MICKEY MOUSE CAKE

I am keeping my fingers crossed as i am writing this post. This is the first cartoon character based cake that i have ever baked. It was for a cute angel M.Baked and frosted it in a limited time; We decided on the flavour and look and feel and i had no idea of how to make it. Somehow i managed to deliver it on time. Still waiting for the feed back. If you are a regular reader of my blog; this is the same eggless chocolate cake recipe, only that i converted it into a butterscotch cake by replacing the cocoa powder with flour.

I didn't have any chance to taste the cake, but the frosting was yum...It tasted like butterscotch icecream. Still to hear from my friend on how the cake turned out. Will keep ya posted

CARAMEL CAKE

I am back. Sound's like Arnie isn't it. Just kidding. Was busy for so long, couldn't try anything bloggable. ha ha. So just  to refresh my already "not so good" skills in baking, i managed to bake this cake. This will be a really treat for any caramel lover. Though there are many recipes for a caramel cake, i stuck to an old fashioned rustic grandmother style cake that is so popular in the southern region of America,

I love caramel, i could have the whole frosting just by itself.  About the cake, there is nothing special, except,  it is an ordinary yellow cake with a glorious caramel frosting. I loved this cake. By the way, this was made for my amma, who was craving for a cream cake. She was, of course disappointed, as she had expected a luscious creamy white frosting, being presented with gooey clay instead. Nonetheless, the taste was fantastic, still i promised to make her a frosted cake some day. Though i hate  iced cakes, sometimes i do indulge in these rare ones. Verdict: A great cake for family reunions, when you want something special or unique.

Before signing off, i forgot to mention my "Tweaks". As the frosting is going to be a glorious caramel, i omitted vanilla extract from the cake, replaced with butterscotch essence instead. Worth the try, the cake smelt wonderful Secondly, the frosting was of spreadable consistency, a bit dripping, i would say. Reason could also be the heat, it is a scorching 109 here.

Recipe

Flour                200gms

Butter               200gms

Sugar                200gms

Eggs                 4

Baking Pdr           2 Tsp

Butterscotch essence 2 Tsp

Frosting

Sugar       50gms

Cream       100ml

Icing Sugar 200gms

Butter      20gms

Caramelisze the sugar untill amber colour.Remove from heat. Add cream and butter. Allow the foam to settle. Mix thoroughly. While it is tepid, add the icing sugar and mix well. Store in a glass container. This will keep for two weeks.

P.S. I had a cup of frosting left after icing the cake. Thinking of making cinnamon rolls and use this as a topping

FRUIT CAKE

What is Christmas without a fruit cake..?. Though we do now celebrate Christmas, i enjoy the fervour and spirit it spreads in this time of the year. I enjoy all the goodies that my friends pass on during Christmas, and as a return gift, i pack them a slice of this cake.

This is, again, a few of my original recipes that i have developed myself with some innovations each year. The first time i made this was with plain sugar and treacle. Next year it was demerera sugar with home made caramel. The fruits of course, we are spoilt with choice, but, i stay to almonds,walnuts, dates, dried black raisins and dried cranberries. Once you get to taste home made fruit cake, you would never go for a store bought one. I do not restrict this bake to Christmas alone. This family favourite will find a place in the table during any special occasion that needs a cake.

One could play with this recipe (as i did); say you could change the proportion of fruits added or the flavourings or the soaking syrup. We are strict non alcoholics, thus a mix of apple and orange juice. The traditional rum soaking method is always there. Another thing that is amiss in this recipe will be candied peel. That does not work for me. If you want a very strong flavoured cake you can add a dash of it too.

An important tip in this cake is, use the soaking syrup according to the days you will make the cake in advance. I make this cake two weeks in advance , so 200ml. By the time it is 4 days before Christmas(that is when i start distributing), the cake would be packed in flavour and Punch.

Now for the recipe

Flour                    200gms

Demerera Sugar           200gms

Butter                   200gms

Eggs                     4

Salt                     1/4 tsp

Caramel                  4 Tbsp

Cinnamon                 1/4 ts

(i don't enjoy it thus such meagre amt, add 1  tsp if you are a fan of cinnamon)

Nutmeg                   1tsp

Dryginger powder         1/2 tsp

Vanilla                  1 tsp

Dates                    100gms (soaked in hotwater for 15mts)

Dried black raisins      100gms (soaked in hotwater for 15mts)

Dried cranberries        100gms (soaked in hotwater for 15mts)

Walnuts                  100gms toasted

Almonds                  100gms toasted

Apple Juice 100 ml

Orange juice 100ml

Cream butter and sugar till light and creamy.

