chocolate chip cookie dough layer cake

A week and a half ago, after spending nearly an entire year in China, Drew came home. 

To welcome him home, I baked a chocolate chip cookie dough layer cake. The cake layers are a white cake, and the frosting is a vanilla French buttercream. Both recipes are from Baking Illustrated. The filling is a chocolate chip cookie dough, from Bite Me More.

This cake is quite a showstopper. It was very good and quite possibly the best cake I've ever made. It might even be better than the Brown Butter Pumpkin Layer Cake I made a few years ago, which is the cake against which I measure all other cakes, but I can't decide. 

devil's food cake with whipped cream and strawberries

Do you remember that movie with Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal? Stranger Than Fiction? I forget what it's about, and all I remember is this scene where Ferrell courts Gyllenhaal (a law student turned baker) with a bunch of flours. Not flowers, but flours. Get it? Very clever.

I am reminded of this scene because I am slowly whittling away my own flour collection. So far, I've managed to use up rye flour, hazelnut flour, and whole wheat pastry flour, but self rising flour, Italian 00 flour, chickpea flour, almond flour, whole wheat flour, and of course, all purpose flour, remain. And until yesterday, there was cake flour.    

My running friends ran a 10K this morning. I skipped out on the race but met up with them for a potluck-birthday-celebration-brunch. Whenever we have potlucks, I am in charge of dessert.  

The birthday girl requested chocolate and strawberries, and so I delivered. I was on the fence, going back and forth between the recipe from Chocolate Cakes or Baking Illustrated. I went with the former, largely because it meant using up the rest of my cake flour. The filling is from the Pioneer Woman. 

I snapped this picture before heading over to my friend's place, and it was a good thing I did. As I assembled the cake, I thought to myself "There is no way this is going to survive the 20 minute drive to Laguna Niguel." And I was right. Just as I accelerated to get onto the 405, a guy began to cross in front of me, on foot, forcing me to slam on my brakes. Fortunately, he took about 2 steps and then turned back, but it was still a little unnerving. It is generally a good idea to look both ways before darting across a freeway entrance (or really, any street). 

Anyway, the top cake layer slid off the bottom one, but nobody cared about the presentation. The cake was nice and tender, and everyone loved it.     

chocolate kahlua cake

I don't know how this happened, but somehow, I ended up with a bottle of Kahlua. I don't know where it came from. Maybe leftover from a party a long time ago? 

I do know, however, how I ended up with rum, amaretto, brandy, and hazelnut liqueur. Sometimes I bake with booze*, but I end up with a lot of leftovers because 1) recipes don't call for that much alcohol and 2) Drew and I don't really drink at home (unless it's wine for me). 

But back to the mystery Kahlua. 

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm moving and I'm trying to clean out the kitchen. I tasted the Kahlua, and it was still good (full disclosure: I tasted it after drinking a glass of wine), so I decided that I had to use it. I did some quick browsing on the internet to see what kinds of things I could bake with Kahlua. I came across this recipe, and while I normally don't just dive into recipes by unknown blogs (uh, unknown by me, that is) without some sleuthing, I made an exception because it called for 3/4 of a cup of Kahlua, and guess what? That's exactly how much Kahlua I had. 

It was fate.

Or destiny.

Or whatever.

The Collegiate Baker's recipe is for a layer cake with frosting and chocolate curls, which looks lovely, but I made mini cakes instead because they are easier to share. As I was mixing the ingredients, I thought to myself "This better be good; I'm using the fancy cocoa powder!" And it was; the Kahlua was subtle, and the cake was rich and chocolate-y.

*I bake with bourbon too, but I must bake with it more frequently because there never seem to be leftovers. 

strawberry cake

Whenever I go to a bakery and order a strawberry cupcake, I'm always disappointed. "Strawberry" cupcakes just taste like a vanilla cupcake with strawberry buttercream. Frustrated, I decided to finally just make my own, but last weekend, I discovered 2 things: First, it is nearly impossible to find a recipe for strawberry cake that 1) does not call for jello or a cake mix, or 2) is not actually a recipe for strawberry shortcake. I used this blog recipe, but I was reluctant to do so because 1) I dislike using recipes from just any blog, and 2) the name of the blog was utterly ridiculous (Confessions of a Foodie Bride). Second, strawberry cake is surprisingly difficult to make. I mean, it's not the technique that's difficult. What's difficult is getting a strawberry cake to actually taste like strawberry. 

As suggested, I reduced the strawberries in an effort to get a more concentrated strawberry flavor. It didn't work. There was pretty much no strawberry flavor. In fact, when Drew tasted the cake scraps (yes, I'm anal and trim the layers so they're level- this is called torting), he said "Man, it really is hard to get a strawberry cake to taste like strawberry." It sure is. 

To frost the cake, I made an Italian buttercream, with leftover strawberry puree mixed into it. Usually, I make buttercream the easy way- just butter and confectioner's sugar. But last year, I was watching an episode of the Worst Cooks in America on the Food Network, and this renowned pastry chef was teaching the contestants how to bake a cake. All I remember is him saying "Real buttercream is not that crap with butter and powdered sugar." Or something to that extent (I don't think he would say 'crap').

