Scratch It: Wacky Cake

Wacky Cake

from America's Test Kitchen

I've been following America's Test Kitchen's "Cooking Through the Decades" contest and this week's recipe is from 1945: Wacky Cake.

Even in wartime Americans were not about to deprive their sweet tooth. Unless they were dabbling in the black market or using precious ration points, homemakers found ways to avoid butter and eggs in their desserts. Wacky Cake sounds goofy but it is really a domestic science experiment gone completely right, in which the chocolate cake is moist and fluffy despite containing no eggs or butter. American bakers learned to have their cake and eat it too, realizing that serving their country and serving dessert were not mutually exclusive.

This is probably the easiest cake ever to make.  The lack of dairy makes it vegan too.  From my internet research, some people suggested that this recipe was made during the Depression and others from WWII.  Lots of people have made this from recipes passed down generation by generation.  It's definitely wacky, from the ingredients to the mixing process.

Ingredients go directly in the pan!  Dig holes in the dry to hold the wet.

Pour water all of the top, then stir.  Bake.  Done!

 Top with some powdered sugar.

My first reaction was, "Meh ... not the best chocolate cake I've had ..."  Then I looked down at my plate and wondered where my slice went.  Apparently I inhaled it.

The texture is pretty impressive for a cake with so few ingredients.  It was fluffy and moist.  You could really taste the natural cocoa.

I baked this cake early Saturday morning.  My daughter woke up and came downstairs by the time I was taking pictures of it.  Lucky her got cake for breakfast!

 I kept trying to get this top-down picture of a cake slice on a plate, 

but she kept taking the plate for her to eat.

Scratch It: Cold-Oven Pound Cake

"Cold-Oven Pound Cake"

by Cook's Country

Color me happy!  I'm pretty sure I knocked this recipe out of the park.  In all fairness, it was pretty simple, but still!  I followed all the directions correctly (except using 2% instead of whole milk) and didn't over-bake it.  This cake is probably the best scratch pound cake I've had so far.

This recipe uses cake flour and was baked in my Chicago Metallic Angel Food cake pan.  The trick to this recipe is not to pre-heat the oven.  While I was getting my ingredients together, I actually made the mistake of turning on the oven right away.  Felt pretty weird to have to turn it back off.

Finally, a pound cake recipe that didn't yield some weird puffy, crusty top.  

It's been over 24 hours since this cake was made and the house still smells amazing.  Nice, tight but tender crumb.  And the taste?  Pretty darn good.  Yup, this one is going in "the binder" (my collection of printed-out internet recipes that I've made successfully).

Scratch It: America's Test Kitchen

America's Test Kitchen

While on maternity leave, I've been watching a lot of America's Test Kitchen online with my website subscription.  Whenever the baby wakes up in the middle of the night, she nurses while I watch dessert episodes on my laptop.  I've had the opportunity to make a few of the recipes that interested me.  They've been great learning experiences and several are now my go-to recipes.

Their science segments have really helped me understand the different ingredients used in caking ... dutch-processed vs. natural cocoa, cake vs. all-purpose flour, cocoa butter vs. cocoa solids, etc.  Watching their chefs use different mixing methods and hear their explanations have really opened my eyes.  Scratch baking is very scientific, and my sloppy, bad habits just won't do if I want to succeed.

 

I know that America's Test Kitchen isn't the highest echelon of pastry art, but it has held my hand as I transitioned to scratch living ... and not just desserts.  This week I made chicken tikka masala and thin crust pizza from scratch.  I haven't attempted using yeast in ages!

I've tried their dessert recipes for:

• chewy sugar cookies (best ... cookies ... ever!)
• fluffy yellow layer cake (little dry and bordering bland, but I think I screwed it up ... the recipe was a little complicated, and I was unprepared)
• chiffon cake (home run! see previous post)
• old-fashioned chocolate layer cake (OMG I didn't know I could have it so good!)
• chewy brownies (pretty darn good, but I have little experience with brownies ... see photos below)

 Unfortunately there is no turning back.  I'm afraid the next time I taste a box mix, I won't be able to keep a straight face.  The host of the show once humorously (but emphatically) referred to box cake mix as "the decline of Western civilization!"  I distinctly recall the moment when tub frosting became disgusting to me.  After years of loving Duncan Hines' chocolate and cream cheese flavored icing ... trying them again after gaining experience with scratch icing was a wake-up call.

I know it must be good if my daughter eats it all.  She's not a picky eater, but somehow she's not big on cake.  When I picked her up from school today, I told her I had made brownies, and we'd try some when we got home.  Sitting at the kitchen table, I cut a piece for her.  She insisted that the piece I gave her was supposed to be my piece and then indicated which piece she wanted from the cutting board.  So I ended up with the small portion and she got the big slice.  She ate the top crust first and insisted I do the same.  We enjoyed our brownies with some cold milk.

