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I have made a Red Velvet once, as a cake, and I made it a year ago. It felt like a million years ago. I was not exactly proud of what I made last year because as far as I remember, I ruined the cake, broke it in half while torting and just frosted whatever is left of it. I promised myself back then that I won't make it again unless I can make it properly. And I forgot about it. After a year though, as I was browsing through my recipes, I thought of making it again (plus there is my handwritting on the printed recipe that says "try again after a year"). So I tried it again, though not because I am already worthy, but because those are the only ingredients that I have left in my kitchen. Hehe. I normally stack up on eggs and butter but this weekend I only have 2 eggs and a stick of butter. I am going home soon, that's why. I am starting to clear up my kitchen and finish all that's in the fridge. I only have a couple of cakes to go for Christmas and that's it, I'm heading home.I made Sarah's Red Velvet recipe as cupcakes because of the available ingredients that I have. I can only make half the recipe, which is good enough for me, Manny and a few friends in the the office who are my regular tasters. Making it this time was a breeze after all the baking that I had the past year. I was worried though because after mixing the batter, it was not bloody red. It was red, but not red-red. I said red thrice in a sentence, and I used it in the last three sentences that I wrote! I then put it in the oven for around 18 minutes and I was prepared to see it fall off the liners. I tend to have cupcakes fall off the liners the first time I bake a recipe, and I make the necessary adjustments when I make it the next time. I was so happy that it stuck on the liners even after cooling it on the rack. As I had expected, the cupcakes turned out as dull red, and not bright. The recipe called for liquid coloring and since I did not have it at hand, I used gel paste. I guess I needed to use more, I did not know how to substitute 4 tablespoons of liquid coloring to gel.
The not-so-red velvet cupcakes turned out to be very moist and delicious! Of course I am not surprised, Sarah's recipes are the best. I was supposed to frost it with Cream Cheese Frosting, but then again, I did not have butter anymore so I settled for the French Buttercream that I have frozen. It was a lovely combination though. And as always, I made Manny and a few officemates' morning happy. :)
I had been in search for the perfect caramel cake for the longest time. I was looking for a cake similar to a childhood caramel cake that I remember, very light and soft cake with caramel frosting that is not too sweet but yet very much a caramel. After a few attempts using different recipes, I think I finally got it.I found the perfect recipe of the caramel cake that I had been looking for. I used Sarah Phillips' Orange Sponge Cake recipe (without the Orange this time), and replaced it with Caramel Syrup. I'm totally in love with her sponge cake recipe, the possibilities are endless as to how I could vary the flavors of the cake (think lemon, mocha, coffee...). I started with the usual beating and folding of the eggs and flour, I added a few tablespoons of caramel syrup and baked the cake for around 45 minutes. The aroma of the caramel again filled my little kitchen, it's heaven! I took out the cake from the oven, cooled it for 10 minutes, removed it from the pan and cooled completely. As I was cooling the cake, I made the caramel frosting. I made it using a vanilla mousseline buttercream and then I beat caramel syrup on it. After I got all the syrup that I needed from the caramel, I proceeded in putting it in the oven for about an hour to make it into a thin custard.
One important note though, don't start decorating your cake when you are sleepy! Hehe. I smoothened the caramel on top, piped the nice border swirls on the edge, but totally forgot that the sides are not yet done! Big no-no. I cannot pipe properly anymore on the sides without ruining the nice swirls on top. I think I managed to still make the cake decent but it was not how I originally planned on piping it. Or did I have a plan at all? I don't remember. LOL! Don't get fooled by the pipes on the side, they're really diagonal and not tabingi. Nevertheless after the piping boo-boo, the cake was so caramelicious, just the way I like it.
