pour the batter into the silicone financier pan (I used a Wilton brownie pan instead), but my batter wasn’t pourable, so I put it in a plastic bag and piped it in. It didn’t need any time in the fridge to solidify.

Piped and ready for the oven

I didn’t have quite enough space for all of the batter in the pan, and I really should have filled these ones less full, because they did rise up out over the top of the pan, which made it difficult to get them out cleanly. Since the first batch stuck a bit, I overdid the baking spray on the second batch, and they unfortunately came out rather greasy.

Finished Financiers

It looks like I may have underbaked the first batch, since they sunk a bit in the middle, but the texture was fine. Jay really likes the crunchy top on these. I thought they had a good texture, though the flavour was a little underwhelming, and possibly a little too sweet. Did I just call something too sweet? That doesn’t sound like me at all!

Next week is free choice week, and I’ve already baked “my” choice. I took it to our friends’ cottage this past weekend, and it almost disappeared shortly after we arrived on Friday night. What didn’t disappear that night was gone first thing in the morning. Jay had all sorts of suggestions for different things I should do to ‘improve’ it, but they all basically boiled down to: you need to make this again and again and again. Find out what I made next week.

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.

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!

These cupcakes are pretty similar to the recipe in the Cake Bible, but with a slight difference in when the liquid ingredients go in. For more details on the differences, visit Jennifer’s blog.

You start by mixing together the dry ingredients.

Mix together dry ingredients

Then add the cocoa (first steeped in boiling water and cooled), and the butter.

Beat in the cocoa slurry and butter

Next, you’ll add the eggs, more water, and vanilla, in two batches.

This is my second egg addition

Mix that up, then divide into your cupcake pans. I won’t even try to pass these off as “muffin tins”.

Cupcakes!

For those of you who may question the whole idea of the ‘mise en place’, because you think it might generate too many dishes, let me assure you, it’s really not that bad.

Aside from the mixer bowl, this was it.

I had one cup with cover for steeping the cocoa, one bowl for the eggs, water and vanilla, and one for the butter to come to room temperature in (I measure it first, then let the appropriate amount come to room temperature). Then there was a couple of spatulas and a fork.

Finished Cupcakes

I had a bit of leftover raspberry cloud cream (recipe is in the Cake Bible) in the freezer. I think this was from my cousin’s wedding cake last August. After thawing and rebeating, it still tasted great to me, so I figured it was time to use it up. That’s what I love about cupcakes — I can make a batch and frost with 3 different batches of leftover frosting, without anyone thinking I’m making strange flavour combinations. I used up a bit of peanut butter frosting too, though it was still a bit firm from the fridge, so it looks more like a blop of fudge than frosting, so I didn’t include it in the picture.

Taste impressions: The raspberry cloud cream is delicious, and it’s a nice contrast to the chocolate. The cupcake is rich and chocolate-y, with a nice fine crumb, but I think I may have overbaked slightly (probably due to me stretching the recipe into 24 cupcakes, instead of 16). I’ve made this recipe before and it came out much more moist last time.

Mise en Place for Custard Filling

Custard, ready to cook

Beaten Cream Cheese and sour cream, and cooled custard

Mise en Place for Italian Lemon Meringue

Bubbling sugar syrup

Folding it all together

Graham Cracker Crust

Full, right up to the top

Extra goes into a plastic tub for Jay to snack on

Finished Cheesecake

I have to admit, for a ‘no bake’ cheesecake, this was an awful lot of work, and even more dirty dishes. Was it worth it? In my opinion, absolutely. I think this cheesecake supplants the “Cordon Rose” cheesecake recipe from The Cake Bible as my favourite. The texture is so unbelievably light and fluffy. It’s a little bit of a challenge to serve because of that, but oh so worth it. Unsurprisingly, given that it has the word “cheesecake” in the title, Jay really enjoyed it too. I offered to make it for him for his birthday, but we were visiting my brother in law at the time, and it turned out that he’d made a different no-bake cheesecake before we got there. It was quite tasty in its own right, and if I want something quick and easy, I’ll definitely be calling and asking for his recipe. No offence to my big brother, but when it comes to taste, Rose’s recipe wins hands-down.

I had every intention of baking this cake then taking it into work to share. What happened? Well, I changed my mind, and gave it to our neighbours across the street. I think I’m going to have to try this one again some time, so I can taste it. The only pictures I managed to grab of the cake were the mise en place and of the batter in the pan. Since neither of those are terribly interesting, I’m not going to bother posting them.