At some point I'll try their red velvet cake recipe as well as their chewy chocolate chip cookies.  I go back to work full time in a little over a week, so I need to enjoy my baking free time while it lasts!

Worst Cake Ever.

Worst Cake Ever.

"Comic Book Guy" from the Simpsons

Event: "That Takes The Cake" 2011
7th Annual Sugar Art Show & Cake Competition (Austin, TX)

Division: Adult Intermediate

Style: Sculpted

Media: cake, modeling chocolate, rice cereal treats, gumpaste, food coloring, candy coating, PVC piping, metal flanges, wood boards

Since I knew the show theme was "Comic Books", I've been wanting to make this guy for a long time.  This is my first cake using PVC for internal structure.  He didn't really turn out how I wanted due to time constraints, but he still took home 3rd place.

I finished him at 3:30 in the morning on the day of the show.  He was heavy, but he was as sturdy as a rock.  He has 1/2" pipe in each leg, secured to the wooden base by adapters and metal flanges.  I smooshed rice cereal treats and formed legs, feet, and his butt.  I then covered that with gumpaste.  After drying over night, his bottom half not going to budge for nobody!

I had plenty of cake to play with.  Carving went well and I used cake spackle to build up any other areas.  He's got some pink icing inside because I had a lot of pink left over from a failed buttercream-only cake.  His head is rice cereal treats over the end of his spinal pipe.  Modeling chocolate provided the rest of his flesh, hair, and clothing.  It was so late in the night, I was completely out of time and couldn't do any of the finishing touches that I would have liked.  The judges specifically called them out too: shoelaces, belly button, etc.  Oh well, maybe next year.

He was still very nice to slice into ... had my stop myself from chowing down.  No one should eat competition cake that's been sitting in a convention center for 3 days in front of hundreds of people!

Amazing Wedding Cakes

Amazing Wedding Cakes

It makes me sad that I can't make a cake every day!  I've been forced to find other ways to satisfy my caking itch.  One of the best outlets is watching Amazing Wedding Cakes from WeTV.  Since I don't actually have cable television, I bought season 1 and 2 from iTunes.  It's a real treat to relax at home and watch other people work!  What's great is that this show follows several cakeries in each episode.  Every time I watch I get exposed to different styles and talent.

Season 1:

• Cake Divas
• Cakegirls
• Cake Atelier

Season 2:

• Merci Beaucoup Cakes
• Cake Alchemy
• Christopher Garren's Cakes
• Cakegirls

I've watched Cake Boss, Ace of Cakes, and some of the Food Network cake challenges.  This show, however, teaches me so much more than those ever could.  I get to watch professionals in their own environment without horrific time constraints.  They all do such awesome work; it's really inspiring to me.

My favorite is Cakegirls.  Their style and artistic vision are really aligned with what I'm personally shooting for.  A few more years of experience and it feels like I'd fit right in there.  Unfortunately their business suffered from a fire earlier this year.  Their website shares that it's still an on-going battle to get things settled with insurance.  I hope the very best for them.  I know many in the caking community and their fans have given their support in their time of need.

I hear Fabulous Cakes on TLC is also excellent.  Grr.  I might have to talk with hubby about finally getting cable. I watched the first episode of Buddy's Next Great Baker.  One of the contestants lives not far from me, and we are both active members in our city's cake club.  Unfortunately it's very reality-tv-ish and downright ridiculous at times.  Buddy is even more over-dramatic than on Cake Boss.  It'd be hard for me to stomach watching more of it, but I'd still want to root for the home-team.

... need more tv ... can't dirty kitchen ... need to lose weight ...

Day of Sharing: August 8th

Day of Sharing

August 8th, 2010

Round Rock, TX

http://dos.capitalconfectioners.com

I've recently joined the Capital Confectioners, the greater Austin area cake decorating and sugar artist club.  We're having our "Day of Sharing" on Sunday, August 8th that will feature several cake artists such as Stephen Benison.  Unfortunately I don't have the time or money to sign up for any of the classes available before the show, but I will be there all Sunday to help run things.  I've volunteered to be the A/V girl since I'm somewhat familiar with techie-type shtuff :b  Let's hope I don't screw things up or set something on fire!

Please come and learn with your fellow decorators and enthusiasts!  All skill levels welcome!

LOST Finale!