I made cupcakes again today. The cupcakes were made with the Chocolate Cake Recipe from Baking911 and I added a few chocolate chips inside so that it will melt once baked. The frosting is the Vanilla Mousseline Buttercream. The cupcake was a breeze to make and it baked nicely domed. It is one of those days too where I got lucky in baking cupcakes and I yielded 100%. Not a single piece fell off the liner. The buttercream gave me a scare though, because it started to get really thin when I started to add the butter, and got really liquidy once all of the butter were added. It was a lot more liquid than how I usually made it but it magically turned into a luxurious cream after beating it for a few minutes on high. As you many have noticed, the colors are not my usual. In fact, it is my first time making black flowers. I would always plan on decorating cakes and cupcakes with a lot of colors normally with a lot of pinks and yellows, sometimes bordering on being over the top. Hehe. I notice that black and white cakes and cupcakes had been becoming really popular. I find it quite elegant actually, especially after making one myself.The decorations were made of gumpaste flowers with sugar dragees, pearls and a little edible luster. I often get asked if the dragees or the flowers that I make can be eaten, and yes, it's all edible. However, I recommend eating only the frosting and cupcakes because the decorations can be really sweet, as it is almost entirely made of sugar.
The final cupcakes looked beautiful and really elegant, but best of all it was delicious. The cake was very good and particularly rich especially with the melted chocolates inside. The Mousseline is slowly creeping up in my list of favorite frostings, if only it were easier to make! :)
I made Sarah's Orange Sponge Cake again last night because Manny has not tried it yet. I made my first orange sponge cake while he was out on a trip so he was not able to try it. I kept telling him how good the cake was and how much people at the office loved it, and kept telling him that he will surely love it because it is light, fluffy, soft and the icing is just so creamy and malinamnam. We were out for a good 12 days and while at it, I kept thinking once in a while of what variation I would make next out of this recipe. I was thinking of making a caramel or mocha next. However, I wanted him first to be able to try the original recipe which is Orange.
So I made this cake last night while half-asleep. LOL! I was already very sleepy when I finished making the cake. I'm still very sleepy right now while blogging, and come to think of it, I'm always sleepy anyway. Hehe. I continued making the cake anyway because I had already sifted the flour and cracked and separated the eggs. I don't want to lose the freshness of the ingredients by refrigerating it and making it the next day. So I went on preparing the batter and folding ingredients, baking it in the oven and cooling it. After cooling, I also just dumped the frosting on the cake which I originally planned on piping nicely! The final cake still looked nice nevertheless, and as expected it was so delicious! It was more delicious than I remembered it the first time I made it. Although I'm confident about the cake, I am still a little nervous at how Manny will like it having raised all of his expectations of the cake because of my weeks of talk about how good the cake was. And the verdict? He loved it and he's excited for me to try it with mangoes. It would be really wonderful! I will be making it though once I get home to the Philippines. For now, the Orange Sponge Cake had taken over our breakfast and lunch at the office. It's perfect with a latte!
I was out on a vacation the past weeks and I even auto-published my DB challenge on the deadline. When I got back here in Israel, the first thing that I baked was these Snickerdoodles by Sarah. I wanted to have some cookies for breakfast once we go back again to work. Manny wanted something with raisins so I just added a piece of raisin in the middle of the cookies. The cookies were very classic, and Kelly (from Baking911) even said that these are the type of cookies which you can pass on to your grandchildren. I totally agree. These are so delicious and chewy!My mind is still on vacation mode, and I can't think of anything else to write on this post. Hehe.
This month's challenge is Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting by Shuna Lydon. I had made a caramel cake once, but the cake itself is not Caramel. It was a hot milk cake that I just frosted with some caramel. I told myself back then that I would make a real caramel cake one day, and I just totally forgot about it.The challenge had 3 components - the cake, the frosting and the caramel syrup.
The caramel syrup was a combination of cooked sugar and water, brought to a boil with amber color, then later on poured with a cup of water to stop the caramelization. It was quite tricky, and scary because of the spatter from the smoking caramel. This caramel syrup once cooled will be a common ingredient that will be used for both the cake and the frosting.We were free to decide what size of cake to make for the caramel cake and I decided to make it using a 6x2 inch pan. With the full recipe, I was able to make 3 layers of cake. Making the cake was fairly easy, starting with creaming the butter and sugar, then adding the caramel syrup, eggs. Then the flour was added 3 parts with milk added in between. The cakes cooked for 30 minutes.The frosting is new for me, in that it uses cooked butter. I had to cook the butter until it was brown, then add the confectioner's sugar, heavy cream, caramel syrup, vanilla and kosher salt.