And so, I decided to make a proper buttercream. The recipe is from Cakelove: How to Bake Cakes from Scratch. The author is Warren Brown, a lawyer turned baker, who owns the Cakelove bakeries in D.C. (Fun Fact: When Drew worked in D.C. a few summers ago, he lived just a few blocks from Cakelove and we used to go there and get cupcakes.)

I rarely use the Cakelove cookbook, but that's not because I don't like it- I do. This cookbook rarely leaves the bookshelf because the cakes are kind of fancy and the recipes are a bit too high maintenance. When I use this cookbook, it is for special occasions, like birthdays. And it was my friend's birthday, so I felt it appropriate to break open Cakelove.

To make the buttercream, first you have to whip 5 egg whites to make a meringue. Okay, you're not really doing that- the stand mixer is doing that for you. While that's happening, you make a sugar syrup and when that reaches 245 degrees, you slowly pour it into the meringue while the stand mixer is running at high speed. Yeah, crazy, I know. In fact, when I did this the first time, I wasn't wearing an oven mitt and the syrup splashed and burned one of my fingers. Profanity ensued. After the sugar syrup is mixed in, you add a pound of butter, one pat at a time, with the mixer at about medium speed. When all the butter is mixed in, you crank up the speed to high for a minute or two, until the butter is fully incorporated. 

If you were paying attention, you noticed that it took me 2 tries to successfully make Italian buttercream. I almost gave up after the first try (I burned my finger!), but I'm glad I didn't. The buttercream is light and fluffy, and it tasted so, so good (and that was before I stirred in the strawberry puree). It is superior to the powdered sugar crap in many ways (not only did it taste better, it was also easier to work with), and I'm not sure I'll ever go back. 

As for the cake itself, it was good even though I didn't detect any strawberry flavor. My friend was happy with her birthday cake, and so was everyone else at her party.

red velvet cake balls

I resisted cake pops (or cake balls) for a long time, dismissing them as a stupid fad, and quietly waiting for some other pastry trend to take off (I think donuts might be the next big thing, but I'm still waiting for pie). I didn't understand them- are cake pops like mini-cupcakes, and if so, why do we need cake pops in addition to cupcakes?  

It didn't help that my impression of cake pops was based purely on Bakerella, who commits two of what I consider to be baking crimes. The first is the use of cake mixes and canned frosting. Okay, I admit that I'm not being completely fair- she does bake from scratch and posts recipes that don't involve cake mixes. However, when I flipped through her cookbook and her blog, I was disappointed by the use of cake mix and canned frosting. If you have a baking blog, using pre-packaged mixes and foods should be shunned (the taste and quality is inferior and it's not really baking) and damages your credibility. 

Okay, moving on. 

The second is that Bakerella's focus when it comes to cake pops seems to be about making them not look like cake pops, and I am against this. Sure, they look cute, but I dislike efforts to make cake not look like cake because then the cake isn't about the cake at all, which is why I'm eating the cake in the first place. Do you follow? Cake decorating detracts from the taste of the cake, which you already know because you know that wedding cakes are notorious for tasting like crap. When a cake is decorated to not look like cake, how the cake looks is prioritized over how it tastes, and even though I'm guilty of enjoying cake decorating shows on the Food Network and those cakes look super cool, they cannot possibly taste good. Also, why is it that cake is like the only food that is made to look like something else? I mean, when's the last time you ate a hamburger that was made to look like a rocket?     

Ha! Yeah, I thought so.

And so, I resisted cake pops until a few weeks ago. Drew and I were at the Crystal Cove Promenade to grocery shop at Trader Joe's, but then I saw a sign for the Sweet and Saucy Shop and of course we had to go immediately. There was an array of cupcakes, cookies, and tarts, but for some strange reason, I was drawn to the cake pops. If ever there was a time to give in to cake pops, I thought to myself, it's now. So I did, and so did Drew. And they were super good.

And then I vowed to make them myself. Cake pops are easy to make, but there are several steps, so advance planning is necessary. First, I baked the cake and made the frosting. On that same day, when the cake was cool, I crumbled it up and mixed it with the frosting. Then the mixture went into the refrigerator overnight and I shaped the cake balls the next day. On day 3, I dipped the balls in melted chocolate, and after an hour in the fridge, they were ready to go.

The recipe is from the Liddabit Sweets Candy Cookbook. I made the red velvet cake and the vanilla frosting (cream cheese frosting is customary with red velvet, but Drew is not a fan). I don't normally make red velvet cake (it's just chocolate cake, people!!!), but I made these for Drew's proposal defense. Since his dissertation is on China, the cake balls were meant to resemble the Chinese flag. That is, until I botched the yellow coating- twice. Fortunately, we had a block of dark chocolate in the cupboard and I used that instead.     

Liddabit actually calls these cake amazeballs, and for good reason. They are really, really good. Cake balls are more dense than regular cake (because the frosting is mixed in), and they're almost like cake truffles. I'm really glad that I gave cake balls a chance, and I'm already trying to figure out what kind I'm going to bake next.  

* This post began as a discussion on cake pops, but you'll see that I actually made cake balls instead. I found the sticks to be unnecessary and even wasteful, so that's why I went with the balls instead.