Escape from Deer Mountain

For a variety of reasons, there has been a dearth of words here at PoC. Though I've stayed true to the pictures, the title of last Thursday's post was, well, accurate for many reasons.

I may be at a loss for words, but I'm definitely not at a loss for cake. I've made a few interesting ones over the past few weeks...

First up is a Cake Thursday cake from the 7th.



Edna Lewis's Busy Day Cake (via Orangette) + Blueberry Sauce.



I sent this invitation out to my co-workers:

Today’s cake is the Busy-Day Cake. It’s rather simple, not too sweet, and fragrant with nutmeg. The recipe comes by way of Edna Lewis and her wonderful cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking. In it, she notes:

Busy-day cake was never iced, it was always cut into squares and served warm, often with fresh fruit or berries left over from canning. The delicious flavor of fresh-cooked fruit with the plain cake was just to our taste and it was also refreshing with newly churned, chilled buttermilk or cold morning’s milk.

If I could give you that experience, I would in a heartbeat. Sadly, the only part I can replicate is that the cake is not iced. So, in my best attempt at improvising with what I’ve got, it will be cut into wedges, not squares, served at room temperature, not warm (there’s always the microwave), and topped with a blueberry sauce made from (really good) frozen berries.

Despite my passion for DIY, I do not can my own fruit, churn buttermilk or milk cows at dawn. Yet.



Both the invitation and the cake were a rousing success.

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Second, I made Mini-Cheesecakes from Nick Malgieri's recipe in The Modern Baker...



for a dinner on the 16th. FYI, it looks a little...airy...due to the fact that this one was made with Splenda to accommodate a diabetic dinner guest.

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The last cake was one I baked last Friday in order to try out a recent acquisition—a Wilton Sports Ball Pan. Now, I'm pretty confident that I will never use it to make a sports ball, but a sphere shaped cake? Endless possibilities.

That said, I chose this recipe for Double Chocolate Cake that I've wanted to try for ages. After all this time, all these cakes, I simply should have known from one read-through that there was no way that recipe would work in that pan. I should have known, oh me of little attention paid, that the cake would collapse into clumps of moist, chocolate failu...

Not quite so fast! A little time in a bowl in the fridge, spackle-thick frosting, and train miniatures I just happen to have laying around and you get:



Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Deer Mountain Cake.

It may look a little funny, but it tasted spectacular.