We made a cheesecake!

It is a rare thing when you sit down with another person and instantly know that you are both thinking the same thing at the same moment.  From the smile on our faces, the sparkle in our eyes, to our upraised shoulders, my husband and I were completely in sync when the astonished words finally tumbled out of our mouths at the same time: “We made a cheesecake!”

 

The last few years we have celebrated Valentine’s Day (usually a few days late) by cooking a meal that we have never made before.  This year we decided to experiment with Chicken Parmesan and make a simple cheesecake for dessert.   We considered making a fancy cheesecake like some of the ones served at the Cheesecake Factory, but decided we should start with a basic one before getting too fancy.  I found Our Best Cheesecake Recipe online and found the same recipe listed on other websites all using “best” and “favorite” in the title and hoped that this description would be true in our own concocting.

As I looked for recipes, I wasn’t sure whether I should go with one that called for sour cream or strictly stay with cream cheese.  There are so many different styles of basic cheesecake recipes that it was hard to pick.  (A future post may discuss the differences between New York Style, Manhattan Style, and any other styles I come across, but for now I will focus on the recipe I chose.)  I read somewhere that the sour cream adds a tartness that pairs well with the creaminess of the cream cheese.  For some reason this idea wasn’t appealing mentally; however, every time I thought about the tartness my salivary glands reacted and eventually changed my mind.  Who knew that the salivary gland would have this much power!?  It may be mind over matter, but salivary secretions over mind? Weird.

At any rate, I decided to use the sour cream.  I mixed the cream cheese batter, while the husband took on the graham cracker crust.  He did an excellent job crushing the graham crackers into a near dust and then mixing them with melted butter.  Together, we pushed the crumbs into a pie plate (I don’t own a spring form pan, so I improvised with the pie plate) and created the crust.  We then poured the drippy batter into the crust and baked it.  Because I didn’t have the right kind of pan, there was more batter than would fit into the crust so we poured it into 4 ramekins to make mini crust-less cheesecakes. After baking for an hour, cooling for another hour, the husband transferred them all to the refrigerator to cool overnight.

In the morning, I cheated and tasted one of the mini cheesecakes for quality control purposes (wink, wink).  What kind of wife would I be if I gave the husband food that tasted bad?  It was, of course, for purely selfless reasons that I had to taste the cheesecake. The cheesecake looked and even felt heavy, so I was suspicious that it would taste that way too.  It didn’t taste heavy though.  Instead, it tasted rich with creamy vanilla flavors and just enough tartness to make it interesting. My taste test locked in my decision to make a cherry pie sauce.

And so after we finished eating our not so impressive Chicken Parmesan, we delved into our cheesecake with much enthusiasm. We each tasted a creamy bite with warm cherry almond sauce, looked into each others’ eyes, and with much love and excitement somehow muttered “We made a cheesecake!” before quickly filling our spoons with a much bigger portion and eating it too.

Pound Cake

Pound cake may be one of the most delicious cakes that I have ever eaten.  What does it taste like? Heaven?  You can practically hear the angels singing as that first buttery, sweetness hits your taste buds.  If the cake is warm, those angels may stop in the middle of their chorus to appreciate their own glory just as  you may stop in mid bite to appreciate the moistness and smoothness that is found in few other cakes. This cake in its flavor and texture somehow make me think of hospitality – a delightful and charming comfort that welcomes me to stay and eat for as long as I like.

Where does pound cake come from?  Contrary to my imagination it isn’t actually heaven.  In my reality, it comes from my mother-in-law’s kitchen, which is appropriate because she and her kitchen embody that sense of hospitality, that same delightful and charming comfort that her cake does.  Before the recipe made it to my mother-in-law’s kitchen, the cake was created and concocted somewhere in England during the 1700’s.  For more information about the history of the pound cake, take a look at Cooks Info.

