Cake In A Bag

Traveling has been interfering with posting. Lots of backpacking, so I thought I'd share this recipe for backpacking cake. (For the person who reached this blog earlier on a search for "backpacking cake" - come back! We've got your answer now.)

Baking while camping presents unique challenges. If you are car- or canoe-camping, and you have room in your luggage, you can bake directly in a Dutch oven. Unfortunately, you can't bake in a backpacking cooking pot because the walls are too thin. The cake batter would turn into a charred cinder crust surrounding undercooked goo.

Cake in a bag avoids this problem by steaming the cake, instead of baking it. You cook the cake batter in an oven food bag or slow-cooker liner on a steaming rack inside your cooking pot. Technically, I suppose that makes it a pudding, rather than a cake, but "pudding in a bag" just sounds weird.

This recipe is entirely a Matt creation. The goals for the cake were to:
taste good - It's not hard to make cake that tastes good after a hard day of hiking, but this cake is yummy even when made at home.
require minimal extra weight - Eggs, oil and other liquids are relatively heavy and require separate sturdy containers to transport safely. This recipe can be carried as a dry mix in a single plastic bag.
require minimal extra gear - In addition to your one-burner backpacking stove and cooking pot, you will need only an oven food bag, a steaming rack and a couple of ounces of extra stove fuel.
be simple to prepare in camp - It's hard for any food, no matter how wonderful, to receive the acclaim it deserves if it isn't ready until the mosquitoes have devoured the children.

Note that beauty is not a criterion. This cake is ugly! It is not browned, and it comes out lumpy, or even lobed, based on the contours it assumes in the plastic bag.


On the other hand, the cake does not have to be as ugly as this picture suggests. Just use a better glaze recipe (as included in this post) and employ moderation in the number of birthday candles you use.

The recipe for chocolate cake in a bag was inspired by a recipe in Light Muffins by Beatrice Ojakangas. (I recommend this cookbook. The recipes are good, and neither taste nor texture suffers appreciably from the reduction in fat.) Matt has also developed a recipe for a date spice cake in a bag.

Gear Needed

Stove- your usual one-burner backpacking stove and some extra fuel
(We've used a white gas stove in the past. We haven't tried making cake in a bag over an alcohol stove; we don't see why you couldn't, though you may have to increase the baking time.)

Pot - the pot you would normally use to cook for more than two people while backpacking (we have a very light 8-cup aluminum thrift store pot that works well)

Steaming rack -

• We use a homemade chicken wire steaming rack that weighs about an ounce and packs compactly in the pot.
  
  
• You can buy a backpacking cake cooker (the Bakepacker) but, at 8 ounces, it's too heavy for our purposes.


• We've never tried a home steamer basket, but it might work (this kind would definitely work if your pot is big enough). Ours weighs in at 6 ounces and is relatively bulky, but you could take it car camping and experiment.


• Someday, we plan to try using a magic wire puzzle. No clue what it's made of or how much it weighs, but you can't deny the cool factor, and the price is certainly right.


• For the ultra-light backpacker, you could try using a loose pile of twigs. The oven bags are pretty stout.

Oven food bag - Glad and Reynolds are widely available brands of oven food bags

When Matt was first developing this recipe, I wondered about the safety of baking in plastic, since these bags are not marketed for that purpose. So I sent an email to Reynolds and got this response from someone named Ethel - "Unfortunately, we have never tested these bags for baking a cake by any method and could not recommend it." Those people have no spirit of inquiry. (And could her name really be Ethel? It sounds like the customer support person in India who has to say his name is Mike.)

We decided to forge ahead on the theory that, if these bags are safe for cooking fatty meat at 400 degrees F (a big if), they should be no worse for baking low-fat cake at 212 degrees or less.

Chocolate Cake in a Bag

serves roughly 8, depending on how many miles you've hiked (the recipe makes the equivalent of 12 muffins)

At home, mix in a heavy-duty gallon bag:

1/4 cup hazelnuts, finely ground (see note at end of post)
1 1/2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, grated
1 3/4 cups white flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup cocoa (preferably Dutch process)
3 teaspoons instant coffee
8 teaspoons powdered egg whites (or powdered whole eggs to equal 2 eggs)
3 tablespoons powdered buttermilk
4 tablespoons vegetable or nut oil (mixing the oil with the dry ingredients makes it fairly safe to travel with)
Optional: seeds and pulp scraped from one vanilla bean (vanilla powder would be easier; you want the equivalent of 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract, which would be 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla powder according to one vendor)

Be sure to carry enough stove fuel for 35-45 minutes of cooking.