To assemble the cake, I just stacked it one after the other with a thin layer of frosting in between. I crumb coated the cake, and then added rope weaves all over the cake. I then decorated it with a few pieces of leftover gumpaste flowers and butterflies that I had.
I had quite a few expectations about the cake because I made it later on when I had read comments about it being too sweet from fellow DBers. I even made a concious effort in adding a little more salt to the frosting to cut back on the sweetness. So how was the final cake?First of all to note, the smell of the final caramel cake was just divine. I felt like a kid in a candy store. I sliced a small piece of it to try and yes, the frosting was really a little sweet to my liking. Or maybe I'm not just used to frostings using confectioner's sugar. The cake, however, was very good. It was moist and the texture was fine. And the caramel flavor was wonderfully infused in the cake. Overall, it was a tasty cake and the challenge had been fun.
Special Thanks to:
It had been a very hectic week at work and some work still spilled over the weekend. I got a very early weekend work call at 7:30am after having stopped working at 2am. It's sick! I was so stressed that all week, I had been looking forward to a weekend of lazing around the house doing nothing, or maybe bake something.
I decided to make few cupcakes today, just to be able to get my oven burning, my creative juices flowing and keep my mind off work. I made some Lemon cupcakes today using Sarah's Lemon Blueberry Muffin recipe. I was actually browsing through my recipes and I found it sitting for the longest time in my to-try list. I did not have blueberries in the fridge, and I planned on substituting it for raspberry, but I got lazy. Hehe. I ended up with just the Lemon cupcakes.
Making the batter and baking was fairly breezy for me, and for some reason, making the frosting is a bigger for me. Not that it's harder to make, I just don't quite enjoy making it like the batter, but it's still fun nevertheless. Oftentimes, I would bake something and we would end up eating the cake bare because I got lazy making the frosting (most recently, the cream cheese pound cake eaten bare!). But this time though, I still have some leftover frozen Italian buttercream that should be good enough for 12 pieces of cupcakes.
The cupcakes were out of the oven after 30 minutes while I sat down by my PC reading about Iphone3G vs Blackberry Storm. Hehe. The cupcakes looked really pretty, they domed nicely and not one cupcake fell out of the liner! This recipe is quite a keeper, I said to myself. The cupcakes also never fell flat once cooled. I immediately tried one of the cupcakes and it was so lemony good! I was expecting the cupcake to be dense and heavy because the recipe was for a muffin, but I was glad that it was fluffy and moist.
I frosted some with a layer of the buttercream and then topped it with a piece of fondant. The others, I swirled with buttercream. My theme for decorating the cupcakes was butterflies, each cupcake with different colors, and I wanted to go over the top with the flowers. However, I ran out of fondant! So, some cupcakes ended up with more flowers than the others. So here are some of the cupcakes, my favorite is the white one (I know it's dull!). Tell me which one is your favorite. :)
I promised myself that I will not bake anything until I clean up my house and with that motivation, I started cleaning up yesterday non-stop. After a few scratches and falling from the chair while cleaning the ceiling, I finished today and as my reward, I baked Priscilla's Orange Sponge Cake with Neoclassic French Buttercream. The sponge cake is Sarah's recipe passed on to her by her mom. 
