I Take the Cake

My Plum Kuchen was a success at church coffee hour.

Gone in 60 seconds!

I actually never got to try it. This violates Julia Child's rule, "Taste the food before you serve it." However I did everything I could to help it along. I got to church a half hour early, went into the empty hall and set up my cake for best results. I picked out a fine purple platter for it, then unfastened the Springform pan, took out the cake and placed it carefully on the platter. Springform are the greatest. They protect your cake in transit and then you can take the cake out of the pan and it is perfect.

Bundt cake pans are overrated. Springform pans are underrated!

Anyway. After placing my cake on the platter I took a knife and cut it carefully into squares. Then, using a spatula, I pushed the pieces carefully together so they would not dry out while Mass was in progress. Then I sprinkled the cake with powdered sugar. Then I sugared it again.

Then I placed the cake at a place on the banquet table where I thought it would be sure to go over big. You want to put it close enough to the center so people have not yet filled up their whole plates and they have room for it.

Finally I photographed the cake. That is it up above!

Because I have made cakes two weeks in a row, I now have momentum going. Next week I will have to make a third cake. What will it be? I am leaning toward a Polish lemon cheesecake. However my brother George might turn up with some other fruit from the Clinton Bailey Market. That drove my choice for the last two weeks and might do so again.

It is almost apple season. That will be fun!

So many coffee hour ideas.

So little time!

Domestic goddess, that's me!

 

I am back to baking. Today I made Rhubarb Cornmeal Cake out of Nigella Lawson's "How To Be a Domestic Goddess." I had some rhubarb Lizzie had given me and I had stuck in the freezer. I thought I had used all the rhubarb but no. And so ...

Rhubarb Cornmeal Cake!

It called for a pound of rhubarb which, I do not think I had that much. But so what. A cake is a cake, the rhubarb is sprinkled in it. 

Today was a scrambled day where I worked too much on other things and could not keep tabs on my baking. I got bread dough mixed up in the morning and then put it in a pan and forgot to bake it. Yikes! It was ballooned all over the place. I might have to make pizza with it.

I made a second loaf of bread in the bread machine and left it up to the machine to bake it. Normally I take it out and bake it in a loaf pan but today I cannot be trusted.

The Rhubarb Cornmeal Cake, too, screwed up at every turn. I mixed everything up in separate bowls the way Nigella instructed. Eggs and vanilla (OK, I used rum) in one bowl. Flour etc. in another. Rhubarb and sugar in another. Then another bowl with the sugar and butter.

However I put them together in the wrong sequence. I just could not get it together today, I just could not.

Things like this though tend to turn out OK, in my very extensive experience. As the cake baked in its springform pan, this incredible aroma filled the kitchen. I mean it was insane. How could this smell so good?

It got a little too brown owing to that I do believe I used a 10-inch springform pan, not a 9-inch. I have a 9-inch springform but for some reason I am incapable of using it, I go for the 10-inch. I think that's what happened. Who knows. But anyway, a browned cake is OK. It is golden brown.

The cake is downstairs cooling now. It still smells amazing.

This one person has the recipe here. A number of blogs have spilled the beans on this recipe but I like this one I just linked to because she does not use too many pictures. I hate it when you go looking for a recipe and all you can find is pictures, pictures, pictures. People take too many pictures and they do not want to let even one go to waste.

Oh well, I should not judge them harshly.

Not everyone can be a domestic goddess like me!

Hamming it up with Betty Crocker

Yesterday I made my first Chiffon Cake, for church coffee hour. It was the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake out of the classic Betty Crocker Guide to Easy Entertaining!

It is a rule I have for coffee hour: Every week I make at least one thing that is new. It keeps things exciting.

Above is a picture of the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake going into the oven. And here it is coming out:

Beautiful as the cake is, I could not help laughing about the chapter the recipe came from. It was going piously to church, yet it came from the chapter titled Stag Parties.

How many cookbooks these days will you find with a chapter called Stag Parties?

It is funny because sex is everywhere, much more than it was several decades ago, but oh, you cannot mention stag parties. But anyway.

"Most men have a weakness for chocolate cake," Betty Crocker writes in this cookbook.

And sure enough!

The guys at St. Anthony's, they loved this cake! Well, the ladies did, too. And the children. But I am not about to contradict Betty Crocker. She was right!

You know me, I am always behind, and I was making the frosting at literally the last minute -- i.e., this morning before church. So I made a frosting that Betty recommended called Chocolate Fluff. You took two cups of heavy cream and whipped it up with a cup of powdered sugar and a half cup of cocoa. The result was amazing. Like ice cream. Addictive. Amazing.

You had to sit the cake in the fridge until it was time to serve it. And so during Mass the cake sat in the fridge in the St. Anthony's social hall. It tastes good cold, I discovered. There is something very satisfying about this sweet, chilled cake.

But next time I will make the other icing Betty recommended.

It is White Mountain Icing!

