A Little Bit of All Right

December represents the finishing of one cake book and the preparing for new one.  I have really enjoyed baking out of The Perfect Cake .  I have used several of their recipes for a special treat for my family (the microwave mug cakes were early favorites) as well as meal enders for special occasions.  The clear instructions have given me courage to try baking cakes that went a little beyond my usual comfort zone. The Cake Slice Bakers have a tradition of allowing each baker free choice of any recipe in that year's cook book for our December bake.  I chose a cake that had tempted me back in February but definitely felt outside my abilities, the Chocolate-Espresso Dacquoise. A dacquoise is a meringue that has finely chopped nuts folded in before baking.  For this cake, there are hazelnuts and almonds added to the meringue.  Often, you bake each layer separately, but  America's Test Kitchen recommends baking one long sheet and then cutting into four separate rectangles.  I mu

I've finally returned to baking from The American Cake .  I've actually baked this particular cake twice, once last spring and again in November for a work potluck.  In the book, it's called a Robert E. Lee Cake, but that seems a bit of misnomer since he neither created the cake or baked it.  So I rename in honor of the woman who did all the work (assuming she didn't just take credit for the work of one of her enslaved persons). This cake consists of a light lemon cake layered with lemon curd and covered with a citrus buttercream.  The lemon cake is one of the best I've ever made.  The buttercream is very tasty; the use of both orange and lemon juices really sets it off.  Where I've had trouble both times is the lemon curd.  The first time I made this cake, I followed the recipe as written.  The curd was very sticky, and I felt overcooked.  It was difficult to work with as it tore the cake when you tried to spread it.  The second time, I used my own lemon cu

Happy Fall!  Where we live, the weather has definitely shifted from summer to fall, and all of the autumnal items are out my us to enjoy - pumpkins, the fall rainbow of leaves, corn mazes, and apples.  I recently went to a farm with my children and a group of their friends that had all of these things and more.  While there, we picked up some apples and apple cider to bake this cake for the October Cake Slice Bakers bake. . We all loved this cake! It uses an apple cider reduction in the cake batter, brushed onto the finished cake, and in the glaze.  The cake was very moist, and the apple cider taste was present in each bite. I can't wait to make it again! An InLinkz Link-up

September's King Arthur Bakealong was as Pane Blanco - basically a type of savory stuffed bread.  There recipe calls for sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil, but I was not up for a trip to the store that I would have had to go to to find those things, so I used some roasted red peppers that I had in the cupboard.  The recipe produces a slightly sticky bread dough that you roll out, add filling and then roll in a style similar to that used for making cinnamon rolls.  You then cut through the top layers to expose the filling and form it into a figure eight. After it's allowed to rise for another hour or so, the interior is exposed more.  I think it would have worked better if I had gone through another layer of dough. Bake and eat. Delicious and easily modified to fit a variety of palates and dinner menus.

This month's Cake Slice Bakers' choice was an easy one for me.  I've been wanting to make a Smith Island Cake since I first came across the recipe several years ago.  It look delicious and is the state cake of Maryland.  A couple things have prevented me from doing this: 1. most of recipes call for either having many more cake pans than I own or cutting the cakes into layers and 2.  I have a small kitchen and did not know how I could possibly find space for all of those cakes.  The recipe in America's Test Kitchen's The Perfect Cake , however, seemed a little more doable.  Two cake pans, reused over the course of a morning.  Frosting made separately and refrigerated until ready to assemble. To deal with the space issue, I re-purposed our dining room table and used a stacking cookie tray rack I owned.  Here are some of the cakes cooling. The cake consists of eight thin layers of yellow cake filled and frosted with a fudge-type frosting.  It was definitely a wi

I was really looking forward to this month's Cake Slice Bakers' bake from The Perfect Cake .  It was one of the cakes I knew I had to bake as soon as I saw it.  A lemon layer cake filled and frosted with a beautiful blackberry mascarpone frosting.  I could see my family oohing over the look and aahing over the taste.  Unfortunately, I was not able to produce the cake of my vision.  Fortunately, I don't think any of the issues I had were a direct result of the recipe. The first issue I had was a reading issue.  Despite pre-reading the recipe and then re-reading as I baked, I missed a crucial sentence that caused me to misinterpret the rest of the recipe resulting in a cake that was so dense it didn't even cook completely through.  The second issue was with the frosting.  It was not stiff enough to hold the layers together.  I'm not exactly sure what caused this issue, but I think it might have been that my jelly did not set up enough.  The frosting recipe calls for

