April 19th, 2011

Tres Leche Cake

One of my coworkers had a birthday today. He's orginally from Mexico, and since I've been on an ethnic/cultural kick for my birthday cake themes, I thought I'd try my hand at Tres Leches.

There is a reason people rave about this cake. I was a little wary of the overly sweet soaked sponge cake, but after the first bite I was won over. This is probably the most amazing cake ever created. Dentists everywhere must curse its existence.

I snagged by recipe from my recently purchased cookbook, My Sweet Mexico by Fanny XXXX. This is where I got the recipe for the milk fudge last month.

April 1st, 2011

Coconut Rice Pudding

I'm mildly obsessed with coconut, and my friends will be the first to tell you this. My friend was joking that if I was on an episode of Hoarders, they'd open my kitchen cabinet and find 2 cases of coconut milk. That I could fund my own coconut milk can drive. Ha...ha..huh.

Well, whatever. I love coconut and I'm not afraid to admit it. You've seen images of the Coconut Cake and Coconut Cream Cupcakes I made last month. Well, I delved into virgin territory last week and made: Coconut Rice Pudding.

There were a lot of recipes to choose from, and I didn't like half of them. I also only had brown rice, which no one seemed to recommend. But that's life and I thought it would be mildly healthier anyway. A loosely based this recipe from the Rice Pudding Recipe featured on the blog Slice of Feist. I'm not entirely sure what went wrong with it. Texturally it worked out well - but spice-wise, it was lack luster. I needed something more. I nearly doubled all of the spices and flavors in the first place. Okay, it was unintentional. I halved the recipe, halved the rice and such, but forgot to half the spices. But even then, it was still sort of flavorless and mild. I wanted more--something. The coconut flavor - I even added coconut extract -- wasn't particularly strong either. Maybe if I'd had raisins, it would have been better or at least added an additional flavor in the mix.

I think that in the future, I will be able to enhance this recipe more to my taste. But in the first go around, it only look cute and was only mildly comforting comfort food.

February 28th, 2011

Orange Olive Oil Cake

Orange Olive Oil Cake

This recipe is actually from Smitten Kitten, and was originally made with blood oranges. I feel the blood oranges are far too precious to bake with, so I substituted naval oranges. In the end, I believe this was the correct choice. The bread itself is incredibly sweet, so a sweet citrus like blood orange would only make it nauseatingly sweet in my opinion. The naval orange had a delicious tart flavor that complimented the cake. And it was chalk-full of orange chunks.

Big hit at the coffee machine at work. Gone within an hour. If you notice, I only bake for my coworkers. It's too dangerous to keep this kind of stuff in my house.

February 16th, 2011

Coconut Cream Cupcakes

Coconut cupcakes Part 2 starts here. I frosted the tops of the cupcakes with the same coconut frosting, then rolled them in toasted sweetened coconut flakes.

As you can tell, this was like semi-homemade since I used the box cake and bought sweetened coconut flakes. My previous coconut cake from two weeks ago was far more advanced with every last thing from scratch - coconut cracking fresh.

But these were a lot more moist than all of my from-scratch cakes, so I fell back on the box after several disappointing cake textures. Everyone loved these and they disappeared almost immediately. Sweet decadence. I can still smell the sugar coconut in the air.

This was a request by the way, from a coconut loving birthday coworker.

February 15th, 2011

Filling the coconut cupcakes

These are my half-complete coconut cupcakes. It's a basic yellow vanilla cake mix. Instead of water, I used coconut water. I added pudding mix for moisture. I added coconut extract for amazing flavor.

I then made a coconut frosting from scratch - which was a little runnier than I wanted, but still fluffy, sweet and most important coconutty. It was infused with coconut extract also, along with coconut milk.

I filled up a pastry bag with the frosting, buried the end into each cupcake and squeezed until the tops bulged and threatened to split.

That was Part 1.

February 7th, 2011

Mango Mousse and Chocolate-Espresso Cake

The second birthday of the week inspired a new level of cake-making. My very first mousse cake. Mango mousse at that. I've been in love with the mango mousse from the Whole Foods bakery for several years now. It's technically made off-site at a local bakery, but I forget the precise name.

