A Little Bit of All Right

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

One of my Christmas gifts to myself this year was copy of the book American Cake: From Colonial Gingerbread to Classic Layer, the Stories and Recipes Behind More Than 125 of our Best-Loved Cakes .  I had been wanting this book for sometime as it combines two of my favorite things - American History and baking cakes. The book is laid out chronologically.  Each chapter covers a different time period.  There's information about the ingredients available during that period in America, events that were influencing baking, and any big baking trends.  Each recipe also has a write-up that provides some history on the cake and its creator.  I'll be baking through this book over the next year or two, picking two or three cakes from each chapter. The first chapter covers 1650-1799, and the first cake I chose to bake from here is Harriott Horry's Water Cake.  Harriott Horry was from South Carolina. The cake has only a few ingredients - sugar, water, eggs and flour - and is receptiv

November/December selection for the King Arthur BakeAlong was a Cinnamon Star Bread.  I decided this would be a perfect choice for Christmas morning.  In accordance with the instructions, I baked it the day before and kept it covered in the refrigerator.  Christmas morning I reheated, covered with foil, in a 350 degree oven.  Worked perfectly! Family loved it, and it was not not as much work as it looked.  I used scissors as recommended, and that definitely made things much easier. I had a little problem with the cinnamon/sugar leaking out as I cooked it.  Not sure what caused that, but it didn't affect the taste. https://blog.kingarthurflour.com/2017/11/01/cinnamon-star-bread-bakealong/