Tarting It Up

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

Since we seem to be averaging a post about once a month these days, I thought I'd catch everyone up on where we're at. Is everyone out there sitting very comfortably? Then I'll begin.

J. endured final finals at the end of April and into May and after a couple of weeks of true free time, she graduated law school on May 20. We were all there and were very proud. Now the grind continues, at least until the last week of July when she sits for the Virginia bar. Um, just looking at the tomes of books and manuals she's been issued for the bar review class, I AM VERY AFRAID.

So, in an effort to lift her spirits, I set about making a requested Chocolate Chip Banana Bread. "It's one with both buttermilk and sour cream in it. On AllRecipes. It's got a lot of great reviews." With such a recommendation, how could I refuse. But finding this well-reviewed recipe on AllRecipes proved a little more difficult. You'll see what I mean if you search AllRecipes for the following string: chocolate banana buttermilk sour cream and look for something which has been reviewed A LOT.

Anyways, as usual I got all of my ingredients together. Assemble the following:

1/2 c. butter
2 eggs
1/3 c. sour cream
1/3 c. buttermilk
(All of the above should be at room temperature. The ingredients mix together if they're at the same temperature.)
1 1/2 c. sugar
1 tbsp. vanilla (we always use our own)
2 1/2 c. cake flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 c. semisweet chocolate chips (I used mini-morsels in this recipe, since it's all I had)

AND THE STAR OF THE SHOW...

Cheesecake

Cheesecakes scare me. There's something about that gently cooked egginess that offers up so many opportunities for failure. The cake can crack, the cake can be unpleasantly eggily undercooked, an inadequate springform pan can cause your batter to run out all over the place. We've found a fairly foolproof recipe that mitigates the uglifiying effects of a cracked surface.

A cheesecake needs ol' reliable: a graham cracker crust. Here's enough to cover a 9 inch springform pan:

1 1/2 c. graham cracker crumbs
1 T sugar
6 T melted unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine all ingredients and press into a 9 inch springform pan. This graham cracker crust is an empty slate, anything could go with it. Cinnamon, sure. Nutmeg? Of course. Cardamom? Hmm...I wonder if it could work. Press the crumbs as far up the sides as you like, probably no more than an inch upwards. Bake for 8 minutes, cool to room temperature.

Bittersweet Orange Cake

Bundt cakes. I've baked my share lately. They're easy to bake; I'm comfortable with them. Let's face it, though, their flavor rarely rocks the boat. Bundt just sits there. It doesn't want to hurt or offend anyone.

A work colleague said she had a great orange bundt cake recipe for me that included whole oranges: rind and all. It's from Judy Rosenberg's Rosie's All-Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed No Holds-Barred Baking Book. My GOD this cake includes orange pith. Orange pith isn't polite bundt cake flavor. It's a bitter barroom brawling flavor.

I couldn't come up with another "b" word for flavor. Ever seen Broadcast News? "A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!"

Gingerbread Cake

It's a clove and ginger time of the year. It's gingerbread time. I think of gingerbread as that "I'm eating this out of boredom," cardboardy, vaguely "spicy" tasting stuff of Swiss Colony houses. This recipe, the Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread from Epicurious is anything but that. It's spicy, moist, and includes Guiness Stout! And it uses the flavor of the moment: cardamom.

Pumpkin Apple Bread

Operation Catoctin apples continues.  Hoping to recover from my recent apple pie debacle, I made an old favorite of mine: pumpkin apple bread from The Gourmet Cookbook.

It's a quickbread.  Don't roll your eyes thinking, "meh...pedestrian."  It's weird: I've taken many an item (almost everything I bake) to feed my coworkers, and this FAR AND AWAY is the most popular item I take in.  It's like crack.  Or catnip.  Cracknip. 

Chocolate Cake: The Search

Since J. is out of town this weekend and doesn't much care for chocolate cake, I decided to begin my quest for the perfect, WOW, chocolate recipe.  The best chocolate cake by far that I have ever made is this one, and yes, it involves a box mix. HOW VERY SANDRA LEE, I KNOW.  Making things from boxed mix now feels karmically wrong while taking a pastry course.

I came across this chocolate pound cake recipe on Chowhound's Home Cooking discussion board which looked like it had promise, so I tried it out tonight.  All I can say is Chocolate Raspberry Bread - rinse - repeat.  What is it about chocolate cakes/breads that I cannot master?  Or what is with recipes where the finished product is a bland, ho-hum eating experience?  Is my quest for perfection really such a challenge?  Too much to ask?  It shouldn't be.

I have a couple of comments about this recipe.  First, I would not call this a pound cake, merely a cake.  Strike 1.  While I realize that the flavor may improve over the next day or so, I had a piece and it was not rich and delicious and it gave me heartburn.  Strike 2.  No fragrance while baking.  Strike 3.  I don't want to take away from this individual's enjoyment of this recipe, but this was not the WOW experience I was looking for and was very disappointing.  I went out on a limb again and made a recipe from a source that was questionable and whose quality was unverifiable.  NEVER AGAIN.

The chocolate fake:

Up tomorrow, I will continue my quest by trying out the Chef's personal chocolate cake recipe which he spent 8 years developing.  Let's see what that tastes like.

Epilogue. I had another piece of my cake this morning and it tasted a lot better. Maybe I'm just not a fan of coffee/espresso powder in chocolate cakes, who knows. I am still on my search.

Zucchini Bread

Late August through mid-September in Mom's garden can be a scary time. Fruits and vegetables grow gargantuan in number and volume. Just look at the caveman-club zucchini:

Chocolate-Raspberry Bread

Look at how it mocks me.  Doesn't it look decadent and moist and chocolatey?  DOESN'T IT??

It's not.  Not at all.

Strawberry Shortcake

We made the most gargantuan strawberry shortcake imaginable last week.  Seriously, it was of a scale that would put size-queen restaurants (Cheesecake Factory and Maggiano's, I'm peeking at you) to shame.  And the bigness was unintentional, too. 

We were working with the ever-reliable Magnolia Bakery cookbook.  If you follow the instructions, you create 3 nine-inch pans of shortcake.  Ooopsie, we only had 2 pans, so we made two shortcakes.  We cut each shortcake round in half to create, yes, four shortcake rounds.  Whipped up a ridiculous volume of whipped cream to match our four rounds (think in terms of quarts, not cups).

And we problem-solved - the cookbook calls for whipped cream sweetened with powdered sugar, but we used regular granulated sugar and stabilized the whipped cream with gelatin.  All of the whipped cream would mush out without stabilization.  So layer, whipped cream, strawberries, and repeat...many times. Look at how it turned out, and trust me, this is but a fraction of its hugeness:

French Buttercream

For the past two weeks in class, we made genoise and buttercream.  I'm pleased with the flavor of the end result...but my writing had some issues...

This writing started off as "Happy Birthday," but my ganache broke off at the first "a" of happy birthday.  I didn't want to remove the ganache, so...um...brainstorming...

"Hu..."
"Hurricane..?"  too inappropriate.
Uh..."Hurry home!"  (you know, for all of those times you send a decorated cake to someone you miss?) Ok, semi-lame, but it would work in a pinch.  Except it looks like "Humy Home".  And "I miss you" doesn't look quite right either.  So remember, tell all of your loved ones:

Humy home; I miso you.