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.

On my short trip to Wonderland.

A few days ago, my friend Meg and I decided to try Sweetiepie, a new restaurant in the West Village with an Alice in Wonderland-meets-Versailles decor and waiters decked out in white buttondowns and black bowties. In an interview, the owner called it "a place where children can take their parents out to."

Indeed, the giant gold bird cages surrounding cafe tables, the bright mural in the back room and the kid-sized door within the regular bathroom door (opened with a big gold key) are very whimsical-child friendly. Wealthy, whimsical-child friendly ($17 salads!?!).

As not-at-all-wealthy-but-kind-of-whimsical-adults, we decided to forge ahead—it was really the desserts we were after...





Had we a few more stomachs and a lot more money, we'd have gone right for the aptly named Sweetiepig, a giant glass bowl filled with five kinds of ice cream, cake, berries, bananas, chocolate sauce, sprinkles, and whipped cream.

Alas, we ended up going with a trio of Micro Cakes and a Mint Chocolate Hot Fudge Sundae...



The sundae was pretty good.

The cakes, frosted and flavored chocolate, lemon, and orange, were...ok.



When I asked the waiter if they were frosted in buttercream, he gave me a confused look and said, "yes, there is butter." Each was floating on a small pool of correspondingly flavoured syrup which soaked the little layers in an overwhelming way. Which fits, I suppose, as the entire place is overwhelming—mirrors everywhere, batty old woman coming in and out (sometimes for no reason at all), four different waiters to our one little table, and an unexpected mix of music, including Duran Duran, playing overhead.

Will we go back? Probably not—too expensive for what you get.

That said, if you have, or can pretend to be, a wealthy seven-year-old, then by all means, it's worth a visit. If I was a kid, I'd want to live there—who cares what the cakes taste like, look how damn cute they are.

A homemade Coconut Snowball

...from Sage General Store in Long Island City, Queens.

Cake Thursday: March 12th

From the book, Sky High.



I also baked a Sour Cream Walnut Streusel Bundt Cake for a Monday morning treat:

The Most Beautiful Bundt Pan in the World

Makes the most beautiful cake...







The Heritage Bundt Pan from William Sonoma

Cake Thursday: February 26th

The invite:



And the outcome:



The lovely hostess photograph inspired me to cut the cake into small squares and serve them as "hors d'ovueres".



The cake was, in one word, splendid. Moist and deeply chocolaty. And, it is the easiest cake I've ever baked.

The recipe for Aunt Frannie's Crazy Cake does not come from my Aunt Frannie (nor do I have an Aunt Frannie), but rather from this fantastic vintage cake book I picked up recently:



It is kind of crazy, which you'll see when you read the recipe below. I had my doubts, but it worked beautifully, and will definitely make many future visits to my oven.