In camp:

1. Fill your cooking pot with water to just below the level of the steaming rack and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to simmer if your stove allows.


2. Pour dry ingredients into oven bag. Add 1 1/2 cups water to dry ingredients and mix.


3. Close oven bag loosely (to allow steam to escape, so bag won't burst). Steam, covered, for 35-45 minutes. To test for doneness, remove bag from pot, open and poke a utensil into the middle of the cake.


4. Peel back the bag and serve.

Chocolate Glaze

Because it's not super-rich, this cake benefits from the extra moisture of a glaze. The easiest thing to do is use instant pudding. Try this recipe for something a bit swankier (in taste, not appearance).

At home, mix in a heavy-duty plastic bag:

1/2 teaspoon cornstarch
1 1/4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, ground
2 1/2 teaspoons instant coffee
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 teaspoons powdered buttermilk

In camp:

1. When your cake is done, add 3 1/2 tablespoons of the boiling water to the dry ingredients in the plastic bag. Mix immediately and thoroughly by squeezing and agitating the bag. (The water must be near boiling to melt the ground chocolate.)


2. Pour glaze over individual hunks of cake (to call them slices would be misleading).

Preparing Hazelnuts

Specifying finely ground hazelnuts in a recipe is a bit like a car repair manual saying "first remove the transmission."

I have yet to find a satisfactory method for removing hazelnut skins. The standard instruction to roast the nuts and rub the skins off with a towel is just a mean joke. Using baking soda in boiling water works beautifully, but imparts a baking soda taste. Most people don't find this offensive, but a few (like me) really have a hard time with it. While looking for a link explaining these methods, I was excited to find that someone suggested using plain boiling water. Definitely worth a try.

Grinding the hazelnuts is fun and easy if you have a good nut grinder. If you are thinking of buying one, I would suggest avoiding this type. Almonds will defeat it every time.

If you prefer, you can have someone else do the work for you and buy ready-made hazelnut meal.

Volcano Cake

I had a party on May 18, and wasn't sure which of the designs in the queue would be best for the event. When I found out that May 18 is the anniversary of the 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption, the choice was obvious. A volcano it would be.

I made a chocolate angel food cake from my go-to cookbook of the moment, the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. I'm not sure I'd ever made an angel food cake before, but I'll definitely be doing it again. It is a hoot to beat twelve egg whites to stiff peaks, with the beaters wallowing in this incredibly sensual bubble bath. (It's faster with a standing mixer, if you have one, but the kinesthetic experience of using the hand mixer is worth it.)

I should confess here that, in yet another flagrant violation of Article 6, the manifesto article banning obscure tools and ingredients (an article more honored in the breach than in the observance), I used powdered egg whites. These can be a little hard to find (try a health food store or the Jewish section of your local grocery store), but they are a fabulous invention. I don't mind separating eggs, but what on earth would I do with twelve egg yolks? For that matter, I wonder what the powdered egg white people do with the yolks. Sell them to mayonnaise makers? the buttercream factory? (In the process of looking for a good link I discovered that Deb-El, which makes a common brand of powdered egg whites, also makes mayonnaise!)

Another excellent feature of the angel food cake is the apparent daring involved in cooling and decanting it. I remember being wildly impressed as a child when Mom cooled the cake in its pan hanging upside down on a soda bottle (the cake that is, not Mom). Glass soda bottles being a thing of the past, a wine bottle is an adequate substitute. I still find the process darn impressive.



Since the footprint of the cake was relatively small, it fit on a cookie sheet (a large platter would make a nicer presentation - we just don't own one). I used a long serrated knife to cut chunks off the top of the cake to create an irregular mountainous shape with plenty of ravines. I piled the chunks at the base of the cake to create a more conical shape. A few smaller chunks went into the crater to soak up extra lava. You could also strew some chocolate-covered nuts, raisins, or espresso beans about as rubble.

At this point, the cake did not look like delicious food. The addition of ash and lava greatly improved things.



I sprinkled the mountain with powdered sugar, followed by cocoa. If you're a gadgety person, we highly recommend this flour duster. It's great fun to use and works beautifully. (Article 6? Never heard of it.)



I was mostly going for an ash effect. You could also apply a thick layer of powdered sugar, if you wanted snowpack or glaciers, although that veers toward violation of Article 2, which decrees that taste not be sacrificed for visual aesthetics.

Next I applied the hardened lava, made of chocolate glaze poured down the ravines. I topped the lava with a bit more ash after the chocolate cooled.

The molten lava was a raspberry sauce from (you guessed it) the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. I filled the crater with the sauce and poured some along the paths of the cooled lava.



