» cake

{recipe} Red Wine Coffee Cake

Karen — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:00:21 +0000

After a month of putting up only photos, I decided I couldn’t go another day without putting up a recipe. I’m wracked with guilt over my inattention to creating useful contributions to the blogosphere. OK, not really. But here’s a recipe anyway!

This recipe combines two delicious things: wine and cake! This cake is moist and flavorful, with a tender crumb and rich flavor- thanks in part to the “secret” ingredient: red wine in both the cake batter and the glaze.

Red Wine Coffee Cake
Makes 1 bundt cake

Ingredients:
•   1/2 cup butter, melted
•   3/4 cup sugar
•   1/2 cup brown sugar, loosely packed
•   2 eggs
•   1 teaspoon cinnamon
•   1 teaspoon allspice
•   1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
•   2 1/4 cups flour
•   large pinch of salt
•   3/4 cup red wine

Method:
•   Preheat oven to 350. Grease a bundt or tube pan liberally with spray, butter, or vegetable oil.
•   Using a mixer, combine melted butter and sugars and mix until well blended.
•   Add eggs and beat for about 3-5 minutes, until mixture is fluffy.
•   Combine orange zest, cinnamon, allspice, baking powder, flour, and salt in a bowl. Add about 1/3 of the dry ingredients and 1/3 of the wine and mix gently. Repeat twice until all ingredients are added and thoroughly mixed together.
•   Spoon the batter into prepared pan and spread to even out. Bake for 30-40 minutes. Cake is done when a toothpick in the center comes out clean.
•   Let cool in the pan for about 15 minutes. Flip onto baking rack and let cool to room temperature.

For the glaze:
Combine 1/2 cup red wine and 2 cups sifted powdered sugar in a small saucepan with a whisk over medium heat. Bring to a boil then turn off the heat and continue whisking until there are no lumps. Let cool 15 minutes then pour or spoon over the cake.

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{recipe redux} Pear Ginger Upside Down Cake

Karen — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:28:39 +0000

A few weeks ago I posted about this Banana Caramel Upside Down Cake. I made it again recently, but instead of bananas I upside downed pears sliced on a mandoline, put some orange zest in the caramel, and used whole wheat pastry flour instead of white flour.

Divine! Although I did dump it out and realize it wasn’t done yet, so I had to re-upside-down it, cook it some more, then re-un-upside-down it. It worked surprisingly well in the end although there was a period of severe swearing that involved liquid hot caramel magma all over the kitchen and my pants, but the cake looked good after all that so no big deal in the end.

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{recipe} Caramel-y Banana Upside-Down Cake

Karen — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:20:52 +0000

This is a pretty easy cake that was inspired by a delicious, gooey pear-ginger cake we used to make at Rose Pistola. I had no recollection of the recipe so I made a few attempts and came up with this excellent facsimile of the original cake. Of course, it doesn’t have to be made with bananas, you can use another kind of tasty fruit like peaches, mangoes, pears, plums, or apples. You can get creative with adding citrus zest, toasted coconut, or chopped nuts into the batter as well.

So the deal is that you make a caramel sauce, put it in a pan, put fruit in the pan, cake batter on top, and then when it’s hot from the oven you have to flip it over right away or else the caramel part hardens and you can’t flip it out. One time I made two of these- one in a square pan with mangoes, and one in a round pan with bananas. I flipped the banana one out OK, but the square pan made it really hard to flip. I solicited my big sister’s help and before you knew it, there were sticky mangoes and cake on the floor and I was trying to pin the blame all on my sister despite her loud protestations. But it was TOTALLY her fault.

Caramel-y Banana Upside-Down Cake

Ingredients:

3 bananas, cut in slices (I like them sliced lengthwise for the look of it, but you can slice them however you like)
about 3/4 cup sugar (more if you want more caramel action)
1/2 cup (1 cube) butter
1 tsp vanilla or a splash of bourbon
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp powdered ginger or 1 tsp fresh grated ginger
1 tsp allspice
big pinch salt
1 egg
3/4 cup milk

Method:

