Perfect Party Cake

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie selection was picked by Carol of mix, mix… stir, stir. Visit her blog for the complete recipe. She picked Dorie’s Perfect Party Cake. The Perfect Party Cake is a lovely lemon-scented white cake with a snow white buttercream. Sandwiched between the cake layers is the buttercream and raspberry jam. The picture in the cookbook really is perfect. Hopefully my cake would turn out somewhat close to the picture. In making the cake, I realized that this cake was quite different from what I was accustomed to making.

The cake is very different from most other cakes that I have made. It only uses egg whites, which is not that unusual. Normally when you make a cake with egg whites, you beat them until they are stiff and fold in the flour. You don’t beat the egg whites for this cake; you just combine them with milk and alternate adding the liquid with the fry ingredients. Very different! The cake came together perfectly well, so I was hopeful. I know that some of the other TWD bloggers said that their cake didn’t rise very much. I have to say that was true for my cake as well. It didn’t rise as much as I had hoped, but it did rise enough.

The other difference was the buttercream icing. I’m used to making a very simple buttercream, which is little more that powdered sugar, butter, and milk. This is a meringue buttercream, which uses egg whites, granulated sugar, and three sticks of butter! This was so unusual for me, but I know there are many types of buttercream, so it’s good to have practice making something different. You beat the egg whites and sugar over a water bath until it is warm. I didn’t know how important this step was, so I followed the recipe exactly, heating the mixture for three minutes. You then whip the mixture and then after you have whipped it for a while you start adding the butter. It takes a while to add the three sticks of butter, but it came together surprisingly easy. After you add the butter you add lemon juice and vanilla. Then you beat the icing for about 10 minutes more, just for good measure. It had a nice texture and tasted good, so I considered it a successful buttercream.

Since my cake didn’t rise all that much, I decided not to split the layers. Dorie’s cake is 4 layers but I just had 2. I also used strained cherry preserves instead of raspberry. My preserves basically soaked into the cake, so you can hardly see it at all in the photo. It was also really hard to ice on top of the preserves, and I was glad I only had to do this on one layer and not three. Even though my cake didn’t rise very much, it had a wonderful texture. It was very spongy, which I really liked. The lemon flavor in the cake and in the icing was a little too strong for my taste, which is odd since I really like lemon. I think had I split the layers and used more raspberry (or cherry) preserves, that would have balanced the strong lemon flavor. Overall, I really liked this cake and I will definitely think about making it when I need a special cake to celebrate a birthday at work.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 250-252.

Chip ‘n’ Chunk Cookies

School’s out for summer! Well, sort of. I work at a college and I only work when classes are in session. I do work this summer but a lot fewer hours, so I have a whole list of different cookies that I am planning to bake. I do hope to clean out the pantry a bit this summer, so hopefully I will be able to find interesting recipes to use up some of those ingredients.

I finished up my last project the other day and I came home and celebrated by making cookies. I found these cookies and they sounded really interesting. My husband loves chocolate chip cookies but I don’t usually want to make those. These are a variation of chocolate chip cookies, with extra cinnamon chips and coconut added in. There are more chunks to these cookies than actual dough, which I like a lot. I hate it when chocolate chip cookies are flat. These are nice and chunky.

I really, really like these. They are a little more special than your standard cookie. The cinnamon chips add a lot. Cinnamon chips may be hard to find, but I stocked up at Christmas, since that seems to be about the only time I can find them in the store. You can buy them online through King Arthur Flour if you can’ find them at the store. They have a bit of a butterscotch/caramel flavor, which was most pronounced when they were fresh out of the oven. The flavors mellowed a bit overnight, but they are still really good. I think the ingredients would be fairly interchangeable, so if you are interested in cleaning out your pantry, give these cookies a try!

½ cup butter

¾ cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons vanilla

½ teaspoon salt

1 egg

1-1/4 cups flour

¾ cup cinnamon chip

1 cup chocolate chunks

1-1/2 cups chopped pecans

½ cup toasted coconut

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line baking sheets with silicone baking mats.

In a large mixer bowl, cream together butter, sugar, baking soda, vanilla, and salt until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, and then stir in the flour, chips, chocolate, nuts, and coconut.

Shape the dough into balls, about the size of a walnut and place them on the baking sheets. Leave about 2 inches between each cookie. Flatten the dough balls until about ½ inch thick.

Bake for 12-15 minutes, until light golden brown. Remove from the baking sheet and cool completely on a wire rack.