The crowning touch was the dry ice. We bought the dry ice from the fish counter at our local grocery store. (Other possibe sources: party supply, welding supply, ice cream shop, or theater supply). Note that two pounds of dry ice, well wrapped and stored in a chest freezer, will reduce to about two ounces in less than two days. Ahem. Fortunately, two ounces was just about the right amount.

I had chosen to make a thick, delicious molten lava, knowing that it might not put on a very spectacular display, which it didn't. But the burblings and wisps of smoke were still a great hit at the party. Finkbuilt has ideas for increasing the vigor of the eruption, which I chose to ignore.



If I felt the need to impress a younger crowd, I might violate Article 4, the manifesto's ban on non-food items, and put a small bowl of water in the top of the crater to improve "smoke" production. A small waterproof flashlight shining up through the lava in the crater would also be a nice touch.

I didn't have clear memories of eating homemade angel food cake, so didn't know what to expect. Wow. Store bought angel food cake has nothing on this puppy. You know how store bought angel food is kind of tough and chewy? This cake was melt-in-your-mouth soft and stayed that way for the several days it took me to mop up the leftovers. I didn't get any help from Matt. He said it was the best angel food cake he'd ever had...and he still didn't much like it. The guests at the party more than made up for his lack of enthusiasm. Everyone went back for seconds without prompting. One of the virtues of a fat-free cake? You can eat a lot of it.

Emperor Penguin Cake

This is the first cake Matt designed for me, and it remains one of his best efforts. He is particularly proud of how efficiently the design uses the cake.

The penguin is straight out of Antarctic Antics: A Book of Penguin Poems. This is one of our favorite books. Where else will you find poetry with rhymes like "can't you be" and "anchovies," or "featherweight" and "regurgitate"? Well, maybe here someday, but in general...

Other than keeping the pattern, we didn't document the first iteration very thoroughly. So when it came time to make a cake for a fundraising auction, I decided to dust this one off and refine it a bit. Well, I decided, and Matt ended up doing all the work while I was occupied with other auction preparations.

Actually, I did make the cake itself. It's the Black Mocha Cake from the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. I hadn't made that recipe before, and it turned out to be tasty, but extremely moist - reminiscent of a pudding cake and not well suited to a cut-up cake. So we froze the bejeebers out of it, and it worked pretty well. (On the cake's little sign at the auction, we called it a "moist gateau," figuring that would have more cachet than "pudding cake.")

The cake is presented on a piece of plywood that is first covered with gray paper, and then waxed paper. This creates a nice icy effect, and the waxed paper is easy to clean up when the icing goes astray.

The cake is quite sweet, and when you add frosting, it teeters over the edge of too much. To reel it in a little, Matt crumbcoated the assembled cake with an unsweetened chocolate glaze (recipe below). He used a skewer to score lines into the glaze to mark the border between the white frosting and chocolate ganache that were applied next.



The "black" parts of the penguin are sour cream chocolate ganache (recipe below) - a lot of it. Matt used 10 ounces of chocolate. You could certainly use less without being accused of skimping, although it's easier to apply if you can spread it thickly.

After applying the ganache, Matt filled in the white belly with sour cream frosting (recipe below). I am grooving on sour cream frosting these days. It's an easy way to make truly white frosting, it's got a little tang to balance the sweetness, and (unlike butter-based frosting) it doesn't harden too much to spread when you put it in the fridge. The only difficulty with sour cream frosting is that it doesn't set up very well. So on a hot day the frosting is apt to sag and adds an extra layer of adipose tissue to your penguin's belly.



While cake turntables are a boon for frosting round layer cakes, they aren't much help for oblong cakes. But hunching over the table is no fun either. Brilliant innovation: put a cardboard box or other object of appropriate height on the table and place the cake board on top of that. You still have to be careful when turning the cake board, but it puts the cake at a much more comfortable height for frosting.

The beak is defined with a sliver of a spear of dried cantaloupe (you could also use dried papaya).

The eye is a white jordan almond dabbed with ganache for a pupil.

The ear patches are grated zest from about 1/4 of an organic orange (it's best to use organic fruit for making zest). Our Microplane grater does a beautiful job of citrus zesting. Regular zesters are also nice, but produce zest bits that are too coarse for this application.

The wings are defined with licorice whip.

The feet are dusted with a crushed graham cracker. The first time Matt made the cake, he used cocoa powder, which also worked well.

At the auction, one of my colleagues spoke wistfully about the idea of a husband who makes cake. It is a very good thing.