I have made a sponge cake once, but it's the hot milk sponge cake which is made not with the traditional way of making one. I did not attempt making a sponge cake earlier because I know it would be difficult, like the genoise. I get second thoughts of baking anything that requires beating eggs and carefully folding the flour because it is very easy to ruin the batter, and waste ingredients. However, I do want to try cakes out of my comfort zone once in a while. I needed 5 eggs for this recipe, and when I went to the supermarket, the chatty old man who works at the dairy area was there arranging new stacks of eggs. He would often chat with me whenever I get eggs or butter. I was looking for large eggs, and he told me that he had a stack of 12 XL eggs sold the same price as the 10 large ones. I told him that I needed large only, but he insisted on me taking the XL ones because he said it's a bargain, and with a hearty laugh, he asked me what difference would it make if I cook with it? Knowing that it would make a deal of difference baking with different sized eggs, but not wanting to disappoint the nice old man, and not wanting to have a lengthy argument (Israelis love to argue by the way :P), I just took the XL eggs. Anyway, no point of arguing because when I looked at the eggs in the carton, the eggs were NOT XL although marked as XL. Hehe.So anyway, on with baking the sponge cake, I separated the whites and the yolks, beating both separately and aftewhich, I need to fold them together with the flour. Some people have heavy hands, and they often complain that they overfold eggs. As for me, my common mistake is I normally underfold. I'm trying to improve on this folding thingy, lest all my cakes will be sinking. I also used fresh oranges for the cake which I squeezed. I can't help it so I drank some of the juice. Hehe. After folding all the eggs, flour and the juice, I baked the cake for 40 minutes and it smelled wonderful! The sponge cake was supposed to go with an orange glaze, but I had leftover egg yolks that I wanted to use so I made the Neoclassic French Buttercream. I made the orange variation so that it would go perfectly with the orange sponge cake. Making the French Buttercream was similar, even almost the same to the Italian Buttercream, only that the French uses egg yolks while the Italian uses egg whites. I also used some orange zest and juice for the buttercream.
Once the cake is cooled, I decorated it with simple pipes of the buttercream. After a few photos, I cut the cake and the texture was very fine. This is the fluffiest cake that I've ever made. The texture was so fine and soft, and the color was perfect light yellow. I'm so happy with how the cake turned out, it's so delicious. The recipe itself was a classic, and even if it is just my first time baking a real sponge cake, it was successful. 
For sometime now, Sarah's Allspice Applesauce Cake had been on my to-bake list and I finally tried it over the weekend. I am now officially in love with spice cakes! The cake is very fragrant and wonderfully moist, and the flavors on it were awesome. The recipe was also very easy to make, and it baked nicely flat and straight. No need to trim or crop the sides or the top.I frosted the cake with Italian Buttercream, which is not my usual buttercream. I was actually afraid of making the Italian version because it requires boiling the sugar first then pouring it into the egg whites. I think it is very easy to ruin the buttercream, but once I get started, it just went smoothly. I will be making some more of this, with all other flavors, to be able to say that it will be in my repertoire since it is harder to make. However, this first version that I made is fabulous! It is light, smooth, but luxurious. 
It is very easy to forget calories while eating this cake because even if the cake is dense, you won't get easily full, or you won't get easily umay. The raisins and the walnuts yet add more flavors to the already delicious cake. I ended up chatting away and not noticing that I already finished a couple of slices! 
Today is a special day and we thought of going out in the beach and have a meal at one of the restaurants downstairs by the beach. The beach was also very inviting, no waves and very few people so we also thought of taking a dip after the meal. However, when I went outside my terrace, the wind was chilly so we just decided to have our meal at my apartment. I will just be cooking with whatever I have at home and we will have a full course meal. Hehe. I'm so not into fancy eating and fine dining but it's OK with me once in a while. So I created today's menu. There's only that much ingredients sitting in my fridge. I was not able to go to the supermarket the entire week because we were busy with all of our test program releases. However, I think we did good with the meals we have and I'm still full right now, after 4 hours.Hors D'Oeuvres
I bought Beluga Caviar when we went to Istanbul last September and we planned on eating it today. One of my main goals when I went to Istanbul was to hunt for a bargain caviar in the Spice Bazaar. We went to the Spice Bazaar almost closing time and once we got in and started asking for prices, it was ridiculously expensive! Well, for me at least. The prices started at 400 euros for 100grams. I won't be able to buy one, I thought. So much for my dream caviar. However, as we went deep inside the stalls, we stumbled on one stall ran by two nice gentlemen. My friends bought a lot of Turkish Delights and sweets from them. I was still not sold to the caviar. The gentleman started the price at 140 euros and then went to 70 euros for 100grams. I told him that I will come back and he said that if I come back, he will give me more discount. So the next day, I went back and redeemed the promised discount and after 30 minutes of haggling, I have my precious caviar for 40 euros with free 10 grams of Iranian Saffron. I was like scheming Blair Waldorf who got what she wanted. Haha! Manny told me that the smirk on my face that day was priceless!Drinks
I'm no wine expert but I do keep a few wines at home for those meals where it's meaty and all. I opened a Chardonnay for the Caviar.