My Facebook friend Janice is a professional pastry chef and she was urging me to try it. She said it was old school but it will be so worth it! Plus, what I love about it is you get to use -- shhhhh -- corn syrup.

It is just a little more complicated than I had time for this morning. In addition I should get a candy thermometer. Why does someone like me not have a candy thermometer? Yet I do not.

The cake shared the buffet with another St. Anthony's novelty -- ham.

We got a couple of hams at Albrecht Discount and heated them up in the oven! This was another first for me. We were doing this because it was the Octave of Easter. Lou, one of the gentlemen of St. Anthony's, had to help me.

We hit a snag when I realized there were no roasting pans in the kitchen. What to do? What to do??? But miraculously in a cupboard we found a beat-up cookie sheet. Wait, it was my cookie sheet! I had been wondering what had happened to it. Here it was. And right when and where I needed it!

And so we roasted the hams -- in foil pans, set on the cookie sheet. Lou said they would be done by the time we got out of Mass and sure enough.

Lou being a prince among men also made the glaze in a saucepan he found God knows where.

I slipped out during the sermon to apply the glaze to the ham.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, there was much rejoicing.

Ham. Is there anything better?

And 99 cents a pound at Aldi.

We will be doing this again!

Bless me, Father, for I have cooked

Today for church coffee hour I went back to a cookbook I've had for years and had completely forgotten about. It is this cookbook from Cape May's Mainstay Inn. It is called, "Breakfast At Nine, Tea At Four."

Why, you cute cookbook!

I made Banana Crunch Coffee Cake, p. 104. While it was baking I turned a few pages and found Orange Kuchen. I had an orange. I had everything I needed. So I made that too.

Here is a funny thing. Both the Banana Crunch cake took about three times as much sugar and butter as the Orange Kuchen. Both baked in the same pan, the 9 by 13, one of my favorite pans, I must point out.

Well, even though the banana cake took enough sugar and butter -- and coconut, too! -- to sink a ship, I made it as written. Give the people what they want! Several times I have skimped and tried to make things healthy and in that case nobody eats it.

Both cakes were a success. My friend Oscar complimented me on the orange cake. Oscar comes from some South American or Latin American country I can never remember, but he is an authority on baking and he loves the taste of orange peel. As do I! It is most zesty.

Another way in which I was a winner, I made a crock pot of white beans and greens, the greens being the collards from my Porter Farms CSA, which is another story for another day. One of the gentlemen complimented me on that! He and his wife were on some kind of plant-based diet and he could not believe his luck.

Long story short, here I am kicking back and listening to Harry Connick Jr. and basking in my greatness. Oh! There is one more thing.

Lizzie and I both managed to make it to Mass in a timely fashion! The Kyrie was just beginning which was not bad for us. Last week, even better, we made it in time for the Asperges. What are we doing right? We were trying to figure that out because it would be great if this trend continued.

I think with me, it was because I made two big coffee cakes instead of any number of smaller ones. That plus I made Amaretto Coffee Wreath ...

... which was huge too. Howard took that picture of it on its parchment paper! I threw these treats together yesterday easily, among doing other things. Howard helped me carry them out to the car this morning so that was something else. He usually helps me but this morning he did the lion's share of it. Not as many pans, and a lot of help! That made a difference.

Now if I could only bring this kind of productivity to the rest of my life.

Onward and upward!

The Bundt baker

Last week I made my second Bundt cake for church. The first, a week before that, was a big breakthrough.

I know, Bundt cakes are not supposed to be a huge challenge. However, years ago, I had attempted a Bundt cake, and it had stuck to the pan. I did something with the cake, I made a bread pudding. But I never forgot the outrage.

And I never attempted another Bundt cake. Until just recently. This is the beauty of participating in our church coffee hour, at St. Anthony of Padua Church. I like to make a game out of it and try to do new things.

I made a Whiskey Squash Cake out of a Reader's Digest cookbook I have. It was a recipe I had had my eye on for some time. Whiskey, got to love it. I almost subbed rum because Rum Squash Cake sounds good too, and I am sure it would work. But I had to go with Whiskey.

I baked the cake in my Kugelhopf pan which previously I had used only for yeast breads. Hmmm. Consulting Wikipedia just now I see that Kugelhopf -- well, they say Gugelhopf -- is the original Bundt pan. Nordicware copyrighted the name Bundt in the 1950s and '60s.

Whatever my pan is called, let me tell you, I oiled and floured that pan half to death.

That cake came out with its hands up!

I sugared it up and took this picture.

So, success!!! Drunk on my success I made the cake pictured at the top of this post. It is a Banana Cream Cake. Oh, excuse me, Banana Creme. It has sour cream in it, is the reason for the name.

I used my other Bundt pan for that. Remember that pan? You can make cakes in it from all over the world.

I took the cake to coffee hour. Gone in 60 seconds!!

I never had a bite!

But I can assume it was good. And so forward I will go as the Leonard Pennario of Bundt cake bakers.

Fire up that oven!