In any case, I went looking for a simple mango cake recipe. Then I realized that I didn't have the beautiful acetate wraps to hole it in place. I did some shopping over the weekend, but couldn't find anything locally. I considered using a clear cellophane used to wrap books or gift baskets, but decided against it in the end. Instead, I went in search of a recipe that was a little sturdier - and fell upon this Mango Mousse and Chocolate-Espresso Cake at the blog Desserts For Breakfasts. The sturdy bottom layer made from a rich mocha topped by a fluffy mango mousse and finished with a sweet espresso jelly, all wrapped and held together in a thin bark of bittersweet chocolate.

The original recipe is designed for 6 small cakes, but I made a 9 inch single cake instead. I was able to bake the cake part in a single pan as a result rather than deal with a baking tray. This made the thin chocolate wrap harder to handle in the end (an extra set of hands would be a lot easier), but I got it on and it turned out brilliantly.

The only bad part of the cake, was the cake-part itself - the chocolate cake was really dense. Again, a density issue with these from-scratch cakes. I was told that it was texturally appealing when eaten in combination with the mango mousse and espresso jelly, however. In the future, I will cut out the cake part altogether though and just make a solid mousse-and-jelly cake. Or do a layered mousse cake with maybe passion fruit, mango and vanilla cream. Yum.

February 6th, 2011

Espresso syrup

I spent the day making more cake. Another multilayered, multi-step baked good that took hours to complete.

This particular shot is the espresso syrup that I used to between the chocolate cake layer and the mango mousse. It was probably the easier part to make out of the entire cake.

February 4th, 2011

Coconut Cream Layer Cake

I have been on a baking binge this winter and the birthdays of coworkers has finally given me a safe outlet. I was chatting with one of the technicians about the project manager who only wears Hawaiian shirts (he's from Hawaii), and mentioned that he was wearing a new shirt today. Last year we came up with this awesome plan to have everyone wear Hawaiian shirts for the day in honor of his birthday. So when the PM walked into the lab, the technician naturally remembered to ask when his birthday was. "Tomorrow."

Woah. We had no time! So we immediately send out an e-mail to everyone to get them in on the last-minute Hawaiian shirt-wearing theme. Then began to plan our Hawaiian-themed party. Really this just involved someone maybe picking up some leis and me agreeing to make a cake. So I went with coconut, since I love coconut.

I chose Alton Brown's Coconut Cake by way of this really delicious baking blog. It would be one of my first traditional cakes from scratch. What I mean by traditional is that I really love cake mix with added pudding. I will jazz up the mix, go to down on shapes and frosting - but the base cake is never my own creation when it comes to fluffy, cakey cake. This is kind of a daunting recipe. Four layers, filling, 7-minute frosting, and 5 different types of coconut products.

I managed to get the four layers baked, filling, frosted and topped, following instructions to the t, but mine really wasn't quite as lovely looking as the recipe blog photos. I used pre-separated egg whites for the batter, which immediately fell after I reached stiff peaks. So they weren't as fluffy as they were supposed to be. this resulted in a more dense, drier cake. However, the coconut water-soak saved the day to make it ultra moist. The 7-minute frosting was also less fluffy than it was supposed to be, which I'm sure was a temperature thing that I didn't notice. You can tell that its sort of glassy.

Overall everyone loved the cake - its richly sweet with every kind of coconut you can think of - coconut cream, coconut water, coconut milk, coconut extract, coconut shavings. I ended up cracking a coconut on my front stoop in like 20 degree weather with a hammer because I having issues cracking indoors. A man was walking by with his Pomeranian who really, really wanted some coconut. It was an odd scene between us.

This image was captured last minute on the travel tray right before we cut into it. Poor lighting. I would like a prettier cake holder with a 9-inch base rather than 8 inch, but this old Tupperware one that my mom gave me has the most secure handle/locking mechanism on the market. The new ones are all really sketch.