But why does “pound” separate it from all of the other cakes out there?  And no, it has nothing to do with any pounds you might gain if you really do stay and eat as long as you like.  It actually has to do with the measurement of ingredients. The people of the 1700’s were not as lucky as we are today; many of them couldn’t read let alone write down a recipe and so “pound” cake referred to the pound of butter, the pound of flour, the pound of sugar, and the pound of eggs that went into the cake.  “Pound” cake was really a way to remember the recipe.  You can imagine that this recipe would create a very large cake that would feed a lot of people.  No wonder it tastes like hospitality.

It's also no wonder that I had never really enjoyed pound cake until recently.  Over the years the recipe has changed, yet the name has stayed the same.  Some have added ingredients like leavening agents, fruit, and even sour cream have been added.  The amounts have also been reduced so that we can have smaller cakes.  Even though a pound of each ingredient is no longer used, eggs and butter are still important ingredients that make the cake what it is.  I'm so glad that I'm no longer allergic to them! 

I will conclude with a conversation that my husband and I had over the last piece of pound cake that my mother-in-law so kindly brought to us:

Me:  Want to share the last piece of pound cake?

Husband: No, that’s your piece.  I ate mine last night.

Me: But I love you so much that I’m willing to share!

Husband: It’s up to you.  How about you eat what you want and I will eat the rest?

I gave him exactly one bite.  Although it was a big bite, I guess hospitality (generosity?) is not a side effect of eating the cake.  I think I should eat more of it to really find out.

A Yellow Cake and Chocolate Frosting Attempt

OK, so I’m not Martha Stewart. I decided to make a cake for my dad's birthday. I asked him what his favorite kind of cake was and he responded with "ummmm…. " My sister, the Cake/Pie Goddess, quickly jumped in with “Don’t you like carrot cake?”  If my mind really had gears, I would have felt them whirring – carrots, I’d have to shred them, does it have pineapple in it, should I make it gluten free, what about the frosting – cream cheese, buttercream?  Obviously, I’ve never made a carrot cake before and obviously for some unknown reason I’m afraid to make a carrot cake.  But as my dad does, he saved me from my own thoughts and said, “I like yellow cake with chocolate frosting!”

That I felt I could do.  So for my dad’s birthday I concocted my very first yellow cake and my very first chocolate frosting.  Of course, I had eaten both of these things before and even made the cake from a boxed cake mix, but I had never made my own from scratch.

The Cake/Pie Goddess was out of town, so I was on my own for this creation.  I found two great recipes on Martha Stewart’s website for yellow cake.  One was for Yellow Butter Cake and the other for a Simple Layer Cake.  I decided to go with the simple one for a few reasons: 1. Because it said it was simple and I figured I could handle that and 2. It called for less butter and less eggs, which I figured was a good way to lower fat and cholesterol intake.  And, yes, I know I probably just ruined cake for everyone.

Making the cake was actually pretty easy, especially using an electric mixer. I’m rather new to the electric mixer. Before I got married I never had one and just mixed everything by hand. What a work out! Now that I know how easy it is to mix things together with the electric mixer, I may be baking more!  As you probably know by now, I can’t follow a recipe.  I just can’t.  That’s all there is to it.  I substituted whole milk with almond/coconut milk.

All was well until the two 9 inch cakes were baked and cooled.  Getting them out of the pan was a real challenge.  I didn’t use parchment paper to line the pans as the recipe instructed.  (Maybe I should learn to follow a recipe after all!) Instead, I greased and floured the bottoms of the pans.  Oops!  The cakes stuck to the bottom of the pans and I had to reconstruct them by pushing the cake pieces together into giant cake blobs. (No pictures for this because it was way too messy!)

Enter Chocolate Frosting.  I made a half recipe of Martha Stewart’s Ultimate Chocolate Frosting, again using almond/coconut milk instead of real milk.  This frosting was surprisingly good!  I don’t usually like a strong chocolate flavor, but this recipe has changed my mind.  It had just the right combination of chocolate and vanilla to cause a perfect chocolate frosting addiction.  Not only was it delicious, but it became the perfect edible binding to hold the yellow cake together. 