Add eggs one at a time untill well blended.

Add all the flavourings and mix well

First add the caramel and soaked fruits and make sure they are mixed well

Then add the nuts (cooled).

Now add flour and mix untill well incorporated.

Give it a quick mix (do not worry about over beating) and fill in a 12 inch bundt pan and bake for 35 mts at 180c.

Wait unitll completely cooled. The next day, mix both the juices in a nozzled bottle and spray liberally over the cake. You will find the cake very wet, but have faith, the refrigerator will do the magic. Pack it in a airtight box and leave it in for two weeks. When you open it after two weeks you will never regret the labour of this cake.

MERRY CHRISTMAS.

I am submitting this to Aspiring Bakers #14: Creative Christmas Bakes (December 2011) hosted by Hankerie

CONDENSED MILK POUND CAKE

This is not a pound cake in the strictest sense. I have learnt that a pound of each butter, sugar, eggs and flour contribute to a good pound cake. To make this extra special, we add condensed milk, i suppose. When i saw the post here, it looked so good. But alas, i ran out of stock of two things, cake flour and vanilla extract. The forever adventure seeker that i am, i went ahead with the recipe with some.....tweaks..yeah you guessed it right. There was AP flour and nutmeg.

The cake was good, i had to steam it for a few seconds the next day to make it extra moist. The flavour of nutmeg was something different to me. Since i prefer nutmeg over cinnamon on any given day, i enjoyed it very much. One thing i missed was the tight crumb that baking fiend had. Must have something to do with the cake flour.

So, this month awaits another variation of pound cake, the "ELVIS PRESLEY FAVOURITE POUND CAKE". Waiting for the right occasion to make it.

Here is the recipe for the cake:

120gm good quality butter

45gm sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup (152gm) condensed milk

1 1/2 tsp vanilla paste  (replaced with 1 teaspoon of nutmeg)

120gm cake flour (replaced with AP flour)

3/4 tsp baking powder

2 large eggs

Sift cake flour and baking powder tog. Set aside.

Cream butter and sugar tog till light and fluffy.

Add in salt and vanilla paste and cream well.

Pour in condensed milk and cream till well combined.

Using the mixer on low speed, add in flour in 3 additions. Mix till batter is smooth.

Add in eggs one at a time. Make sure it's well mixed and smooth.

Bake at 175 degrees for 1 hour. (mine was done in 45 mts)

HOKKAIDO MILK CUPCAKE

I was waiting for a long time to try this cake. It looked soooo.. good and the reviews were great. When SSB announced this month's theme, the first thing that came to my mind was this cake. It yielded a whole dozen of cupcakes. The cake was soft, moist and tasty, but....the eggy smell was overriding everything else. Though i added two sachets of sucre vanille, it still was there, Otherwise the cake was a superhit. Very healthy and tasty for evening tea. The next time i am thinking  of adding lemon zest or orange zest to suppress the eggy smell or does anybody know anyother means to get rid of it ...?

Here is the original recipe. I gave my tweaking fingers some rest and followed the original recipe to a T.

Chiffon CupCakes:
yields 8 large cupcakes (I got 12 medium ones)

Yolk mixture:
40 grams milk
50 grams oil
70 grams egg yolk (about 4 large)
30 grams sugar
70 grams flour
10 grams cornstarch
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Egg White mixture:
160 grams egg whites (about 5 large)
1/2 tsp cream of tartar (i used lime juice)
80 grams sugar

1. beat egg whites with cream of tartar until it forms soft peaks. Add sugar gradually and peak to stiff peaks
2. Combine all yolk ingredients and mix until smooth
3. add 1/3 of egg whites to yolk mixture, and whisk to combine. Dump and yolk mixture back into the rest of the egg whites and fold gently until smooth and there are no more white streaks.
4. bake at 340F for 20 minutes.

I am submitting this post to Aspiring Bakers #13: Enjoy Cupcakes! (November 2011) hosted by Min of Min's Blog.

CHOCOLATE FUDGE CAKE

This is the same cake as this. Only difference is, i substituted lindt 99% dark chocolate with cocoa powder in the original recipe. Everything looked so well done (or so i thought).When i placed the cake in the fridge to set, fate grinned at me. Power played spoil sport; the refridgerator started to defrost thereby water droplets started to drip on the cake. That is why one end of the cake is so untidy. The frosting was vanilla buttercream covered with chocolate gananche and the borders were malt flavoured buttercream.

