Liz n Dick vs. Baked Occasions

I expect pictures!

I'm very excited about this project and have stratospheric expectations.

I look forward to this project

Yeah, the title promises a little bit more than it delivers, sadly.  

And my baking is definitely not "excellent", so maybe this will project will help with it!  

Is there anything for Flag Day?

This weekend's dessert?  Red Wine Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Glaze!  Ostensibly, per the book, for "National Wine Day", we enjoyed them as a very grown-up chocolatey answer to the Valentine M&M rut we've been in the last couple of weeks.



For starters, one of the things I loved about the whole series of cookbooks by the guys from Baked is that they are high-end baked goods that don't rely on many specialty things.  They rarely call for obscure ingredients or off-the-beaten-path tools or pans or molds or whatever.  So imagine my surprise when, for the second random-draw recipe in a row for this project, I was being asked to use a specialty ingredient.  Last time it was vanilla bean paste, this time it was black cocoa.  Now, I did happen to have black cocoa on hand (exactly the 1/2 cup the recipe asked for, in fact), but I wouldn't have considered it a dealbreaker to use the regular stuff.  There's a lot of flavor in these things already.

This recipe promised a chocolate cupcake with minimal sweetness and it wasn't kidding.  It was a pretty standard cake recipe -- cream your butter and two sugars, add some egg, then add in dry ingredients and melted chocolate + liquid in alternate additions.  But the chocolate was melted in red wine in this case.  Brilliant!  There was also a caution that these would be especially sunken cupcakes unless the baker wanted to heat the oven to 375, then drop down to 350 immediately after putting the trays in the oven.  (This is true for all cupcake recipes, if you want a more domed finished product.)  It worked!  My cupcakes, as you can see above, did not have any droopy crowns.  As for the glaze and decor, the book had theirs decorated with some white sprinkles, but we didn't have those things.  We had red sanding sugar, and figured they could be Chinese New Year cupcakes, then.  I'm glad we went with the sugar, actually, because it added a pleasing little crunch and a very welcome nibble of sweetness on the finished cake.

So, how were they?  STUPENDOUS.  I like dark chocolate, and love desserts that are on the less-sweet end of the spectrum.  But I'm not a fan of the "super-high cacao content!!!!!" chocolate arms race; it reminds me of the increasingly bitter power-hop IPA movement.  Just not my thing.  These cupcakes are the answer to that.  They are not at all sweet.  They are very rich and dark.  But they aren't at all bitter.  They're perfectly balanced -- a very grown-up sort of baked good with heft and fullness, but also a chocolate joyfulness.  Now, they were great immediately after glazing, and would have been fantastic with a nice buttercream frosting as well, but after sitting overnight with the (simple) glaze, these cupcakes reached their full potential.  Perfectly moist, with a spectacular crumb, I love, love, love these cupcakes.  LOVE THEM.

You've set the bar high with your Alton Brown series!

Absolutely!  I'll try to get it posted this weekend.  

I will be baking another entry for this series today, but in the meantime, here's one from the archives.  We tried this recipe last summer, the Rice Krispies Treat "Cake" conceived ostensibly to observe the birthdate of Mildred Day, the woman who invented Rice Krispies Treats.

The project here is making a big ol' batch of marshmallow, molding one third of it in a loaf pan, and then using the rest, once set, to make Rice Krispies treats.  For the treats, you use Cocoa Krispies and add chocolate chips to melt into the marshmallow goo.  Sounded like perfection to this particular Rice Krispies treats and homemade marshmallow enthusiast!  Alas...

The recipe for the marshmallows presented a problem, though.  It called for gelatin sheets, which I neither have nor have immediate access to.  So I went off-script, and subbed in my regular marshmallow recipe, from BraveTart, using vanilla extract instead of vanilla bean.  I have no idea how the two stack up, and won't ever find out because I'm not ordering gelatin sheets just to try this recipe again.



There are few things I ever cook that delight me as much as a giant, uncut marshmallow.  Normally I just mold them in a boring cake pan, but a marshmallow loaf is so much more awesome!  I probably should have stopped here, though, and just chowed down on a 9x5 marshmallow.  Because the Rice Krispies Treat part was... not good.

It all started well, and as I've mentioned before around these boards, there was much bewilderment, as they went together, why people don't always melt chocolate chips into their krispie treats.  So simple!  So obvious!  So scrumptious while molten!  Ah, but there's the rub.  It was only good while molten.  The chocolate messed with the chemical balance, and the Rice Krispies got mildly soggy.  The marshmallow "glue" never really fully set.  We ended up with clumpy, falling-apart, not-quite-mushy-but-not-quite-firm "cake" under a frankly fantastic "frosting" cap of marshmallow.



It was edible, mind you.  But not great.  In fact, after we all did our best to tackle a piece or two of it, I ended up throwing the rest out.  Perhaps the recipe's marshmallow works better with the chocolate in it?  If anyone wants to find out, let me know how it goes.

That looks amazing.

Random dummy question. So I know that traditional glazes are usually made with milk and confectioner's sugar. And these are usually left out at room temperature for even days at a time. Why does the milk not go bad? Does the sugar protect it? Or because it's spread thin does it dry out too fast to bacterialize? 