Preheat the oven to 375.
Arrange cut fruit in the bottom of a pie plate.
Combine 3/4 cup (or more) sugar with equal parts water in a pan. Put over high heat and wait until the sugar turns amber colored. When it does, turn off heat and add 3 Tablespoons of the butter and the vanilla (or bourbon) and swirl the pan to melt and combine. Immediately pour the mixture over the fruit.
In a mixer, combine the flour, 1/2 cup sugar, baking powder, spices, and salt (If you like more spice, feel free to double the spice amounts.)
Cut up the remaining 5 tablespoons butter into small pieces and carefully mix into the dry ingredients, on low speed. Don’t get the butter all incorporated or the cake will be chewy, not tender. Leave the butter in smallish pieces (around the size of peas.)
Stop the mixer and put the egg and milk in. Mix just until incorporated, still being careful about keeping the butter in discernible pieces.
Spread the dough over the fruit/caramel action. Cook for about 20-25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.
When it comes out, flip it over within about 5 minutes or it will stick. It should come out super easily. Put a plate on top of the pan, grip it with potholders and flip it quickly.
Don’t ask your sister to help you or it might fall on the floor.

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{something for the kiddos} Easy Car Cake

Karen — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:00:06 +0000

My nephew turned 5 recently and swore he wanted a circuit board cake. At the 11th hour he decided he wanted a car cake instead. Online searches for car cakes yielded a lot of lameness and ugly-ass cakes, so I winged it. Wung it? Whatever. I figured something out, and was pretty pleased when it actually, totally looked like a car.

I know the icing isn’t perfect here- that’s the beauty of making something for a person who is only 5. Perfection is not what they’re after. They are after copious amounts of frosting and candy on a cake that’s shaped like something other than a cake, which makes them pretty easy to please. I think the biggest compliment came when, after admiring the cake for several minutes, my nephew turned to my Dad and with saucer eyes and his jaw hanging open, and said- “GRAMPA- do you realize this CAR is EATABLE?!?!?”

Eatable indeed! I made this somewhat nasty hot pink strawberry cake in a 9×13 pan and then cut a third of it off, lengthwise. Then I cut the long skinny piece I had in half perpendicular. Like this:

I flipped the 2 pieces 90 degrees and set them next to each other on top of the remaining large cake and stuck them on with frosting. They were kind of slope-y which actually made it look more like a car. I wanted really sturdy, fluffy frosting for this, so I used a fluffy meringue frosting (my mom made it so I’m not sure how- something about like this) and tinted it blue to attach the cake pieces and cover the whole thing in gobs and gobs of icing. I made a little bit of white royal icing for the windows, doors, and writing. Tic-tacs for lights and blinkers, oreos for wheels, sour belts for racing stripes and windshield wipers, some weird white tootsie rolls for the bumpers, and voila! A car that any 5-year-old would love.

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{recipe} Apple Upside-Down Cake

Karen — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:35:06 +0000

My mom calls this an apple cake-pie, but I don’t know why. She has been making it since I was a kid. It’s delicious! The hardest part is peeling and cutting the apples, which I hate. I mean, really hate it. Like, if you want to come over and peel and cut the apples I will make you this cake and we can each eat half!

Apple Upside-Down Cake

Ingredients:

3 apples, peeled, cored, and sliced
2 T soft butter
1/3 cup brown sugar
big pinch of cinnamon
1 c flour
2/3 c sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup shortening
1 egg
1/2 cup milk (I actually didn’t have enough milk, so I used a little milk and the rest plain yogurt, with no discernible difference.)

Method:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Spread butter into bottom and sides of a pie plate. Sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon.
Layer the sliced apples in the pan. You can lay the apples in the pan all pretty and layered so that when you flip it out it looks professional, OR you can just throw them in which is a lot quicker.
Put all of the rest of the ingredients in a bowl, and mix them in an electric mixer for about 2 minutes.
Pour batter over apples and bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes.
Remove from oven and cool for 5 minutes. Run a knife around the side of the plate, and carefully dump over onto the serving plate.
Serve hot or at room temp with ice cream or whipped cream.

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{off the blogs} Salt-Kissed Buttermilk Cake

Karen — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:32:13 +0000

I made Heidi’s Salt-Kissed Buttermilk Cake from 101Cookbooks last week, and want to encourage you to try it! The cake came out incredibly moist and delicious, and was easy to make.

I made it as a dessert, which was OK, but I think it would be an absolute knock-out for brunch. Next time I’m going to cover the entire top with berries. I used big smooshy blackberries and wished I had one in every bite!

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