As part of my baking with The Cake Slice Bakers, I chose to bake the Lemon Buttermilk cake from America's Test Kitchen's book The Perfect Cake .  This cake is light lemon cake topped with icing and lemon sugar.  It was an easy, quick bake that would be good if you had to put a quick dessert together to take with you or for last minute guests as you don't have to wait for it to cool to add the icing.  The cake itself has a very light lemon taste, but once the icing and lemon sugar was added, it was just the right combination of sweet and tart. Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through.  This year it is The Perfect Cake from America's Test Kitchen #atkcake.  We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all post about our cake on our blogs. There are a few rules that we follow, but the most important ones are to have fun and enjoy baking & eating cake

Summertime, summertime. Nothing says summer like fresh fruit. The Cake Slice Bakers continue to bake through The Perfect Cake , and this month, I chose to bake a Rhubarb Ribbon Cake. The recipe uses fresh rhubarb to add flavor to a basic yellow cake and to the buttercream frosting. It also uses strips of rhubarb to decorate the top. It is a beautiful cake. The only issue I had with the recipe was that my 2 lbs of rhubarb did not produce the 4 cups sliced rhubarb called for in the recipe, so the frosting was a little short. While the rhubarb taste in the frosting would have been that much stronger if I'd had the called for amount, it was still quite tasty. My family had mixed emotions about the cake. My daughter and one son were not fans, but my other son called it one of the best cakes he'd ever had. I loved it. I definitely need to spend more time baking with this summertime fruit. Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cake

For this month's Cake Slice Bakers bake, I selected the Swiss Hazelnut Cake.  It has two layers with ground hazelnuts mixed into the batter and filled and frosted with a delicious frosting made in part with marshmallow cream and hazelnut liqueur. Bittersweet chocolate covers the outside.  The instructions say to use a food processor to shave the chocolate.  I don't own a food processor, so I chopped the chocolate. In general, I was pretty happy with this cake.  The cake was tasty and moist, and I really liked the texture with the ground hazelnuts.  The frosting was also good, though a little sweet, but it completely lacked hazelnut flavor.  Also, I think the cake would have been better overall if the chocolate had been sandwiched in between the layers to better cut the sweetness of the frosting. An InLinkz Link-up get the InLinkz code Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking throu

February's King Arthur Bake Along.

A surplus of bananas sent me looking at various banana pudding recipes.  I was looking for a recipe that had the cook creating pudding from eggs and sugar and not a box mixed with cool whip and sour cream. While I really do like that version of banana pudding, I was hoping to increase the types of puddings I can create from scratch.   There were a plethora of types of recipes for banana pudding.  I finally opted for what was billed in many places as "true Southern-style" banana pudding.  This was a warm pudding, layered with bananas and vanilla wafers and then topped off with meringue that was browned under the broiler. It was a beautiful dish of pudding, one that would be perfect for potlucks if I could perfect it.  This was definitely a little runny for our tastes.  Whether that was because of a mistake I made while making the pudding, an issue with the recipe I finally decided upon, or the mixture of warm pudding with bananas, I won't know without making mor

The Cake Slice Bakers continue to bake out of The Perfect Cake  #atkcake. This month I chose to bake a Tres Leche Cake.  This cake is a soft yellow cake soaked in a mixture of milks and cream and topped with a lovely whipped cream topping.   I was a little surprised by the amount of milk poured onto this cake - I didn't see how the cake could possibly hold it all.  But hold it, it did producing a wonderfully moist and flavorful cake. Each cake from this book becomes my family's new favorite. An InLinkz Link-up get the InLinkz code Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through.  This year it is The Perfect Cake from America's Test Kitchen #atkcake.  We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all post about our cake on our blogs. There are a few rules that we follow, but the most important ones are to have fun and enjoy baking & eatin