Liz n Dick , I'll be in my bunk. Totally hot for dat Bundt.

Thanks to a last-minute decision to work from home on Good Friday I had plenty of time to work on one of the big cakes in this book, the May Day entry "Strawberry Supreme Cake".  Here's someone else's picture, because my pictures ended up all sucking and I haven't gotten them off my camera yet:


(Mine looked nothing like this.  I am terrible at decorating cakes.)

Okay, some strawberry cake background:  I love, love, love strawberry desserts despite generally favoring the savory end of the flavor spectrum.  I most often like my desserts chocolate and salty, but then along comes strawberry and I'm like, "The sweeter the better!"  The idea of an all strawberry all the time dessert was just what I felt we needed, considering how many very chocolatey things I've been baking lately.  But Hugs is not of like mind with me (even though she has a sweeter sweet tooth), and she was a bit hesitant about this one.  Until I promised one little tweak, which we'll get to later.

For the last few years I've been a devotee of the Smitten Kitchen Pink Lady Cake, specifically the strawberry-flecked cake part of the recipe.  This Strawberry Supreme Cake, however, promised exactly the same.  So now the question was, would it be better?  It was certainly more complicated.  My scullery maid grumbled quite a bit about all the bowls and measuring implements I was piling up in the sink, which makes this something like the third recipe from this book in a row that used the entire contents of my kitchen.  There was the sifted dry ingredients, the pureed strawberries, the whisked wet ingredients, the folded-in beaten egg whites... and that was just the cake part!  The make-up of this one was a bit unusual, actually:

- The dry ingredients were very standard, assuming you consider cake flour "standard"
- The wet ingredients were buttermilk, whole milk... and ice water
- The egg situation was one whole egg added to the butter/sugar step, then two egg whites beaten to soft peaks, folded in after you did the whole "add the wet/dry ingredients in alternating steps" part
- Then you folded in the pureed strawberries

Nothing especially complicated or fussy, but also not exactly run-of-the-mill.  And I had my doubts about this one when I sampled the parts I trimmed off while leveling the three layers.  It all tasted kind of... muffiny.  Had I just spent enormous effort (and left Boomer with a monster clean-up) for a cake that wasn't as good as the Smitten one?  It remained to be seen...

The exterior frosting in this recipe is the standard Baked buttercream, with a pink food coloring tint.  No strawberry in this part.  The Baked buttercream is staggeringly delicious, but a total pain in the ass.  You combine flour, sugar, and heavy cream in a pot, boil it until it gets the consistency of "a thin pudding", then you put it in a stand mixer and beat on high until it cools down.  Then you add a ton of butter and some vanilla.  When I've followed those instructions in the past I've often found myself unwilling to continue listening to my stand mixer long enough for the hot "thin pudding" stuff to get cool enough, so then my butter melts and my frosting is a disaster.  Now I prefer to cook the base and let it sit at room temperature for a while until it's cooled down on its own.  Is this wrong?  I have no idea, and I don't care, because I'm not going back to the "mix it until it's cool" method.  That's for crazy people.  My frosting was mostly fine this time, if a tiiiiiiiiiiny bit curd-y.  (I think my butter wasn't quite soft enough.)  This buttercream technique is a total diva, but it's worth it.  Because it's spectacularly good -- light as air, perfectly sweet, and so so buttery.

The filling in this cake recipe is whipped cream with chopped strawberries folded in.  And you're also supposed to include a layer of strawberry preserves between the cake layers as well.  This is where I deviated, both because I don't have any strawberry preserves in the house (would you believe that?  Also, I refuse to buy preserves, even for a case like this) and because this was how I could placate Hugs -- by replacing the preserves with ganache.  Genius!  Just the tiniest hint of chocolate in an otherwise strawberry-sweet confection!

How did it turn out?  YOU GUYS.  This was THE BEST LAYER CAKE I HAVE EVER MADE.  Whatever seemed muffiny about the tops of the cakes when I trimmed them was not present when the whole thing got assembled.  The frosting was divine.  The filling was a heavenly balance of creamy, sweet, berry-y, and that little hint of chocolate, like the strawberries in the cream had been chocolate-dipped.  And the cake!  THE CAKE!  The crumb on this thing was ridiculous, gloriously fine and incredibly moist.  And the berry flavor was bold and pervasive -- after a day in the fridge under the cake dome I felt like the the pink buttercream had picked up just the right amount of berry flavor, too.  It was the platonic ideal of a strawberry layer cake.  Something I've been chasing for years, and have finally found.  

And I should note that the berries I used for this were from last year's farmshare; they were on the line right between "unremarkable" and "not very good".  The recipe says you can use frozen or fresh berries interchangeably, and I can't even imagine how much better this would be if it was using berries that were actually good.  I mean -- lousy, relatively flavorless berries yielded the greatest cake I've ever had.  Good berries might make this too beautiful for this world.

Sure thing -- I'll try to get to it tonight.  

For the ganache I used one in the same book from a different recipe -- 6 oz chocolate, 1/2 cup of heavy cream.  I had enough that I also ended up putting a layer on the top (on top of the frosting, actually, because I'm an idiot who didn't plan ahead very well.  And that's why my cake looked like ass, but I didn't care and it was nice to have there).