This cake has 3 components, none of which are particularly difficult or time consuming on their own. First you make the cake, which is a fairly standard chocolate butter cake. I think it’s based off one of Rose’s recipes from the cake bible, but I haven’t taken the time to sit down and compare. Next, you make a creme fraiche ganache, and let it cool. I let mine sit overnight, because of the busy weekend we had. The next morning, I frosted the cake with the ganache, and stashed it in the fridge to firm up. Then I went outside to get some yard work done.

Jay had cut the cedars at the front of our house back to stumps earlier in the week, and I needed to dig them out, so that I can eventually plant something I actually want in their place. Before you go thinking we hate trees or something, these cedars were so old and poorly maintained that they really needed to be put out of their misery. While I did that, he was working on taking down the basketball net at the corner of our driveway. I periodically came around back to help him out at various stages, but for the most part, he spent much of the day swinging a sledgehammer at the concrete it was embedded in, trying to break it apart. Between the two of us, we could pull the post (which turned out to also be full of concrete) out of the hole it was in, but we wanted the concrete up, so that didn’t really get us anywhere. He did eventually get the concrete free and could get the post to rock back and forth, but there was no way it was coming out any further than that. The piece of concrete it was embedded in seemed to be about a foot and a half wide, and maybe 2 feet deep. When I finished with the roots I was digging up, I came over to help him. Apparently, our neighbour across the street saw us struggling, because all of a sudden, Albert comes walking up our driveway and says “The wife says you’re having trouble. Want me to bring my tractor over?”

So… Long story slightly shorter, Albert brings his tractor over, wraps a chain around the concrete plug, and pops it out of the hole. It turns out it was actually about 3 feet deep, and had 3 metal posts (not rebar, but similar) going another 1/2′ into the ground deeper than the concrete. I don’t know what the guy was thinking when he put it in, but I guess he really really wanted to be sure it wasn’t going anywhere when he did slam dunks and hung off of it. With that task done, we cleaned up our tools and I went inside to finish the cake. For the life of me, I couldn’t find my powdered gelatin. I still can’t find it, and I can’t find an empty container for it either. I did find some of the glaze leftover from the apricot roll in the freezer. I thawed it, and used that. It didn’t come out nearly as smooth the second time around, even though I heated it up to the required temperature. I had to do some spreading to get it to a reasonably thin layer, but I did manage to cover the whole thing. It wasn’t pretty, but I hope Carolyn and Albert enjoyed it.

Baby Lemon Cheesecake

This recipe begins by making a biscuit, which acts as the crust for the cake. It amused me that in this case, the biscuit name is actually literal — bis (meaning twice) and cuit (meaning cooked). It’s baked once on its own, then goes into the oven again as the base of the cheesecake. I’m easily amused.

Mise en place for biscuit

For the biscuit, you basically beat egg yolks and sugar until very light and fluffy, mix in flour and vanilla, beat egg whites into a meringue, then fold the two together, spread into a sheet pan, and bake.

Baked Biscuit

Let that cool, which doesn’t take long because it’s so thin, then cut into rounds, about the size of the bottom of whatever you’re baking this in. I had leftovers, which I stashed in the freezer. Hopefully the texture won’t suffer too much.

Leftover biscuit

Once you’ve lined the bottoms of your molds, get the cheesecake batter ready: sour cream, cream cheese, lemon juice, and eggs. I halved the recipe, because my silicone cupcake liners are about half the size called for in the recipe. In retrospect, this is probably why they baked up much quicker than the recipe called for.

Mise en place for cheesecake

Pour the batter into the molds, then fill the outer pan with hot water for a water bath.

Into the oven we go

After baking, and when the cakes have had a chance to chill in the fridge, make the lemon curd. I didn’t take any good pictures of this process, so you’ll just have to use your imagination. Spread the lemon curd as evenly as you can on the cakes, then chill again for a couple of hours before attempting to unmold.

Finished Cheesecakes

Jay really enjoyed these, and as I said above — anything that hints of cheesecake isn’t allowed to leave the house, so his was the only feedback I got. He thought they might be better with a more solid crust, but I think that’s because the temptation with anything ‘cupcake’ size is to want to eat it with your fingers. These are just a bit messy for that. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with these, but they weren’t my favourite dessert ever or anything. They don’t contain nearly enough chocolate for that.