Chocolate Glaze

Use butter and unsweetened chocolate in a ratio of 1 tablespoon butter to 1 ounce chocolate. Matt made 6:6, but 4:4 would probably have been enough.

Melt butter and chocolate together over double boiler or in microwave. If microwaving, do something like 20% power in 3-4 minute increments. Start stirring once it's melted enough.

Drizzle the glaze over the cake, spreading it with a spatula as you go. You will probably need to reheat the glaze once or twice during the process.

Ordinarily it would be best to apply the glaze while the cake was on a cooling rack and then transfer the cake to a clean platter for serving. In the case of a cake assembled from multiple pieces (like, say, a penguin), or in the case of a fragile "moist gateau," you'll probably have to apply the glaze to the cake after it's already on its presentation board. You can clean up later by scraping the excess glaze off with a knife and then polishing up with a paper towel.

Sour Cream Chocolate Ganache

Melt as described in the chocolate glaze recipe:
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate (Matt used 8 oz bittersweet and 2 oz unsweetened chocolate because we didn't have enough bittersweet)

Beat in:
1 cup sour cream (Matt used 3/4 c sour cream and 1/4 c whipping cream because we didn't have enough sour cream)
1 1/2 tablespoons coffee liqueur

Add:
powdered sugar to taste (probably start with about 1/2 cup)

Sour Cream Frosting

Beat together:
3 tablespoons sour cream
1/2 pound (2 cups) powdered sugar

Add one or two more teaspoons of sour cream as needed to achieve the desired consistency. Don't add more or the frosting will be too runny to support itself.

Cautionary Tales of Waxed Paper

My usual protocol when preparing cake pans is to grease, flour and apply waxed paper to the bottom of the pan. This always seems like belt, suspenders and helium balloon, but it's commonly recommended and cheap insurance at the price. After all, you want a cut-up cake, not a break-up cake.

There are many theories on the order of application. It's good to start with grease, anyway, because it helps keep your paper stuck down. I used to think there was no need to grease the paper because, hey, it's already waxed. Mostly, that's true. With an ordinary butter cake, the crumb is loose enough that if a little sticks to the waxed paper, it doesn't mess up the rest of the cake.

However, if you have a particularly sticky or thick batter, greasing the waxed paper is a good idea. We recently made a flourless chocolate genoise that turned out fairly dense and sticky (much nicer than the usual flourless cake, but that's another story for another day). Pulling the waxed paper off that cake pulled off a substantial layer of crumbs. A tasty bonus for the cooks, but we would have preferred the crumbs to stay on the cake.

And then there were the sesame oatmeal bars we made for our wedding. (See the recipe at the end of this post.) I thought I'd get fancy and add waxed paper to the pan, even though I knew the recipe worked fine without the paper. With true motherly patience, my mom scraped the baked-on sticky mess off the waxed paper, and we served artisanal hand-formed sesame oatmeal balls at the reception. I'm not sure that even greasing the waxed paper would have helped with this recipe. Since the bars are removed individually, rather than turned out, just greasing the pan works fine.

But wait, there's more. Resist the temptation to use waxed paper between the pizza stone and the pizza. In the first place, you're not supposed to put exposed waxed paper in the oven - it should always be completely covered with batter, or it is apt to smoke and burn. Not only that, since pizza crust is not crumbly by nature, it turns out that waxed paper forms an unholy bond with pizza dough. As we learned to our sorrow, the amount of actual food that can be salvaged depends on how long you're willing to spend picking waxed paper off your dinner and how much paper you're willing to eat. Yes, parchment paper is more expensive than waxed paper, and the name sounds hoity-toity, but I'm willing put on airs if it means not having to eat waxed paper.

Sesame Oatmeal Bars
(from The Buffet Book by Carole Peck)
I generally don't reproduce recipes from books that are in print, but this book does not seem to be easily available, so here goes.

Melt together:
4 ounces (1/2 cup or 1 stick) unsalted butter
3 tablespoons honey
1/3 cup light brown sugar

Remove from heat.

Stir into butter mixture:
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup chopped almonds
1/3 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1/3 cup sesame seeds

Bake in greased 9" square pan (do NOT use waxed paper) at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 15-18 minutes, or until golden.

Cool 10 minutes and score into bars. Let cool completely and cut along score lines.

Dip or drizzle with chocolate if desired.
for dipping - 4 ounces melted semisweet chocolate and 1 teaspoon oil
OR
for drizzling - 2 ounces melted unsweetened chocolate and 1 teaspoon oil

The bars are very sweet and somewhat crumbly. They keep up to two weeks in a tightly covered container.