The cake itself definitely needed the frosting's flavor.  It was missing something that I can't quite place.  Maybe it needed the extra butter and eggs in the other recipe or maybe I should have doubled the vanilla.  I'm not sure, so I guess I will have to make more cake to figure it out!

Martha Stewart, I am not.  My cake looked terrible, but it actually tasted great!  It was made with love, creativity, and happy birthday wishes for my dad.  Happy Birthday, Dad!  

The Case of the White Velvet Cake

I can never do anything the easy way.  Buy a cake from the bakery?  While I love them, where is the challenge in that? Buy a cake mix from the store?  Oh no, that would be too easy.  Instead, for the husband’s birthday, I decided to make him a “White Velvet Cake” from scratch.  I showed him the picture of the cake next to the recipe before I started baking and he agreed whole heartedly in favor of this being his birthday cake.

No pressure, right?  Keep in mind that I’m still learning to use ingredients like butter, eggs, and white chocolate, especially in baked goods.  Butter is a completely different consistency than butter-flavored Crisco.  It has to be slightly melted and softened before it can be added to the flour mixture of the cake batter.  Oh, how I miss Crisco!  You could just dump it right in the bowl without any preparation.  If only they would make a soy free version!  And then there are the eggs – the saving grace for any cake – they help the cake rise and give it a moist fluffiness that no substitute can quite create.  I’m glad that I’m no longer allergic to these simple miracles, so that I can experiment with cake making.  Finally, the white chocolate, which is another ingredient I’ve grown to love.  For the cake, it had to be melted, slightly cooled, and then slowly added to the batter.  This was a challenge because it couldn’t get too hard in the cooling stage or it wouldn’t mix with the batter.  Somehow the timing worked out though.

I only came across one real snag when mixing the ingredients: I realized that I didn’t have any sour cream. I never buy sour cream because I typically still buy groceries that are dairy free unless there is something special I’m planning to make as in the case of the White Velvet Cake.  Somehow I forgot, so when I came upon the line in the recipe to add it to the batter, I panicked.  Should I skip it altogether?  Is there a substitute that might work?  I had some applesauce, but would that make it taste like apples?  All of these questions quickly raced through my head before I decided to Google “sour cream substitutes” and discovered that yogurt is the best substitute.  Too bad I didn’t have any of that either.  I also found that buttermilk and butter could be used.  And no, I didn’t have any buttermilk, but I normally substitute almond milk mixed with apple cider vinegar for this ingredient, so I thought I would give it a try.  Unfortunately, I forgot to melt/soften the butter and it didn’t mix well with the liquid.  My husband gave it his best shot as I mixed the other ingredients, but it was not meant to be.  So…I ended up using most of the liquid and some of the butter that mixed in just so the cake wouldn’t be too dry.  At this point I wished that I had bought that cake mix at the store!

Long story short: the cake looked beautiful and golden in the pans until I removed them from the pans (and yes, I did grease and flour them).  Parts of the cake stuck, which made frosting the cake a little more difficult as cake mixed in with the icing.  But the frosting  actually made the cake.  Without the icing on top of the cake, it wouldn’t have been worth eating.  I made a White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting as the original recipe recommended.  It was delicious and made me change my negative thoughts toward cream cheese frosting.  Add white chocolate and it is a masterpiece!

The cake itself was dry and didn’t really taste much different than a dry white or even yellow cake.  Where was the white chocolate taste when I went to all of that effort adding it to the batter?  Maybe the lack of sour cream messed up the consistency?  (I looked at comments on Pinterest and noticed that other people complained of the dryness too and I’m pretty sure they didn’t make up a sour cream substitute!) 

The case of the cake will continue as I search for better recipes that are moist and fluffy.  Maybe I should keep it simple and stick to white or yellow cake recipes.  No, you’re right; that would be too easy.

