Birthday cake

A veganized version of Black Star Pastry's Strawberry Watermelon cake:

For the almond dacquoise, I used my recipe, but with aqua faba in place of the water + versawhip (and I also didn't heat the mixture, working on my unproven assumption that baking would activate the agar). I made two layers a bit over 20cm in diameter -- next time I might make smaller, taller layers.

For the cream, I used rad whip with some rosewater added. Next time I might use Soyatoo, which I expect would hold its shape better -- the rad whip didn't whip up a lot to begin with, and then as the cake sat it deflated a lot.

Overall, not as impressive looking as its inspiration, but it tasted superb, and was still delicious when we finished it a day or two later.

Birthday cake

Not the prettiest, but the tastiest:

I made pistachio dacquoise, using my recipe but with chickpea liquid instead of versawhip. I didn't bother with heating the agar mix, I just mixed everything together and assumed that the agar would activate during the baking. (To be honest, I'm actually not even sure whether the agar and xanthan are necessary.)

The filling was a salted caramel mousse, based on a peanut butter mousse from The Voluptuous Vegan. Each dacquoise disk had one side painted with melted chocolate with some roughly ground coriander seeds and some dehydrated ground whole lemon mixed in. I thought I would make some beautiful swirls of chocolate on top but... well, you can see how well that worked. (I didn't count on the chocolate solidifying immediately on the cold mousse!)

I was aiming for the dacquoise to soften slightly, but hoped the chocolate would prevent that from happening too fast. After sitting for about 4 hours, the disks were still quite crisp. 24 hours later, they were quite soggy. Somewhere in between they would've been perfect. The flavour, though, was amazing. I got the idea for the flavour combination from this recipe for Pistachio Millionaire's Shortbread.

Catchup

Good things I ate (or drank) in the second half of 2014:

From Vedge, Broccoli Rabe Philly Style (seriously bitter homegrown broccoli rabe [which I cut with gai lan to tone it down a bit], roasted red capsicum, porcini mayo)

 Pizza and roasted cauliflower at Pizza Domenica in New Orleans:

 Birthday/journal acceptance cake (Chocolate/root beer):

Asparagus pizza:

Enchiladas Especiales Tacuba style (wish I'd had poblanos; made do with green chillies and used rehydrated yuba sticks as chicken, and cashew cheese)

Pasta with a pureed caramelized onion / nutritional yeast sauce and cubed smoked tofu:

Pumpkin and pecan pie(s):

Home brewed saison:

Hazelnut dacquoise

I made this hazelnut dacquoise to go into a fancy cake. These two layers were sandwiched into the middle of a vanilla cake, layered with a cooked vanilla frosting. (I think a mousse would be better, but this cake was for a frosting-lover.)

I used my recipe for meringue, and added some ground hazelnuts. (I was inspired by this recipe for peanut dacquoise.) I think I might've overbaked them a bit -- next time I might do closer to an hour rather than an hour and a half. In the finished cake, the dacquoise tasted fantastic and added a really interesting texture. It didn't soften as much as I expected -- this is where I think that baking for a shorter time might help. Anyway, overall the verdict was: delicious!

UPDATE: Bake for 1.5 hours, then turn off the oven and leave them in there until completely cool / overnight. After being in the oven overnight, they had started to soften slightly. Once in the cake, layered with frosting/mousse, they softened completely. Perfect!

Dacquoise:

120 g water
100 g caster sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
vanilla
2.3 g versawhip 600k
1 g xanthan gum
1.2 g agar powder
1 cup hazelnut meal

