A Little Bit of All Right

 December is Free Choice month for the Cake Slice Bakers, and I was having such a hard time deciding that I decided to bake the cake with the longest name - not really. I did have a hard time choosing, but then my daughter needed to bring a dessert to a holiday party, and these cupcakes seemed like the perfect option. The recipe starts with a simple chocolate cupcake recipe. While the cupcakes are cooking, you make a dark chocolate ganache. The recipe gives instructions for making it on the stove, but I used my microwave. While that cools, you turn your attention to the filling which is basically homemade marshmallow cream flavored with raspberry jam. I didn't have any raspberry jam on hand, but I did have barely used jar of something called BEAR jam - Blackberry, Elderberry, Apple, Raspberry - that we had picked up at a farm stand. While the flavor of the jam had been a bit much for toast, it was perfect for this filling. To assemble the cupcakes, cut out a divot from the top and ...

This month's choice featured three winter-themed cakes - spicy eggnog, chocolate peppermint, and this cranberry topped pavlova. All three appealed to me, but I needed something that required hands on time, so the pavlova was the obvious choice. I have, however, added the other two cakes to make "bake this soon" list so am looking forward to reading how they went for others. This recipe calls for creating a Swiss meringue for the pavlova, and I am a fan! I should have taken a picture of the unbaked meringue because I felt quite successful with how thick and shiny my meringue turned out to be. It piled up beautifully on my baking sheet. The recipe calls for baking for 2 hours and then leaving in the turned off oven for several more hours.  The cranberry topping includes dried cherries in addition to the cranberries and is flavored with five-spice seasoning. I did not have any port in my cupboard, but I did have a bottle of blackberry wine from Shenandoah National Park, so I...

When I got ready to bake this month's cake, I noticed I had several egg whites sitting in my refrigerator, left over from a batch of lemon curd. That, coupled with the author's note that store bought raspberry ice cream would work as well as homemade, led me to attempt this version of a baked Alaska. A Baked Alaska starts with a layer of cake that gets topped with a dome of ice cream, and the entire thing gets covered in egg white meringue that is toasted. The air bubbles in the whipped egg whites insulate the ice cream from the heat.  This version starts with a large, round brownie that is wonderfully chocolate and would be a terrific dessert on its own. The author then provides a recipe for raspberry ice cream that you freeze in a round bowl approximately the same size at the top as your brownie circle overnight. We don't own an ice cream maker, so I opted to buy raspberry ice cream from the store.  The final steps of this dessert should be made right before you're re...

 The Tart Cherry Almond Cake starts with an easy almond-flavored cake batter that you then fold in tart cherries. Once it comes out of the oven and cools, it gets a soak in an almond simple syrup and then topped with a thick glaze and a sprinkle of slivered almonds.  The only problem I had with this recipe is that the cherries all sunk to the bottom. The recipe says you can use either fresh or frozen tart cherries. I had a couple of jars of tart cherries in my house, so I decided to use one of those. The note at the top suggests placing half the cherries on top of the batter if you're using frozen, which I did with my jarred cherries. But they all sunk anyway. With the cherries all clustered at the bottom, I had to work to get a proper taste of all the components. And while the iced cake was good, and the cake-encased cherries were good, the cherries with iced cake was perfection. If I were to make this cake again, I would cut the cherries into fourths, and I might even opt to...

The recipe header describes this as banana heaven, and that is certainly a good description. It required 5 bananas, and came out both smelling and tasting wonderfully banana. The cake starts with a spiced banana batter. You then fold in diced bananas that have been cooked briefly in a mixture of rum and brown sugar. Once the cake is baked and cooked, it gets a brown butter rum drizzle that is a good match for the banana flavor.    My drizzle did not drizzle, and it was much darker than the picture in the book. I did add a little bit of milk to the mixture even though the recipe didn't call for it. I probably should have added some more to get a looser mixture. Instead, it was more like frosting. It was still delicious, and there were not complaints from the tasters. One suggestion the author makes is that when you're ready to remove the cake from the pan you should flip it onto the cake plate, and then let it sit for a minute before slowly lifting the pan off the cake. I had n...