 

My Weekend of Cake

My birthday was over a month ago and this post never made it up, so here it is now!  My birthday was on a Monday, so I chose to celebrate the entire weekend with cake.  My very wise mother once said that you get to subtract a year from your age for each celebration.  She forgot to mention that this number is then added to your weight!

But it was worth it!  Saturday my husband surprised with a  beautiful cake from ABC Bakery.  It was decorated in my favorite colors, reminiscent of wedding cake – red buttercream roses, turquoise butterflies, green leaves, and sparkly sugar.  It was almost too pretty to eat.  Almost!

It tasted even better than it looked.  White moist cake with a raspberry jelly filling, topped with an airy vanilla buttercream frosting.  If I could be a flavor I would want to be a piece of this cake.  It was sweet, fluffy, and the raspberry filling was deep enough to be intriguing and only made me want more.  Normally my willpower is strong enough to say no to more than one piece of cake, but not if it is from ABC.

Or if my sister made it.  On Sunday my sister (a/k/a the pie goddess in some circles and more recently the cake goddess) treated me with her Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake.  This cake looked crazy, but in a fantastic way that made me want to dig into it – forget a plate and fork, just dig in!  Somehow I managed to suppress my inner two year old and managed to avoid chocolate all over my face.  The cake was covered in blue, purple, and black sprinkles on top of white buttercream frosting.  And the inside? Two layers of chocolate devil’s food cake that sandwiched chocolate buttercream frosting.

The only words spoken (if they can be considered words at all) from my dad, my husband, me, and even the pie goddess herself:

                Ooooooo.

                Ahhhhhh.

                Yummmm.

The cake completely abducted our ability to form words; that’s how delicious it was.  We took turns mumbling.  And after my second slice, I think my teeth ached from the sweetness, but not unpleasantly – more like a craving for more of the crazy, fantastic, yumminess.

Thanks to everyone who helped me celebrate my weekend with cake!  I’m already looking forward to next year!

A Delicious Disaster

I made a cake – not just any cake, but my first real cake; a cake with eggs. I’ve never been good at making cakes; they never seem to rise with my multitude of egg substitutes.  But this cake did!  I used (sort of!) a recipe for Vanilla Cake with Italian Meringue Frosting.

All was going well.  I baked the two layers of the cake one day ahead of eating time (the husband’s birthday.)  They baked perfectly evenly and with a little coaxing they even came out of the pan without too much damage.  On the big day, I was feeling pretty confident on my cooking efforts: the cakes looked good, I stopped at the store for some lemon curd for the filling, and expertly ordered a pizza.  All that was left?  The frosting; the meringue of the meringue cake.

I mixed the sugar and water in a saucepan as instructed, heated it until it boiled, and then stirred until the sugar dissolved.  I turned down the heat to let it do its thing as it thickened into syrup.  Meanwhile, I separated 3 eggs and beat the egg whites with cream of tartar.  I beat and beat, waiting for the “moderate” peaks to form.  The syrup was only supposed to heat for 4 minutes, but that quickly turned to 7 because of my unresponsive eggs.  After 10 minutes, I gave up on the eggs and slowly added the syrup to the mixture while still beating with my electric mixer.  The mixer seemed to jam.  I figured it was just a minor setback and pulled the beaters out.  I thought maybe I imagined it and put them back in the mix and started beating again.  Talk about “egg on my face” and my coffee pot, on the floor, and all over the counter too!

The “syrup” solidified as it hit the egg mix and created a candy around the beaters.  The mixer jammed and sent my would be frosting all around the kitchen.

As I stared at the mess, trying to think of a solution, my phone rang.  “Hey, I’m on my way home!” said the birthday boy cheerfully.  “OK!” I said equally cheerful.  Now what?