1. Mix everything but the vanilla and hazelnut in a pot and bring to the boil. (I seem to remember some problems with clumping, so hit it with the stick blender if need be.)
2. After it's boiled for a little bit (activating the agar), take it off the heat and add vanilla.
3. Whip the mixture (using a stand mixer) until you have a thick foam. It should form a large blob on the whisk when you lift the mixer head.
4. Fold in the hazelnut.
5. Draw circles the diameter of your cake on parchment paper, and split the dacquoise mixture accordingly. I was making a small cake (about 18cm/7 inch), and made two circles. The dacquoise spreads out as it cooks -- you end up trimming them to get them back to the right size.
6. Bake at 130 C (275 F) for at least an hour. When they are done, they should have taken on some colour, and will be dry to the touch but still soft. [UPDATE: Bake for 1.5 hours, then leave to cool in the turned-off oven.]
7. Let them cool. Trim to the appropriate size. Eat all the offcuts.
8. Layer into your cake with frosting/cream/mousse. Let it sit for a while before you serve -- the idea is that the frosting softens the dacquoise a bit, making it deliciously chewy.

Secret ingredient

The first time I tried making a passionfruit-flavoured cake, it didn't work very well. I added the amount of passionfruit called for by the recipe, and the batter tasted of nothing. I added more and more, and yet the final cake did not taste of passionfruit at all. (I saved the cake, somewhat, by topping it with a passionfruit ganache that was excellent -- the chocolate-passionfruit combination is delightful.)

Anyway, cut to last week, when I bought some feijoas at the markets. To me, they smelled intensely of passionfruit. (Other people compare them to guava or pineapple.) They tasted okay, but mostly just made me want passionfruit instead. And luckily enough, this week at the markets I found passionfruit on sale.

So, I bring you passionfruit cupcakes (with secret ingredient, feijoa):

These worked out well. The passionfruit taste was definitely there. I topped them with some lemon 'cream cheese' icing which was a nice combination.

1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
1 feijoa, pureed with soymilk to make just over 1/2 cup total
4 large passionfruits
1 t vanilla extract
1 cup plus 2 T flour
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t salt

Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes.

Icebox cake

I think I first read about icebox cake on Smitten Kitchen, which if that is true, means it was 5 years ago (!). Anyway, since then I have had it in the back of my mind to try a vegan version. I finally did it yesterday, prompted by (1) leftover rad whip, and (2) weather too hot to turn on the oven in.

I layered rad whip, Nice biscuits and sliced banana, and left it in the fridge overnight. It worked out really nicely -- the rad whip has a very pleasant, neutral-creamy flavour, and I really like how the banana flavour permeated the whole thing.

Chocolate stout cupcakes

These cupcakes set a dangerous precedent.

I am not one of those bakers who enjoys precision. I try to measure things accurately and follow the recipe, but the urge to just eyeball it, and change things on the fly is just too hard to resist.

Anyway, the day I made these cupcakes on the spur of the moment, I surprised even myself in how far I strayed from the recipe. I didn't have tofu or sour cream, or self raising flour. I used less chocolate, and more sugar. And yet they worked out beautifully. The flavour combination of chocolate, prune and stout is just perfect.

Birthday cake

Technically, it's a birthday blondie with mousse topping.

It's based on the Peanut Butter Mousse Cake from The Voluptuous Vegan, except I used Kittee's recipe (with added peanut butter, and no cashews/chocolate) for the blondie layer.

Since we had a quiet little birthday celebration with just us two, I shrank the recipe down to fit my 5 inch springform pan. (I divided both the blondie recipe and the mousse recipe by 4 -- the blondie recipe made enough for a couple of bonus blondies cooked in a muffin tin.)

This was really nice. The mousse is subtle and airy, and is a nice contrast with the sweet and chewy blondie.

No Oil Cake?

Carrot cake with pineapple (crushed, drained) and buttermilk and applesauce is dense. No coconut lightness, no walnut chunks... but this cake made my kitchen smell like spiced donuts. Where does that "fry" smell come from? Was it the 2 egg whites, and one whole egg? Was it the mix of spices and a longing for "fry"?
I think the next time I do carrot cake, it'll be with some oil. Or butter. The crumb was too dense, and even though my head knew it was "healthy," I wanted something that was more like cake.
I got the golden raisins here at a little shop I stumbled into in Philadelphia. They are sugary sweet -- too much for my taste. But aren't the lovely?