Where does February bring to mind for you? Mae Jemison, Shirley Chisholm and Josephine Baker? Hearts, candy and flowers? Snow, ice, and cold? In our family it's Samoas, Trefoils, and Thin Mints. Yes, February is Black History Month, and it has Valentine's Day right in the middle, and it is (at least where we live) the coldest month of the year, but it is also Girl Scout Cookie month, and my daughter is a girl scout who actively participates with her troop in selling cookies. So of course I had to try out this month's choice of a Thin Mint-inspired cake, the Thicc Mint Cookie Cake. It's a layer of chocolate cake, topped with mint buttercream, and covered in ganache. It did not disappoint. This cake had a great mixture of flavors and textures that is indeed reminiscent of the cookie. It was easy to prepare and sliced up neatly. I'm especially a fan of the buttercream mixture. It starts with 1 cup of butter and 1/2 cup of shortening to which 3 1/2 cups of powdered suga...

 This year the Cake Slice Bakers will be baking out of The Cake Book: Beautiful Sweet Treats for Every Craving . Based on January's recipes, I believe I'll find the subtitle completely accurate. We had three recipes to choose from: Lemon-Olive Oil Chiffon Cake, Glazed Tangerine Donut Cake, and a Dark Chocolate Cajeta Cheesecake. I opted for the Glazed Tangerine Donut Cake. The cake is supposed to be baked in a tube pan which will give it the appearance of a donut. It then gets topped with a tangerine glaze to finish the look. I opted to use my Bundt pan, so it doesn't quite have the expected appearance, but the taste was still spot on. The cake is flavored with vanilla and nutmeg giving it a light spice cake flavor. It's light, airy, and moist, and tastes lovely without the glaze. With the glaze, it's the perfect cake for cup of coffee or tea, and carries over to make a nice bite for breakfast.  I'm really looking forward to what the rest of the year will bring....

 December is always free choice month for the Cake Slice Bakers. Some years I know early on which cake I'll bake in December; other years I find myself flipping pages, looking for a recipe that calls my name. This year was the second kind. I was looking for a cake that was something I hadn't made before and that I had all the ingredients on hand. I finally settled on the Chocolate Orange Marble cake. The recipe has you make one batter, divide it into two sections, and then flavor one with melted chocolate and the other with orange. You then put the orange batter in a loaf pan, top it with the chocolate, and use a spoon to try to marble it. After baking, you slowly add an orange flavored simple syrup to the cake while it's still hot. Once cool, remove from the pan, slice, and enjoy. This is a delicious and fairly easy-to-make cake. Both the chocolate and the orange flavors were present, one not overwhelming the other. I opted for dark chocolate (70% cocoa), but you could cer...

This recipe starts with a coconut cake that then gets layered with yuzu curd, frosted with a vanilla-flavored French buttercream, and dusted with flaked coconut. Because yuzu can be hard to find, the author suggests a number of substitutes including other citrus curds and chocolate buttercream. I opted for lime curd. The cake recipe is simple, the instruction for rolling it up worked like a charm. My experience with cake rolls has been a little rocky in the past - the cake has cracked, broken or even stuck to the pan. I had none of those issues this time. The cake is flavored with coconut extract which gives it just the right level of coconuttiness when combined with the other components. I followed the instructions for the yuzu curd but substituted lime juice for yuzu juice. My curd need a little longer on the stove as it was not quite thick enough, even when mixed with 1/2 C buttercream as the recipe suggests. But it did taste delicious. If you haven't made French buttercream bef...

Suzy's Cake is a rich, chocolatey layer of goodness that we all enjoyed eating. It was simple to bake and used ingredients that I generally have on hand. Definitely a go-to recipe for special occasions as well as those days when you just need something decadent.     The cake may not be much to look at initially, but that first taste had everyone closing their eyes in ecstasy, so it really didn't matter. It has a moist, soft texture and held up well overnight. The instructions have you refrigerate it for an hour before taking it out of the cake pan, probably so it doesn't fall apart. Then you're to let it come up to room temperature before slicing and eating. I followed those instructions the first night, but the second night I just ate it cold, and it was still delicious. We served the pieces topped with a dollop of whipped cream and some fresh strawberries. Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking thr...

I chose to bake the Gluten-Free Fig Cake this month because we had just received a gift of home-grown figs from a friend of ours, and the opportunity of including some of them in a cake was too good to pass up. This cake starts with a layer of quartered figs that is then topped with an orange-flavored cake batter. It's baked in a springform pan, and the author says not to unmold but rather scoop out as the texture of the cake is somewhere between traditional cake and pudding.  The cake batter was easy to put together. While I did need to make a trip to the store to buy some mascarpone cheese, the other ingredients were all household staples for me. The recipe uses almond flour instead of wheat flour. Unfortunately, this cake was not a hit with anyone in my household. Some of this was because some members of my family prefer raw figs to cooked figs. But another complaint was that the figs weren't integrated into the cake. It felt like eating cake with cooked figs and not like ea...