Now that i have gained some confidence in frosting a cake, the next time, i should try something with freshcream. Baking fairy...are you listening.....?

BIRTHDAY CAKE

If any body cares for day 1, here it is.  


day 2). Frost the cake, check for the look and feel and ready the cake.

I sliced the cake horizontally into two. Good, no problem, that was easy with the new turn table at hand.

The icing was rock hard when i took it out from the fridge, so i thought of easing it down by whipping it once again. OH MY GOD, THE ICING FELL APART IN CLUMPS, IT HAD A CURDLED LOOK AND GOSH..! MY HEART STOPPED. I had no idea of how to repair this. After racking my brains for a few minutes, i decided to start afresh, this time going with the age old recipe of butter, icing sugar only.

So made a fresh batch of butter cream with the above ratio omitting the milk chocolate, it was a bit grainy at first, but as i whipped in intervals of 15 mts 3 times, the texture was nice and smooth. THANK GOD..face saved.

But, there is the catch, i had promised her a chocolate frosting. I didn't want to experiment again (putting the inner genius and the genie to sleep; i now understood the look on appa's face), i made a chocolate truffle by melting equal portions of dark chocolate and cream till it is of pourable consistency. Whew....let me catch some breath.

Firstly, (remember i had left the cake as it is once it was slit) i layered the cake with buttercream, then crumb coated it and set it in the fridge for 15 mts. Once set, i plastered (is it the right word..?) the cake with more buttercream and smothered the edges nice and smooth. Set in fridge for another 15 minutes. Now the cake looked half beautiful (or half ugly...!). Gently pour the cooled truffle until it coated all the sides of the cake. That was the only thing i could well in this (mis)adventure. There it was a smooth delicious looking chocolate cake.

Next, what, i let my imagination run wild and piped out designs using the remaining buttercream all over the cake. (lousy, lopsided, lethargic). These would be the words going through anybody's mind if they caught me in the act of piping. Time to get serious and get good practice. All in all, the cake was done. It looked pretty, not professional. Am waiting with bated breath about the outcome of the cake from my friend.


P.S. For people wondering what i did with the chocolate frosting "gone wrong" check out my next post.

EGGLESS CHOCOLATE CAKE

I had a request For a birthday cake. An eggless one. Till then i didn't have any chance to try eggless ones, but this friend is a strict vegetarian; so, for her little one's birthday, i challenged myself to make a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.I zeroed in a recipe from a milkmaid collection recipe book of my mother's.I was not sure of how the texture of this cake is going to be or how much this will yield, so i made a trial version a week before. As this was my first cake for somebody else, i had to set out a plan to make the cake and frosting.

day 1). Make the cake and frosting, set both in fridge.

Chocolate cake recipe

milk maid - 400gms
butter- 150 gms
maida - 200 gms
cocoa powder - 35 gms
baking powder - 2 tsp
baking soda - 1 tsp
warm water - 200 ml
salt - a pinch
vanilla essence - 1 tsp

grease a 9 inch baking pan and line it with butter paper. (i always do this, makes cleaning the dishes easy)

sift the maida, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt twice.
melt butter in a bowl and allow it to cool
Add milk maid and mix well
stir in the water and mix again
when everything is a homogeneous mixture, add the dry mixture and mix lightly until they all come together.
Do not over mix.

transfer into the cake pan and bake at 150 for 45 mts.

You have to make it to believe it. The cake smells heavenly. I had made a lots of cakes before, but his was something special. It tasted so divine the next day. I had set it on the table early in the morning to cut out the wedges, the whole room smelled of milkmaid (i could eat a whole can just like that). The cake, though lacked the spring form effect of an egg based one, was dense and very very tasty, like a pound cake. But the aroma, nothing could be compared to it. So, my eggetarian friends, please try this cake atleast once in a lifetime, you will never regret it

Allow the cake to cool.

Frosting:

This was another opportunity to spread the austerity drive that i always practice. There were lots of milk chocolates in the fridge; suddenly an inner voice prompted me to substitute cocoa with milk chocolate (that was the disaster waiting to happen).

I whistled aloud of what a genius i was; Appa just gave a baffled look..!(i didn't know why).

So meticulously i took 250 gms of butter, 500 gms of icing sugar, 250 gms of melted milk chocolate and mixed everything with a hand held mixer and whipped them until they were soft and fluffy.

Notwithstanding, the inner genius (i think it should be read as genie) hinted on to add a table spoon of instant coffee powder to make it a mocha frosting.

Just imagine, a first timer dishing out a chocolate cake with chocolate mocha frosting (sounds so professional yo..).