LOST Series Finale Cake

(+5 skill points => 335/400)

My husband and I attended a LOST finale episode get-together this evening.  We had a mini-junk food fest that ended with this peanut butter chocolate cake.  The finale was a little disappointing ... thankfully the cake was good ;)

Stats:

• 8" round Duncan Hines Devil's Food cake mix (I thought "Devil" was appropriate considering the show)
• coated with semi-sweet chocolate ganache
• iced and filled with peanut butter chocolate IMBC
• topped with cocoa using a stencil
• shell and reverse shell borders

The grocery store was out of the Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix, which is my norm for chocolate cakes.  The Devil's Food cake performed adequately, though.  Now I'm not even sure how they taste different.  It was a little on the dry side, but it could be because I hadn't frozen this cake before hand.

It's been a while since I've used ganache to ice an entire cake.  I was being lazy and a bit rushed, so I wasn't very vigilante in making it correctly.  There were several chunks of chocolate chips that didn't get melted completely.  Meh, it wasn't for looks anyway.

Since this cake was basically for me and my buddies, I got to choose the flavors.  I've been wanting to retry the peanut butter chocolate Italian meringue buttercream for a while now!  It was yummy.

My hubby and I have been working a lot of overtime lately.  There wasn't many hours left in the weekend for me to spend on decorating cake, so I opted to make a stencil using my Cricut.  I asked people on the cakecentral.com forums for LOST cake ideas and several suggested to recreate the DHARMA logo.  The net has several LOST cakes that feature this, and it was a great idea for something simple and quick.

I downloaded a LOST font and modified some of the characters to make my stencil using SCAL.

http://www.dafont.com/lost-font.font
http://shinymetalobjects.net/cake/LOST.scut2

My first attempt consisted of using the stencil on the cake with the leftover ganache and that ended up to be a fail.  I didn't let the iced cake firm up hard enough in the freezer, so the stencil stuck to the icing and smudged it.  The ganache wasn't thin enough to really fill in the details of the stencil.  I, uh, lost the "LOST" in the middle completely.  I ended up scraping it all off and starting over.

This time I used a technique detailed in Toba Garrett's book The Well-Decorated Cake.  She sifted cocoa powder over a stencil to recreate an image.  This worked pretty well for my first shot.

Unfortunately I didn't take the time to make bridges in my stencil.  The stencil was actually 3 pieces placed together on the top of the cake, so some cocoa powder fell on to the negative space as I was trying to lift each piece off off.  I also accidentally threw away the center of the "O" when I was making the stencil, so you can see it's completely filled in with powder.  It was really great to finally get to try this technique and it saved me some time rather than trying to figure out how to re-do things.

I was pretty pleased with how this casual cake turned out and its taste.  It even looked pretty sliced.  We had a great time re-capping and watching the end of LOST!  Some day I'll actually go back and watch all of the episodes I had missed.

Happy 1st Birthday, Malaya!: Completed

Happy 1st Birthday, Malaya!

(+15 skill points => 270 / 400)

 

 

(03/01/2010)  I totally forgot this post was sitting in my edit queue!   Well, this was supposed to be posted a week ago, but my life got completely taken over by the cake competition.  Better late than never!

(originally written 02/20/2010)

This past weekend was my cousin's daughter's first birthday party!  I had the honor of making the cake for the party and Malaya's smash cake.  The cake and I had to resort to plan B many times, but in the end, I think it was a job well done.

Stats:

 3 tier party cake:

• top tier: 6" round Duncan Hines Red Velvet with Cheesecake Mousse
• middle tier: 8" round Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge with Oreo Mousse
• bottom tier: 10" round Duncan Hines Red Velvet with Cheesecake Mousse
• iced with "Vanilla Italian Meringue Buttercream" (new recipe for me)
• Royal Icing ball border
• Michele Foster's Fondant accents

Smash cake:

• single layer 6" round Duncan Hines Red Velvet
• iced with IndyDebi's buttercream
• reverse scroll border
• Michele Foster's fondant accents
• Wilton sprinkles on the side

It was bound to happen.  This cake was my first all-nighter.  That's what I get for procrastinating.  I've been pretty busy at home and at work, so I never really got a head start on this cake except for the baking.  On Friday night, all I had was thawed cake.  I started everything else at 11 pm and stopped Saturday morning at 8 am for a brief 2 hour nap, then back to finish the cake before the party.   It was actually nice to not have any interruptions like a crying baby or going to work.  Also I got a clear picture of how long it takes to make a 3 tiered cake from start to finish.

My previous post described how I decorated the cake drum.

Next up was making fondant.  I tried Michele Foster's fondant recipe from cakecentral.com, and believe me, it's worth all the hassle.  There are pros and cons to this recipe, but it was a great learning experience.

Cons:  The fondant will be off-white because of the butter.  Also, plain gelatin smells like dirty socks.  It doesn't taste as good as MMF, but it's better than Satin Ice and Wilton brands.

