Practice makes for improvements

I previously described a practice cake made from the Epicurious chocolate layer cake recipe. Two weeks later I went ahead and made the real thing for Mommy's 45th birthday. It was glorious to taste, and the ganache was the stuff of dreams.



It was still a good learning experience. The hour was late and my patience and impulse-control were running low. I could not bear to let it cool before frosting it, and I did pay the price. Furthermore, that gel in-tube icing is no fun whatsoever, so I made more and added another layer of writing on top, to an acceptably cool effect. Was it a work of art, with its peaky writing and craterous center? Perhaps not, but it was pretty damn cute and tasted perfect.

I have since made this cake once more, for my Great-Grandma's (a.k.a. GG) 95th birthday on April 16th. Following some fantastic cake-baking tips, I halved the recipe to make a single, decadent 10" layer and omitted the raspberry filling (GG likes chocolate). The oven at The Nest is the Quarter Horse of ovens; never quite on top of things, like perhaps it was meant to be something, anything but a hunter...wait, are we talking about horses? Anyways, the oven runs cool so I just set it to the stated temperature rather than a little higher, and baked the cake a bit longer. I also made my own cake strips by neatly wrapping wet paper towels in aluminum foil and pinning them to the edge of the pan. Planning ahead helped, as I had all day Saturday to let the cake cool first in the pan, then on the rack, before wrapping it in plastic wrap and moving it to the freezer. The chilly and remarkably even layer, removed about an hour later, was about a thousand times easier to handle, and less crumby. A bit of ganache softened in the microwave made a workable, waste-less crumb coat, after which the cake was retired to the fridge for a half-hour or so. The main coat came out lovely and smooth.
For the writing, I chose to trace out my letters in the ganache with a toothpick first. I have a lot of icing anxiety, and this experience did little to assuage it. I followed the JoyofBaking.com royal icing recipe, which was simple and did not require any thermometers (I refuse to make any kind of frosting or icing which requires a bloody candy thermometer) and dyed it a faint blue. I piped "Happy 95th Birthday GG!" over my tracing, and decorated the edge with pale blue dots. It was really quite beautiful...

...until the icing broke. Why did this happen?! Fortunately, GG is quite nearly blind, not that she would ever have said anything even if she could see how the liquidy parts spread away from the stiffer center and dried that way. My only guess is that perhaps I did not beat the eggs thoroughly enough, and the lemon juice ran off with some of the lumen. How annoying! It was practically perfect in every way, but for the icing. Boo.

Regardless, it was a nice 95th birthday party, and having never heard the story before, I begged to hear how GG met Vincent, her long-time boyfriend of truly staggering vitality. Vincent left us at the age of 104, and what a fabulous character he was, aqua Cadillac and all.

It must have been in the early or mid 80's, as my great grandfather died in 1986 quite soon after I was born, I think. A strapping farmer born in French-speaking Maine, my great grandfather was steadily deteriorating under Alzheimer's. His wife, a petite 5'4", cared for him until family and friends insisted that she could no longer manage his needs alone, and so he was sent to a professional care facility. She visited always.
GG was not long after this decision swimming with a friend, enjoying Senior Swim hour, which actually lasted 2 hours. Most of the attendees were women, to whom 2 lanes were devoted, while the other lanes were for the men, of which there was only one. You can hear my great grandma laughing at herself when she describes how sorry she felt for the little old man, swimming by himself. Perhaps she thought she was brightening his day in exchanging pleasantries after being introduced to Mr. Vincent Stella by her friend, Terry.
After their swim, my great grandmother went to Boston Chicken (as it was called in those days) for lunch, while Terry went home, having already eaten. And who should she bump into there but the little old man from the pool! My great grandma must have thought herself quite charitable, offering to pay for the little old man's lunch, but he declined and insisted on paying for hers instead. As she watched him go to his aqua-blue Cadillac, she felt even sorrier for him. Said she, to herself: "That must be his only possession left in the world! Poor thing."
I think that, to use my mother's favorite expression, I come by my love of story-telling honestly. I cannot imagine that my great grandma would keep such a funny tale to herself, and so she told Terry, who laughed and laughed. "Oh, no!" she must have cried, telling her friend not to pity the little old man, who had emigrated from Italy at the age of 14 and had cheerfully retired at forty thanks to a thriving oil business. He had had a wife, and plenty of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

My great grandmother then recalls sitting at home one day, now empty without her husband, and seeing a be-hatted head bob past the window. She looked up, and when she heard a knock at the door, she pressed herself into a corner that gave her a convenient, secretive view of the door through a great picture window. There stood Vincent! Surprised as anything - or perhaps surprised only for the story - she invited him in, and after he crossed the threshold he swept off his hat. My great grandfather was, I know, quite a good man, but he and Vincent must have been like night and day. The former had been hard of hearing since boyhood, and was not naturally inclined to exuberance. He was tall and strong, quiet and shy, never drank or smoked, and wanted above anything to return to his farm after the war. His father sold off everything during the war: the plow horses, the property, the livestock and machinery, and when the tractor was finally sold, my great grandfather wept. Vincent was not a tall man, but was meticulously groomed and fashionable, taking great pride in his appearance. He loved to dance and loved to be photographed, and had a bigness all his own.

And after sitting with my great grandmother for some time, Vincent asked her to dinner.