Everything was hunky dory, the cake was good and the frosting was well done. I thanked all my stars and went to bed.

JUMBO VANILLA CUPCAKES

The day i sulked about sponge cakes, the baking fairy must have heard it. She turned around and stayed with me for the next two endeavours (devil's food cake and the current post). The cupcakes turned out beautifully. More beautiful than i had expected. They were absolutely spongy, melt in the mouth cupcakes. I had never dreamt that i would bake such beautiful cupcakes one day.


Thanks to "The little teochew". This is her recipe for clear water sponge cake. I added a dash of vanilla to make it a vanilla cupcake. Next time, should try it with orange or lime flavour.

DEVIL'S FOOD CAKE

This is my second frosted cake. As i have already said, frosting is not my forte, but this seemed quite easy. The recipe is HHB's Devil's Food cake.This is a deeply dark, chocolaty, velvety cake. The only thing i tweaked is, i omitted the bananas in her recipe and i think i went overboard with the spikes on the cake. Her cake's spikes are much gentler. Should work upon it next time. May be i was very much carried away by the way the frosting was responding to the movements of the spoon. They spiked very nicely. Only after seeing the picture did i realise that i had played too much with it. Other wise, for a person like me who doesn't like chocolate too much, this was an occasion to fall in love with chocolate.

Another tweak was that i didn't use dark chocolate for frosting, i used milk chocolate (phew, there were so many leftovers..)along with low fat cream (that is all i could manage in chennai). The cake was overall received well, but i will stay with my bet with fruited cakes that are my all time favourite.

CASTELLA/KASUTERA CAKE

"success", "success", "success" Does this remind you of an old M.G.R movie's opening line; then so be it. I had baked a sponge cake successfully after so many days that my joy knew no bounds. As posted previously, i had my own inhibitions about baking cakes with oil. Now, when i came across a recipe that didn't call for oil either, i was intrigued, how on earth could they do it..? It is called "Castella/Kasutera" or Japanese sponge cake. The picture of this cake was out of the world. Seriously; anybody who takes a look at this beauty will fall in love with it instantly.

After the damp squib in the last post, i was determined to conquer the "Sponge Cake territory";So: the spider from Robert Bruce's episode, that i am: i scoured through scores of sites that dealt with sponge cake 911's.I always turn to HHB for all my baking misadventures. She is so versatile as a baker. From HappyHomeBaking's blog i jumped from site to site until i laid my eyes on The Little Teochew, another fantabulous blog that finally opened the doors to Just Hungry from where i took the recipe that didn't have a drop of oil or butter in it. It was so kind of her to dote down step by step instruction on baking the cake that i made this one which was 80% the texture of the original Castella(since i halved her recipe, i baked it in a loaf tin and i used AP flour, u dont get bread flour in chennai). Next time i would try this in a square pan. I pinched myself when the cake was sliced the next day as she had instructed. From now on this is going to be called as Ms Maki's cake. It was so tasty...that all of them drooling over it.

This was my far the best sponge cake that i had ever baked. Hip Hip Hurray.

SPONGE CAKE

Looks like i am always running out of luck when it comes to baking a good sponge cake. As i already said, i am yet to try some cakes that uses oil. This is one such (mis)adventure.

This cake uses the separation of eggs(whites and yolks beaten separately) and uses oil and water. I was very skeptical initially, but gave myself a daring bakers challenge. What is life without taking up challenges.

The cake was good but not good enough. It was more "cottony" in texture rather than "spongy" . But, i think i know where i went wrong. The pan i used was a 7 inch round pan for a 100 gm flour batter.This could be a reason (or so i think).

Any way, about the cake, as usual, my family didn't want to break my heart; they said it was good, but for me it was a learning curve. I don't like cakes filled with butter cream or whipping cream. I prefer jams and fruit preserves to coat them. This one was smothered with orange marmalade to make up for the lacklustre texture of the cake. So friends please ask the baking fairy to visit me when i bake my next sponge cake...

DATE AND WALNUT CAKE

This is the other baby which was drooled upon. I got extremely astounding feedback on this cake. It was very well received and well it tasted "OUT OF THE WORLD"...

CHOCOLATE CAKE

The ultimate cake for any cake lover. This is a simple chocolate cake with rich ganache frosting. I made this cake for A's friend and she liked it very much.The cake was very moist with a tender crumb. But the frosting was not perfect, i have to hone my frosting skills to have a smooth finish. Other than that, i achieved some success with the mirror effect of the galze. (i could see my face on the cake, once it had set).


All around, this cake was a success and i will try this again.