Cake 3

Buttermilk cake with lemon frosting. Cake too squishy to frost entirely, so it has big pancakey layers of frosting. (I need to work on this.)
My birthday dinner was on my sister's birthday (the day before mine). Another guest - a new girl in town M met and, on her funniness and niceness, promptly invited - didn't mention it, but her birthday was actually the night of the dinner. I made this cake the day after, and we dropped it by her house.

Cake 2

Chocolate chocolate, topped with animal crackers.

Cake 1

Almond (naked).

The Hot, Hot Oven

On the final days of a meditation retreat in early summer, I had begun to think of worldly things. Two worldly things became interesting to me in those days: an oven thermometer, and an oven timer. I bought them shortly after the end of the retreat.
I haven't been baking much this summer, but any time there is a birthday (a twelfth, a forty-seventh, a forty-fifth), I fire up the oven and make a double-layer chocolate cake. This is an old picture, but you get the idea... they're messy cakes, and obviously home made. The last one was covered in chocolate-covered star-shaped cookies. It looked crazy.

De-Stressed Baking

I woke up on Saturday at 4.30, ran starting at 5, and finished work at 4.30pm. I came home ready to relax. This is what I did. The cake is the Cook's Illustrated chocolate snack cake (fudged because I ran out of vegan mayo -- I used some old sour cream, which probably wasn't a great idea -- too dense). The cookies are from 101 Cookbooks, thanks to David Lebovitz. Really super tasty.

Look quickly -- Quickly! Then turn away!

I had to look away while someone else emptied my cake pans... a birthday cake for a colleague, and another crumbly mess.  Is it the humidity here?  Why is it I can't turn out a decent cake, even with parchment paper?  My flour should have had enough gluten in it... is there just so much bayou in the air I need to add less liquid to my baking mixes?  Ughhh.  This is the SmittenKitchen chocolate layer cake.  It's great.  It's just the non-vegan version of the cake I made a few months back.  I need to find another one... maybe the Veganomicon recipe I've had a few times with cream filling?  

65 pounds of limes

Limes were 5 for a dollar at the local grocery store this week. That's unheard of around here. (Apparently the store owner ordered 65 pounds of them by mistake.)

And so, this tasty morsel: a coconut-lime cupcake from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

Cake and cake and cake!!!

This here is a monster of a chocolate (vegan) birthday cake.   There's a layer of ganache and red raspberry jam in the center, but it's basically chocolate.  Whole wheat flour to support it (2c ww/ 2c apf) - there's basically a cup of cocoa and a bag of chocolate chips melted with hot coffee).  I can't eat it.  The caffeine makes me crazy.  

You'll see (look carefully) that the sides are held together with frosting - (1/4 c earth balance, 3/4 cup soymilk, until melted, then stir in a bag of chocolate chips) - the cake crumbled coming out of the pans.  I should have used bigger pans, but something in the whole wheat flour/brown rice syrup thing went wrong.  Not sure what.  Guess I'll have to bake it again!

Birthday = Pink

I can never quite wrap my head around the girly-girl thing.  You say "pedicure," I think "complex labor issue."  But apparently, I'm on a mission to bring pink cakes to the table when someone calls "Birthday!"

In the foreground, ginger cookies with lumps of crystallized ginger and some fresh ginger (minced) in the mix too.  The star is a beet cake with crystallized ginger, pecans, and some local goat cheese stirred with sugar and maple for (center) frosting.  

Both were good, but I need to get an oven thermometer.  My cake was a bit dense in the middle and cooked on the edges.  Grrr.

    

Carnival Season's Back!

Starting Twelfth Night, King Cake (and it should be capitalized) is back.  The quick cultural tutorial: holidays follow the holidays follow the holidays.  Whoever gets the baby (there's a plastic baby inside) has to buy the next King Cake.

This one is from Wholefoods.  It's cinnamon flavored.  Other flavors include raspberry cream cheese (berry chantilly) and praline pecan.  Basically, it's flour and eggs and SUGAR.  (And therefore fun.)  I believe you can see the grease.  Add butter to that list of ingredients.