1.       Clean up the evidence of the disaster.

2.       Find the ingredients for fall back frosting (a/k/a buttercream frosting).

3.       Concoct butter free buttercream frosting.

Why butter free you might ask?  I don’t know how to cook with butter after so many years of being allergic to it and I threw away all of the Crisco because of my current soy allergy.  That left…Spectrum (the palm oil butter substitute and my frosting saving grace) added to my favorite flavoring – vanilla.  Voila!  Frosting!

I spread the store bought lemon curd on the bottom layer and then gently placed the top layer over it. Then I did my best to frost the cake.  Of course, bits of cake crumbled and spread throughout the icing, adding to the already brown tint from the vanilla.  But hey, it was frosting and it was a cake.

My disaster turned out to be delicious: a light fluffy cake, with a sweet yet sour lemon flavor in the center, topped off with an extra sweet vanilla frosting.  Lessons learned?

1.       Never use old cream of tartar

2.       Never boil syrup for too long

3.       Never take yourself too seriously

4.       Be flexible enough to stray from the roadmap of th recipe

5.       Disasters can still be delicious

Celebrate with Cake

Have you ever noticed that just about every milestone we come to we celebrate with cake?  Weddings, birthdays, and even other holidays all marked with the surgery confection we call cake.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining!  I’ll make up a milestone if it means there will be cake.  Luckily, I don’t have to as I have a lot to celebrate!

Wedding Cake   

My husband and I just celebrated our first anniversary.  You know what that means? We got to eat the cake top!  (Oh yeah, and we love each other.)  That cake top dominated our freezer for an entire year, but more than that it dominated our thoughts and the desire for that yummy butter cream frosting on our taste buds.  OK, so it didn’t dominate our entire lives or anything that dramatic, but when we reached our first year milestone we were ready to celebrate – with cake.

For those of you who have frozen your cake tops, you probably now that you are supposed to wrap the cake.  I didn’t know this.  Give me a break – I’ve never been married before!  So…the cake sat in a box free to breathe in all the other freezer foods.  You can image what our cake top tasted like – freezer burned!  The frosting is my favorite part of cake, so you know it had to be pretty bad when I scraped it off and refused to eat it.

The cake itself even a year after its creation was still as divine as it was on our wedding day – a taste of heaven and a reminder of all the happy moments from our special day.  White wedding cake – firm yet spongy, sweet yet not overpowering – with a whipped raspberry filling that complimented that cake perfectly. 

Birthday Cake 

My mom just celebrated a very big birthday.  The world has been lucky to have her for 60 years!  We obviously needed a special cake to celebrate this very special lady, a special bakery bought German Chocolate cake.  German Chocolate is her favorite and I can see why.  I’m not usually a fan of chocolate cake, but German Chocolate seems to be sweeter than other chocolate and the cake itself seems to be lighter. But it isn’t the cake that makes this dessert so special, it’s the icing: chunky coconut blended with milk, sugar, and pecans. One taste made me completely understand the phrase “icing on the cake” and instantly reaffirmed my belief that the frosting really is the best part of cake.

This cake was so delicious, that it not only excited my sense of taste but my curiosity as well.  I couldn’t just leave it at “oh, that tastes good.”  That’s not really my style.  No, I decided to do a bit of research on German Chocolate cake and discovered that the chocolate isn’t from Germany as I expected!  Instead, it’s named after a person with the last name German who was hired by Baker’s chocolate to develop a sweet chocolate in the 1852, hence the name German Chocolate.  The cake wasn’t made popular until the 1950’s when recipes started appearing in magazines and newspapers.  For more information, check Wikipedia.

Thank you, Mom, for letting us share in your birthday celebration and thank you for sharing your favorite cake with us! My favorite is still the white cake with butter cream frosting, but German Chocolate is a close second.

Celebrate with Cake

I tasted cake before I discovered that I’m not allergic to milk and eggs – a splurge here and there. Again, what celebration isn’t complete without cake?  But now I can enjoy it without having to worry about any reactions later on.  I can “have my cake and eat it too” – enjoy my dessert and the celebration.  I’m not sure why we celebrate with cake, but I’m sure glad that we do.