Appetizer
I made a Split Pea and Mushroom Soup. I was already hungry while I was cooking so I decided to prepare a hot soup for the grumbling tummy. The soup is made of peas and button mushrooms sauteed in garlic and shallots on heavy cream, with a dash of garlic salt and thyme. The bread is also homemade, this is my first time to actually make a loaf bread and it was a keeper. The recipe is of course from my mentor, Sarah Phillips. I used Wheat Flour for the bread.Entree
For the starter course, I sauteed some Shrimps and Calamari and dressed it with White Wine Cream Sauce with a little Parsley on top. This in itself could have been a full meal already.Main Course
As for the main course, we had grilled steaks. My rub for the steak was pretty simple, but the steaks are very tasty. I just rubbed it with Kosher Salt, crushed black pepper and Garlic Salt, then let it rest for a few minutes before grilling. I like my steak medium rare to medium, still a little pink on the inside but not bloody. Manny likes his steak medium to medium well. To go with the steaks were some buttered vegetables, which is basically just peas and carrots. Not being able to go to the supermarket means not having fresh veggies at home. :)
Dessert
For our dessert, I have previously made an Allspice Applesauce Cake with Mousseline Buttercream. The cake was very fragrant and bursting with flavors from all the spices on the cake, allspice, cinnamon, ground ginger. The buttercream is also a perfect compliment for the cake since it is very light and just yummy. Though it is not a typical dessert, it was what I have at the fridge today and it was very good anyways! After having made a few cakes a few days ago loaded with chocolates, this is a very nice (and yummy!) change.
So there goes our day. :)
I made the Pumpkin Walnut Cream Cheese Roll by Sarah Phillips today. It's my first time making a roulade and first time making a cake with Pumpkin in it. The only vegetable that I have tried putting on a cake is Carrots and I was excited to taste how a Pumpkin would taste together with the entire cake ensemble. The Pumpkin Roulade is a traditional cake served on Thanksgiving and growing up in the Philippines, the only time I get to eat Pumpkin (or is it squash?) is when my father would cook his special Chili Crabs in Coconut Milk (yum!).
It's about time that I make a roulade. I kept putting it off since December last year when I thought of making a Christmas log. So I started with mixing the batter of the Pumpkin Cake. I went on the long route of making this cake because I cannot find canned solid pack pumpkin and crystallized ginger here in Israel. Yes, it's pumpkin and ginger together, with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon juice, nuts. The recipe required walnuts but I also cannot find any at the supermarket, so I substituted it with Pecans. Mixing the batter is similar to a genoise in that it starts with whipping the egg and sugar then adding the rest of the ingredients. After a few minutes of mixing, I spread the batter onto a floured jelly roll. The cake baked for 15 minutes and it smelled wonderful!