Pros: The fondant is super stretchy.  It has the consistency of bubble gum.  I could take a lump and pull it apart with both hands and it will stretch like melted mozzarella with no cracks or breaks.  Here are my loops for the intended bow topper.  I tried to color it to match the cake drum.

Those were set aside to dry.  Next cake leveling, torting, damming, filling, and spackling.  Not many pictures because I was too busy making the darn thing.

 

I made a batch of IndyDebi's buttercream to be used for the spackle and damming.

  

  

All of the cakes were spackled.  I wanted to make sure everything was straight, even, and sturdy.  Nothing was gonna happen to this cake ... not on my watch!

  

My co-worker convinced me to try this IMBC recipe.  He said his kids love it; they like it better than the recipe I've always used.  I had to fight for a long time to get this IMBC stable.  After adding the melted sugar to meringue, I have a bad habit to not let it alone long enough to cool.  I started adding butter and it completely destabilized.  It was so liquidy, it was flinging gunk everywhere.  My shirt and back kitchen wall was covered.  I made a make-shift plastic wrap tent, but eventually stopped trying to add butter.  I stuck it in the fridge for a while.  After a few minutes I tried again, but no luck.  I stuck it in the freezer for a while.  That made it a little better, so I added the rest of the butter.  It was still too cold (it gets looking like cottage cheese at that point), so I set it over a pot of boiling water to warm it up.  Jeez, this stuff is high maintenance!  I eventually got it stabilized.  Unfortunately the color was too yellow for my liking.  Luckily this is for a baby girl, so light yellow is always good.

The tiers were supported with bubble tea straws.  When it came time to place a tier on top of another, I only partially inserted the straws.  Once the tier was placed over them, I let gravity take the rest of it down gradually so I could slip my fingers out from under it.  I left my spatula underneath so I could coast it down and shimmy it in to place.

For the smash cake, I only had a little bit of IndyDebi buttercream.  I thinned it down with some milk.  Unfortunately that made it too unwieldy to smooth well.  In desperation I grabbed a bottle of huge Wilton confetti sprinkles and lined them up all along the side.  Good save, if I may say!

 

I didn't even attempt to pipe "Happy Birthday, Malaya".  I knew my piping still sucks and was not willing to mess anything up.  The smash cake got topped with some pretty ribbon roses and a cut-out 1.  The leaves were free-hand cut because I couldn't find my leaf cutters (which I later discovered were practically right in front of me).

Reverse shells make everything look better!

Unfortunately the mousse requires refrigeration, which called for some creative organization between our main and mini fridge.

The bead borders around the main tiers were royal icing with a dollop of corn syrup.  This made it look shinier and kept it soft.

I had to ditch the bow topper idea.  I didn't make nearly enough loops, the ones I had weren't dry enough, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to arrange them in a non-stupid manner.  Ribbon roses to the rescue!!!  This was my first try at ribbon roses ... they are so simple and cute! 

I had a wonderful time making this cake and was so proud to share it with my family.  The birthday girl was a little too tired to smash the smash cake, but everyone else enjoyed.  I received several compliments on the look and taste of the cake.  The top 2 tiers were devoured quickly!

Happy Birthday, Malaya!

 

I've had a couple weeks break to think about my past cakes.  Here are my conclusions:

FAILs:

• I don't prefer this IMBC recipe.
• My end result was too yellow; not the color I was shooting for but still ok, I guess.  This probably wouldn't be acceptable if it were an adult's birthday cake.
• Waaay too much butter.  It didn't taste bad at all, but I'm just not comfortable putting so many sticks of butter into one thing.  I'm not big on butter in cooking or eating either.
• IMBC was too finicky.  First it was too hot, then it was too cold.  Jeez!  I don't need this in my life!
• Not enough time.  
• It's been an unbelievably busy month for me.  I didn't have any time to prepare much in advance except for the baked cake.  The all-nighter was unavoidable.  
• I would really have liked to have more time to get the buttercream flawless.  No one really notices all the flaws, but I know I could have gotten it smoother.  Boy, your "icing" arm can really get tired after doing 3 tiers in one shot!
• I don't know how to make a bow!
• I really need to follow directions and/or practice making a loopy bow.

FTWs:

• covered cake drum badge earned!
• ribbon rose badge earned!
• smash cake badge earned!
• Sprinkles saved the smash cake.  I originally bought those huge confetti sprinkles for another cake, but decided to go in a different direction.  It was pure luck that they happened to be the same colors I was using and in a great size and shape.
• Tasted fantastic! 
• Costco Mousse is the way to go for great tasting filling.  It was nice and stable.  It didn't effect the cake that was in direct contact with it.
• I received several compliments on how "the cake was so good!"
• It's really nice to have a cake that looks and tastes good.  Either way is such a treat, but to have both ... that's what awesome is made of.