A Montage of Photographs Featuring the Splendid Coconut Cake My Friend Baked for a Co-workers Baby Shower...

Baker: Abigail



Recipe: Ina Garten



Mom-to-be: Sarah



Baby: Girl

An Amazing "Nightmare Before Christmas" Wedding Cake

From Let Them Eat Cake

(By the way, I've no idea how this became wedding cake week at PoC, but there you have it!)

Blue Wedding Cake

While flipping through some old notebooks recently, I came across a sketch/illustration I did ages ago.

Thought I'd post it just because.

D.I.Y. Wedding Cake Advice

over at The Kitchen.

Tuesday on Cake Thursday: June 12th

For this past Cake Thursday, I made a lemon and almond cake served with fresh raspberry sauce on the side.

Literally and figuratively...



The recipe I used came from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess. As I've mentioned before, I have hit and miss luck with her recipes, yet I still dig in to her books on occasion.

This time around, the cake was...really good. But I'm not sure if it came out quite as I expected. For all her lovely language, I sometimes wish for and occasional dollop of concrete description.

In this case, the recipe calls for ground almonds. That's all well and good but—how finely ground?

The cake that came out of my oven was thick with bits and pieces of nut that made for a toothsome texture, but not quite the "damp, dense" texture she mentions in the book.

I'm curious if grinding the almonds finer would create not only the texture she describes, but would make it more cake-like (rather than torte-like).



In the end, this is just curiosity speaking as it did taste really lovely. She "mumured raspberries" and I followed suit with the fresh raspberry sauce (2 pints fresh berries broken down with sugar and lemon) that proved to be a bright and lively compliment.

Damp Lemon and Almond Cake
Oven: 350 degrees
Buttered 8-inch Springform pan (I used a 9-inch and started checking after 45 minutes)

Cream 1 cup unsalted room temperature butter with 3/4 cup sugar until almost white. Beat in 4 large eggs, 1 at a time, alternating with 1/3 cup AP flour (egg/flour/egg/flour/egg/flour/egg). Once all is incorporated, gently stir in 1 1/3 cup ground almonds, 1/2 tsp. almond extract and the grated zest and juice of 2 lemons.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for around 50 minutes (that's how long it took me, but in the recipe she notes that it has taken at times 70 minutes) until the cake test comes back clean.

Let cool in the pan for a few minutes, then invert onto a rack and let cool completely. The cake does very well after a few days in plastic wrap.

Such Humble Beginnings...

for such a remarkable outcome.

(Thanks to my dear friend Jason for sharing the link)

Lemon + Nuts = An Addiction

Or perhaps it's just the weather.

I keep baking nutty lemon cakes and I'm not sure why. Early last week I baked this wonderful Lemon Walnut Sour Cream Pound Cake from The Sweet Melissa Baking Book...



and, as you'll see tomorrow, the Cake Thursday cake was also lemon-heavy. And rather nut-heavy as well.

Nuts for Lemon? Nuts and Lemon? I have no idea. But my, do they taste good.

Butternut Squash and Sara Lee

The Butternut Squash Cake from Greenpoint Coffeehouse is damn good.

Though I'd never tried squash-based cake, given how well carrots and beets work, I figured such a pleasant squash couldn't be all that bad as a cake-base. But it turned out to be ten times better than I expected—super moist and not too sweet with a faint whisper of the squash's virgin flavor. Yet, as tasty as the cake was, the frosting...oh, the frosting.



When I was a kid, my mom often bought freezer-case Sara Lee Carrot Cake. I generally prefer (and always have) cake over frosting, but the glorious icing on that Sara Lee cake was pure bliss to my little taste buds. Given that, it's a little odd that it's been nearly two decades since I've had one of those cakes—so long in fact that, even though I've seen it often in freezer cases over the years, I had forgotten all about the taste I loved so much.

But memory works in mysterious ways, and after just one bite of the GPCH cake, it all came flooding back. I've made plenty of the standard heart-attack cream cheese frosting—sticks of butter, blocks of cream cheese, a snow storm of powdered sugar and a splash of vanilla—which is all well and good, but that Sara Lee frosting...well, it's hard to beat.