Recipe from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

Honey Apple Pie

I visited a farmers market recently and all I ended up getting were some apples. Normally the farmers markets have a good selection of produce, but it was still early in the season and we had a pretty cool spring here in Washington State, so a lot of produce was later than expected. Apples are almost always available, since they are such a big crop here in the state. I picked up a bunch of apples, a couple of different varieties, and figured I could make something.

My husband and I both really like honey, and he came across this recipe for honey apple pie. I had a frozen pie shell in the freezer so I ended up using that. If you’d like to make your own pastry, you can. I was just trying to use up some ingredients before they got too old. The original recipe called for puff pastry, more of a free-form pie. We had a couple of different types of honey, and I think I ended up using blackberry honey. It sounds fairly exotic, but it just has a subtly different flavor.

I really liked the honey in the pie. It was a nice addition, you could taste the honey but it wasn’t the primary flavor. I think that the apple filling had too much cinnamon, so I would definitely reduce that, maybe to two teaspoons. I love the crumb topping, which isn’t all that shocking since one of my favorite desserts is apple crisp. This in many ways is apple crisp in a pie shell (with some added honey), which I like a lot more than a double crust apple pie. If you’re looking for a slightly different take on apple pie, this is a great recipe to try.

Pastry for a 9 inch one crust pie

8 to 9 apples, peeled, cored, and sliced 1/4-inch thick

2 Tbsp all-purpose flour

1 Tbsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground nutmeg

¼ cup butter, melted and cooled to room temperature

½ cup honey

1 cup all-purpose flour

¼ cup granulated sugar

½ cup packed brown sugar

½ tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground nutmeg

½ tsp salt

½ cup cold butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a 9 inch pie pan with pastry. Set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Toss sliced apples in flour mixture. Drizzle with melted margarine or butter, and then honey. Toss again. Let rest while you make the topping.

Whisk together flour, white sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Place flour mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Add the cold margarine or butter cubes. Pulse until mixture resembles coarse bread crumbs.

Toss the apple mixture again, and then put the apple mixture into the unbaked pastry shell. Sprinkle with the streusel topping mixture. Bake about 1 hour or until apples are tender. Cover topping with foil the last ten minutes of baking if it is browning too quickly. Serve warm.

Recipe adapted from http://homecooking.about.com/od/dessertrecipes/r/blpie44.htm

Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was selected by Andrea of Andrea In The Kitchen Andrea In The Kitchen. She picked the Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise. For the complete recipe, visit her blog. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with a dacquoise. I’m typing this up in Word and it doesn’t recognize the word either. A dacquoise is a cake made with layers of nut meringue; you can fill the layers with buttercream or whipped cream. I’ve never made a dacquoise before, so I was quite excited to make this recipe.

This dacquoise has coconut and ground almonds in the meringue, and then is filled with a white chocolate ganache. To top it all off, you roast some fresh pineapple and throw that into the mix. Hard to go wrong with all of these great ingredients! Some people don’t like white chocolate, but I do. Some of the other Tuesdays with Dorie bakers substituted buttercream or whipped cream for the ganache.

This is not something that you can make quickly! Luckily, I don’t have to work this week so I had an entire day to make this. It doesn’t take a whole day, but fairly close to it. You make the meringue first. You have to trace the desired shape on parchment and then spread the meringue to the right size. I halved the recipe, so I made 6” squares. You then have to bake the meringues for three hours. Yes, three hours. This is the perfect thing to make if you are at home and have all sorts of other things to do. So I put it in the oven to bake and was able to get a lot of other things done around the house. Luckily it wasn’t very warm today; otherwise I wouldn’t have been too thrilled to have the oven on for three hours.

As soon as I got the meringues into the oven, I made the white chocolate ganache, which is just white chocolate and heavy cream. Since this had to chill for about three hours, I got it in the refrigerator right away and it was basically chilled when the meringues came out of the oven. The pineapple roasted very quickly, so that didn’t add any extra time. Assembly was fairly easy. You have to whip the ganache before assembling the dacquoise, and I think I overbeat it somewhat, but it worked ok. I did have a little problem getting the meringues off of the parchment. I’ve never had anything stick to parchment before, very strange!

This was really good! It was light and refreshing. It was very sweet, so if I made it again I think I would use less of the white chocolate ganache. The meringue layers have a bit of a crunch, and the pineapple and coconut flavors come through nicely. I wasn’t really sure if I would like the meringue, and I think it has a good flavor and texture. This is such an interesting dessert and so different from anything that I had ever made. Thanks Andrea for picking such a great recipe!

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 293-295