My bake for this month for the Cake Slice Bakers was a Wellesley Fudge Cake.  I've seen this recipe in a couple of cookbooks but have not tried it until now.  Don't know what I was waiting for!  It was a pretty easy recipe to follow, and the results were amazing!  It's a chocolatey layer cake with a fudgey frosting.  Perfect for the chocolate lovers in the group. The cake was extremely moist and kept well.  I had the last little piece four days later (how did my family miss it?), and it was as moist as when I first cut into it. An InLinkz Link-up get the InLinkz code Wellesley Fudge Cake Tahini-Banana Snack Cake Hazelnut-Chocolate Crepe Cake Gateau Breton Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through.  This year it is The Perfect Cake from America's Test Kitchen #atkcake.  We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all p

This month the Cake Slice Bakers continue to bake from The Perfect Cake  by American Test Kitchen.  This book is not yet available, but we've been granted permission to bake and post a few months before publication.  Based on the cakes I've baked so far, I can't wait for this book to arrive in my mail. This month, I had a hard time choosing.  The Boston Cream cupcakes definitely sounded like something my family would enjoy, and I'm always looking for a good cupcake recipe.  The Bananas Foster Cake sounded like all kinds of yumminess (and will definitely make an appearance on our table sometime in the next few months).  The Chocolate-Espresso Dacquoise sounds amazing, but I was afraid it would be more than I could manage this month.  So the Blitz Torte it was, and what a good choice!  It was not over-complicated, I had no problems with the recipe, and my family did their best to gobble it up in one night - thankfully they failed so I could have a second piece the next

This year I decided to make another attempt at a Yule Log.  I used the same chocolate cake recipe I used last year, but I filled it with a cranberry-raspberry mascarpone filling and topped with chocolate buttercream.  I again had issues with the cracking as I rolled the filled log, and it actually split in half, though that was okay because I was going to cut it into two pieces anyway.  I think next year I will try a different cake recipe Cranberry Mascarpone Filling 1 Cup Heavy Cream 3 T granulated sugar 1 container of Mascarpone 1 container of raspberries, chopped 1/2 can of whole berry cranberry sauce 1.  Puree the cranberry sauce. 2.  Whip the heavy cream with sugar until thickened. 3.  Add the Mascarpone to the whip cream and continue to whip until medium peaks form. 4.  Add raspberries and cranberry sauce and whip for another 2-3 seconds.  Continue to mix by hand with a rubber spatula until it looks mixed.

January 2019 King Arthur Bake Along was Challah Bread.  I had a lot of trouble getting it to rise, but it may have been the way I combined the ingredients.  I used regular yeast instead of instant yeast.  I'm going to try again with the correct yeast and see if it rises more.  My family still loved it though, and it was perfect with beef stew on a cold, snowy day.

October King Arthur Bake Along.  Easy, delicious. I used a variety of fillings, including cinnamon, chocolate chip, and apricot jam.  The apricot jam was definitely our favorite.

In honor of The Cake Slice Bakers tenth anniversary, we are baking from a "bonus book" each month - one of the cookbooks used during one of the previous years.  In my family this is cause for much rejoicing as it means at least one extra cake each month!  The January 2019 bonus boos is Great Cakes  by  Carole Walter. I wanted to make something chocolate and also something that I already had the ingredients for in my house.  I chose a recipe called Little Tea Shop Cake with Chocolate Pudding Sauce that was based on a cake the author and her mother used to enjoy from a restaurant in Memphis, TN.   The cake was really easy to make.  It had a light vanilla taste and was very tender. But the star of the show was definitely the Chocolate Pudding Sauce.  This stuff was amazing warm or cold.  I had to make a second batch before we finished up the cake because my kids kept dipping their fruit in the leftover sauce. The cake was airy enough that it absorbed the

A new year brings a new book for baking cakes with the Cake Slice Bakers.  This year we are fortunate to be able to back from America's Test Kitchen's latest book - The Perfect Cake (#atkcake).   This book won't be available to purchase until March, but we were allowed to have a sneak peak at a few recipes to kick off 2018. I picked the Peanut Butter Pretzel cake as my January bake.  When I first heard the title, I was sure there would be some kind of chocolate involved - after all, what would go better with peanut butter and pretzels than chocolate?  When I saw that there wasn't any, I toyed with the idea of adding some.  Then I tasted the batter and realized how wrong I was.  The cake batter has ground pretzels added to it as well as molasses, giving it an almost gingerbread taste.  The cake is topped with a peanut butter frosting that is simply divine.  I had some left over that I intended to use on cupcakes this weekend.  My family beat me to it.  They've