Practice cake

I have a silly friend. Not prankster-silly, or foolish-silly...but the kind of silly that can forget to eat if she's busy. That is something that I can experience about as purely as red-green colorblindness (as a matter of interest, I have two of those sorts). The silliest part about her relationship with food is not even that she can forget to eat, but that she can forget to eat because she's too busy baking. On the weekends, this single young lady bakes cookies and cakes and everything in between. Fabulously, too!

Invariably, someone in your life, trying to encourage you to like chemistry, will tell you that it's just like cooking. However when chemistry precedes the first buddings of impulses to cook, as it does for me, one might have to say that cooking is like chemistry. And - are you ready, old school SAT fans? - cooking : chemistry :: baking : __?__.
(a) biochem
(b) torture
(c) recess
(d) organic
(e) physics

If you chose (d) organic, congratulations, you agree with me! The parts of organic chemistry that I enjoyed entailed imagining the interactions of molecules and their conformation, which are too eenie-weenie to actually watch or see. However organic chemistry lab was 3 hours per week for 30 total weeks (two semesters) of scheduled anxiety. Chemistry and cooking are similar because one follows a recipe. Organic chemistry and baking represent the same variation on that theme; if you do not follow the instructions to the letter, things go horribly, horribly awry. I am however, a realist on this point: a doughy cookie or an icing that falls apart into a gooey mess is not tragedy on the same scale as a deep lungful of fuming sulfuric acid or a botched sodium fusion test. Some days more than others I might not feel this way, but on the whole I am more leery of a chemically-ravaged esophagus than ravaged sweets.

While the fear of imminent injury made organic chemistry lab into a weekly cortisol-fest, baking gives me just that little thrill of "Oo gosh I hope this comes out yummy!" My friend got me hooked on baking. For two weeks it was Valentine's day cookies: chocolate-dipped marzipan conversation hearts and orange butter cookies dressed alternately in white chocolate, dark chocolate, or white icing were the favorites. With oodles of sprinkles, liberal use of red food coloring, and spiffy food coloring-markers, I ended up with plates and plates of pink chocolatey sugary be-sprinkled atrocities. Oh, they were hedonism itself, drizzled in chocolate.

This past weekend I made peanut butter cookies, but I halved the recipe (yes I used half an egg!) and didn't have any peanut butter chips so I used extra extra chocolate chips. They were superb. And in other news, the notoriously badly-calibrated oven in my kitchen was beautifully-behaved. I also tried the famous Epicurious chocolate cake recipe.

There are some things that you shouldn't do for the first time when it really counts. Jumping on horseback comes to mind, and so do birthday cakes. I have never made a cake of any kind, and Mommy's 45th birthday is in the first week of March, so I needed to practice. My goal is to bake a chocolate cake with a preppy feel: pink and green will be making a cameo appearance. For my practice cake I needed 2, 10x2" round cake pans, which not only did we not have at home, but could not be found at the grocery store. Boo. The grocery store did, however, have boulder-sized hunks of Callebaut. Memorably, my college dining service had used tremendous quantities of Callebaut for Valentine's day displays, and a thieving friend provided me about 1.5 pounds of her bittersweet spoils. In any event, my practice cake is square. I started after dinner and would have finished before the end of the Oscars had the dish washer not taken several eons to give me some clean measuring implements. I had to guesstimate on the amount of chocolate: I bought 0.75 pounds and needed 3 ounces. My mommy helped me with that math. The cakes came out beautifully and slipped cheerfully out of the square pans. I used canola non-stick spray and parchment paper on the inside of (2) 9x9x2" pans.

I chose a whipped cream filling and followed The Joy of Cooking's directions for "Stabilized Whipped Cream" and then added in 0.25 cups of smooshed raspberries (seeds and all, babies). The result was pretty and a faint but lusty purplish-pink. I spread this between the two layers, and then discovered that my square cakes did not have flush edges.

I also made a very simple buttercream frosting: beat the snot out of 0.5 cups room-temperature butter and 0.5 teaspoons vanilla, then beat in - cup by cup - 4.5 cups of confectioner's sugar. Add milk a tablespoon or so at a time until it's the consistency you want. Ohmygod delicious! I think other recipes probably give you a more reliable, pliable frosting, but anything that requires a candy thermometer is too much work. Plus, I don't have a candy thermometer. I made this pretty thin to avoid a crumby massacre.

Initially, I just frosted the cakes in the hopes that the frosting would cover up the unevenness. No go. I made the frosting pretty runny, remember? So I lined up one corner and trimmed two sides. It looks marginally better now, or at least less lumpy. Bits of pink filling and brown cake do show through.

This cake is tasty. The buttermilk (horribly misleading name, blech!) and coffee give it a bitterness that keeps it from tasting cheap, and the texture is lovely. The original recipe recommends a chocolate ganache frosting and filling, but my initial reaction was that such a dark, rich, somber thing would clash a bit with my preppy goals. However, I do not think that the white frosting and fluffy pink filling are a good match for this cake. A delicious raspberry filling, more gelatinous and shiny and dense, would be delicious. Combined with a shiny ganache shell, this cake would be gorgeous...

...and sadly, exactly like the one available at Highland Park Market. Perhaps a chocolate+liquor filling would be better, or an orange or clementine filling. I haven't given up on decorating the top of the cake with darling dots of pink and green icing, but I definitely have some thinking and research to do on the subject. More later.