krafty kate

Again from The new Best Recipe cookbook is this sour cream coffeecake. I did the chocolate chip variant. I didn’t have the pan that the recipe actually used, which is one of those straight sided tube pans you often see used for angel food cakes, so I just used one of my many Bundt pans. I think it actually cooked a little too long and, because it’s a rounded pan, I had to serve it technically upside-down. It was still quite yummy, though.

I now own more Bundt/tube pans than any one person really has a right to own. Well, any one person who doesn’t own a bakery. I think I now have 4 full-sized ones (all differently shaped) and one that has 12 mini-Bundts in it. I picked up the 4th full-sized Bundt pan from Williams-Sonoma. It’s called a Heritage Bundt Pan. I normally don’t like to shop at WS because they’re a little overpriced and, really, do I really need another baking gadget? But look at the thing! It’s cool! It has such defined edges I had to get it.

A little while before, I’d also bought a classic tube pan from King Arthur Flour, also because it looked cool. That one is spirally and 12-cup capacity. The Heritage is a regular 10-cup capacity one. I used the classic in the previous post for the Butter-Rum Crunch Cake. That pan actually came with a recipe called Brown Sugar Spice Cake, so I decided to make it with the Heritage pan.

The Brown Sugar Spice Cake has apple juice, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ground ginger, and crystallized ginger pieces in it. The recipe actually called for quite a bit (something like half a cup chopped), but since I really don’t like crystallized ginger, too much (I find it too strong), I put in just a bit, I think about a quarter cup if you fluffed it up a bit.

The cake was a hit and it was a lovely spicey cake, almost like a gingerbread cake. It has a glaze on it, too, of melted butter and spices. It kind of made the cake a bit tough to cut into, but it was still tasty.

This was a recipe from King Arthur Flour’s The Baking Sheet newsletter. I wanted to follow it as closely as possible, so I waited until they had butter-rum flavor back in stock (it’s amazing that you can’t find this anywhere) and then had at it.

There was a total of 3/4 teaspoon of butter-rum flavor but if you tasted and smelled the cake you would have thought I dunked the thing in rum. I’m not a huge alcohol fan, being allergic to it, so I’m not too fond of alcohol flavors, either. The glaze was a bit too strong with the rum flavor. The cake itself was delicious, though. I tried a piece just after the glaze went on and it tasted much more like rum than butter. The next day, after the cake had completely cooled and the flavors mingled, I could taste more of the butter.

In my quest to eat more fish, I decided to try making a cedar plank salmon. I went to Wegman’s and picked up a salmon with a brown sugar and cracked pepper rub and a cedar plank. I also decided to make some chunky fries from Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food cookbook.

The fries were awesome, but I did put a little too much salt on them. The fish was also pretty good, but I think I prefer a saltier fish than a sweeter fish…but too salty I don’t like.

I think I used a boxed mix for the yellow cake. The cream cheese icing I took from the carrot cake recipe in The New Best Recipe cookbook. I didn’t mix it up as well as I should have prior to adding some food coloring so you can see little bits in it. Whoops! I made this for a co-worker, Nick, who I’ve made a habit of making “froo froo” looking cakes to. ;)

Another easy cake, the pineapple upside-down cake. I changed up the recipe a little bit by not putting in pecans and not putting in those nasty Maraschino cherries. Blech!

This one’s an easy one…take an oatmeal raisin cookie and substitute chocolate chips for raisins. I think they’re also called “Ranger Cookies” to some.

I made 2 types of brownies but only managed to take pictures of one of them. Whoops.

One was a mix for Cocnut Macaroon Brownies and the other was just a recipe from the cookie cookbook. I think they were “on the fence” brownies, meaning they were between cakey and fudgey.

I also used the Baker’s Edge pan.

Didn’t manage to get a picture of the macaroon one. I didn’t really like them too much…the sweetness of the brownies and the coconut seemed to be slightly off from each other…but still a bit tasty.

Time for another batch of updates.

I’d bought a Valentine Linzer cutter set a while ago and it came with a Vanilla Sugar cookie mix and raspberry jam.

The cookies turned out a bit too crisp, but I put them in a container and in the fridge overnight and they softened up quite nicely.

The last class for Wilton Cake Decorating Course 1 focused on “The Wilton Rose.” There were also a couple other things, but for the most part it was the rose. Again, I needed to provide a cake. This time, I went for Devil’s Food Cake from scratch. I also used regular vanilla buttercream icing to ice the cake before I took it to class.

I used 2 batches of icing to do the general icing layer. Two. Batches. Each batch has 1 cup of fat (shortening, butter, or a combination of the two) and 1 pound of confectioners’ sugar. It’s approximately 3 cups. So, even without any decorations, the thing had 2 pounds of sugar on it or 6 cups of icing. :o I managed to get a pretty thick layer of icing in-between the layers, too, thanks so piping it out via a disposable decorating bag.

For the rose, I chose to do icing that only had shortening in it for fat and butter flavor to, well, add butter flavor. Previously, I’d used half shortening and half butter, which causes some consistency issues since butter will soften up much more than shortening at room temperature. I’d had problems with icing consistency throughout the class and I still had them. This time? My icing was too stiff! You’re supposed to have stiff consistency icing for the rose but this was too stiff. But, I forged on and made some not too shabby roses. Although, since the edges weren’t smooth, I suppose they look a little more like carnations. ;)

I also put some leaves in and man…I hated leaves before and I still hate them. They will not, for the life of me, have a nice tip and half the time they split as I’m piping them out. Boo!

But, now I have a fully decorated cake. Since I used only shortening in the last batch of icing, the icing was very white. So, I put a shell border on the cake and it contrasts pretty nicely with the cream color of the original layer, which has butter on it. You can also see some of the butter has seeped into the cake circle I used. ;)