Baking for Good

I recently signed up for something I am very excited about: Dessert Corps.

Dessert Corps is the name for a program in my neighborhood that uses volunteer chefs/bakers to provide a homemade dessert for the soup kitchen. Each volunteer who signs up makes enough to feed 10 hungry neighbors, and the results are served up after dinner on Wednesday's.

Last week I dropped off my first donation, an Apple Upside Down Cake:





If you happen to live in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg area of Brooklyn and are interested in Dessert Corps, check out this blog.

If you don't, ask around at your local soup kitchens or shelters...maybe even start up a Dessert Corps of your own!

Cake Thursday: April 16th. The Victoria Sandwich

The custom of Afternoon Tea began in the mid-19th century with Anna Russell, the Duchess of Bedford and one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting.

As with many things, what the royal court did, everyone soon did as well, and Afternoon Tea swept Britain with a fervor.

Victoria was very fond of this respite, as well as the simple cake that was served along with other assorted sweets, dainty bread and butter sandwiches, and, of course, pots of steaming-hot tea.

That cake, two layers of basic yellow cake sandwiching a layer of preserve, became known as the Victoria Sandwich.*



Modern interpretations of the cake include an additional layer of vanilla buttercream along with the preserves, but in the case of my cake, I wanted to add another afternoon tea staple to the mix—clotted cream. My Victoria Sandwich: Two layers of yellow cake with homemade Strawberry preserves and clotted cream.








*The cake is also know by the name Victoria Sponge when the layers themselves are traditional sponge cake.

The Classic Lemon Pound Cake

that I baked for Easter brunch.

Double Chocolate Cake

baked for my friend's, friend's birthday. Delicious recipe courtesy Ina Garten via Food and Wine.

Cake Thursday , April 2nd: Every cloud has a silver lining,

and (almost) every fallen cake can be salvaged.

Case in point:



which was supposed to be a very simple, straight-forward French Yogurt Cake with Lemon (recipe courtesy of Orangette).

Though I was sure the toothpick came out clean, after letting it cool for a spell in the pan, I removed the cake to a rack and watched the middle not just sink, but collapse. Clumps of heavenly-scented warm lemon cake fell onto the table top below.

With neither the time nor the lemons to make another, I decided to forge ahead. Once the mostly complete cake was cool, I trimmed some of the edge off to fill the hole in the center, applied the glaze and the icing from the Orangette recipe, then covered the lot of it in an obscene, swirly mound of my favorite cake fix-it: whipped cream...



I figured with a catchy name and curls of freshly-zest lemon, I couldn't go wrong.



It probably didn't hurt that the cake tasted amazing as well. Tart and sweet and, with all of that cream, light as a...

well, you can probably guess.