Once removed from the oven, I started to unmold the sides from the pan and then rolled it in a parchment paper over a kitchen towel. I left it to cool completely while wrapped in the towel. While the cake is cooling, I make the cream cheese filling. Once the cake is cooled, I filled the middle with cream cheese filling and rolled it again. I let it cool in the fridge, and while doing so, I made the spike cream. The spike cream is a mixture of heavy cream, vanilla, a little powdered sugar and a little rum extract. I beat it until it's stiff. After an hour in the fridge, I removed my rolled cake from the parchment paper, frosted it with some more cream cheese frosting and topped with spike cream swirls and walnuts. Here's how the cake looked like. It was not as hard as I thought it would be. And the taste was a real surprise for me. Having no idea how it would taste like, I anticipated not liking the final cake. And I'm glad I was wrong. It was so delicious that we needed second slices of the cake. I'm excited to have it again tomorrow, for breakfast. :)
This month's Daring Bakers' challenge is Pizza and Toppings. The Pizza recipe is Peter Reinhart's Pizza Napoletana which I had made a few times in the past and then a combination of sauce and toppings on top.I was pleasantly surprised that this is this month's challenge. I love this pizza recipe, in fact this is the only pizza recipe that I bake. It is very easy to work with and the resulting pizza is just divine! It is perfectly crunchy and chewy, and it does not get soggy with the sauce and the toppings.Making the dough, I started with combining the dry ingredients together and then slowly adding the cold wet ingredients. Having the water cold is a key factor. I then mixed the dough until everything is combined and starts to form a ball. Afterwhich, I kneaded it with the dough hook attachment until it is smooth but still sticky. Then I kneaded it for 2 minutes with hand. Cold hands for kneading is also important. When my hand started to get warm, I run it with cold water. At this point, I divided the dough into 6 pieces, lightly spraying each with oil before wrapping with plastic and then I made it rest in the fridge overnight.The next day before using it, I took it out of the fridge 2 hours before baking to let it rise. Once the dough has risen, I attempted a toss but ended up rolling the dough. LOL! I rolled the dough in a sheet pan and baked it at almost 500F. After 5 minutes, I took it out and then I placed my sauce and toppings. For the sauce, I used a tomato sauce. I mixed a few teaspoons of lemon juice, spices like oregano, thyme and parsley, dash of garlic salt and pepper. For the toppings, I added some ground beef, green bell pepper, onions, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes and lots of mozzarella cheese. It was so delicious!Here's how the pizza looked like.
And here's a fuzzy picture of me attempting a toss!
I have not baked anything with chocolates for the past month so I decided I will go over the top with chocolates. I baked the Ultimate Chocolate Butter Cake by Sarah Philips, filled it and frosted with Chocolate Ganache and then wrapped it with Chocolate Plastic. Everything will be chocolates.Somebody asked me what I love the most about making cakes, is it decorating? Actually, no. I love baking the most, the part where you mix flour, butter and all other stuff, then put it in the oven and then have a pretty layer of cake or nicely domed cupcakes. I always strive for perfection on the height and edges of the cakes. I don't mind having imperfect icing or decorations as long as I have a good cake. That is why I get frustrated when I cannot get a recipe perfectly, I keep baking the same recipe over and over until I get it perfectly. Having said that, I baked my cake pretty nicely and that's what mattered most to me. I love stacking layers and not having to torte or trim edges. The chocolate cake was so moist and very decadent, because it has melted chocolates and cocoa powder on it. It's like those expensive European cakes in cafes loaded with chocolates. I then made the ganache and it was so rich and fudgy! Once the cake layers were cooled, I assembled the cake with the ganache filling and frosting.It is my first time making chocolate plastic and it was easy. Putting it on the cake though is another story. I had a great time kneading the chocolate plastic, it was just like clay dough. I easily rolled it but I had a hard time putting it on the cake. I'm a total bummer with fondant and I think there is only one fondant cake that I had been happy about because I put the fondant nicely. The others had a lot of issues from folds, creases or cracks. As expected, I was not able to put on the chocolate plastic without issues. I had to do a lot of smoothening of creases after I put it. However, I think I produced a decent cake. I just topped the cake with a single rose and lined with a tiny lace at the bottom.So here's my chocolate overload cake. We will have it for dessert tonight, I bet it tastes good! I should know, I've tasted the components individually while making it. :)
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