So, thank you to the baker who made the Greenpoint Coffeehouse cake for reminding me of what my perfect cream cheese icing should taste like. Now, I just need to find the recipe...

A Fictional Conversation Between a Wal-Mart Bakery Employee and a Woman I'll Call Jeanine

"Hello, Wal-Mart bakery department...I'd like to order a good-bye cake...yes...oh, she loves chocolate, maybe a little too much if you aske...yes, a chocolate sheet cake...how about flowers...nice bright col...she wears a lot of orange...ok....yes, it should say Best Wishes Suzanne. Underneath that, We Will Miss You...ok...Friday at 12:30. Thanks."

via: buzzfeed.com

Celebrate Good Times, Come On

A few weeks ago we had a big backyard party to celebrate both my boyfriend’s birthday as well as his sister’s (they are one day and some years apart).

After some back and forth, I decided to make a fudgy sour cream chocolate cake frosted with pillowy swiss meringue. The final result was an incredible, fork scraping the plate cake. It was wonderfully textured, softly mouth-filling, and subtle in the best way, and reminded me of my favorite childhood snack cake: the Suzy Q.

The cake recipe comes from the wonderful book How to Make an American Layer Cake from The Cook’s Illustrated Library (It’s out of print, but you can pick up a copy for a few dollars on Amazon).

Sour Cream-Fudge Layer Cake

Grease and flour two 9” round cake pans (I used butter, they recommend shortening) and turn the oven to 350.

In a small bowl, mix 1 cup nonalkalinized cocoa powder with 2 tsp. instant espresso. Stir in 1 cup of boiling water. Mix until smooth and let cool to room temperature, then stir in 2 tsp. vanilla and ½ cup sour cream.

In another bowl, whisk 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour with 3/4 tsp. baking soda and 1/2 tsp. salt. Set aside.

Cream 2 sticks of unsalted, room temperature butter with 1 3/4 cups white sugar, beating until very fluffy and almost white in color (3-5 minutes). Add the first of 2 large room-temperature eggs, beat for one full minute, then add the other egg and beat for an additional minute.

With mixer on low, alternate adding the drys with the cocoa-based blend in three parts. Mix until batter takes on a lovely satin-like quality, then pour into your prepared pans and bake for 23 to 30 minutes or until your cake test comes back clean or with just a few crumbs.

Let cool on rack for 10 minutes, then remove the layers from the pans and let cool un-armoured.

The Swiss Meringue I used was such a basic recipe that I can not even recall where I found it. That said, any good baking book should have a recipe for this wonderfully versatile frosting. I slathered some between the two layers, then covered the whole lot with a thick, shiny white coat...



and the candles...



I wish I had a photo of the lit cake or a slice to leave you with, but circumstances prevented those shots from happening. I do have one photo which strikes me as an ocean of icing, so I'll say goodbye with a trip to a sugary sea...

Glorious Chocolate Cakes

and a milk-worthy slice from



The Chocolate Room.

Tuesday on Cake Thursday: May 29th

For the inaugural Cake Thursday, I chose to bake the recipe for Honey Cake in the back of Maira Kalman's amazing book The Principles of Uncertainty.



The beginning:



The middle:



It's a quirky recipe for a cake that's way more spice than honey...



and it. is. brilliant. Incredibly moist and fragrant—



I was honestly shocked at how good it was. Not that I didn't trust Maira's recipe...rather it was unlike any recipe I had baked from before. The amount of spice alone was enough for me to raise an eyebrow. Add to that no salt and the call to dissolve baking soda in water and stir it in last...well, let's just say curiosity led me to steal a slice before taking it to the office.



In full disclosure, I did make a few changes/substitutions (which I have noted in green), but other than that....



(click on image to enlarge)

I could say that the first Cake Thursday—and the first cake—was a hit, but I think in this case a picture is worth more than a thousand words...

The end: