Chocolate Dome

I didn't manage to think of a good birthday cake commission for Matt this year, so we made a cake designed by someone else, but that I've wanted to make for years. (I guess I'm developing a sort of chocolate mound theme for my birthday cakes.)

During all those years of anticipation I referred to the cake as a bombe. In researching this post, I learned that a bombe is actually a frozen dessert (or an ominously ticking cryptography machine). Ah well. (I saw the movie, Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? at an age when I thought the line, "The bombe is a bomb!" was simply hilarious.)

The recipe is in Cooking with Master Chefsby Julia Child, and the actual recipe is by Michel Richard. I've made several recipes from this book and all have turned out reasonably well. Many are even suited to home cooking. Others, well...in the spirit that over the top is not far enough, Richard has another recipe in the book for deep-fried chocolate truffles. I made these once and treasure the memory. In the same spirit, I hope someday to try Nancy Silverton's sourdough bread recipe, which involves more than a week of nursing a starter made with fermented grapes.

For all the pastry cheffery involved in the chocolate dome, it actually wasn't that difficult to execute -- just a lot of steps (and a full 3/4 pound of chocolate!). Make genoise (three ingredients - eggs, sugar and flour), orange juice, chocolate mousse, raspberry sauce, chocolate shell, and chocolate leaves. Soak genoise with orange juice, layer with chocolate mousse and raspberries, encase in a chocolate shell, and garnish with cocoa powder, raspberry sauce, and chocolate leaves.

One makes chocolate leaves by applying chocolate to actual leaves (we used rose leaves). It was our first attempt at this technique, and we found it a bit fiddly. Fortunately, we made plenty of extras, so we did end up with enough unbroken ones for the cake.



Hours of cooking entertainment, a grand presentation, and very tasty to boot.

Highly Imaginative Cupcakes

I recently ran across the blog Cupcake Bakeshop by Chockylit, which has a fabulous collection of recipes. Sadly, the blog is no longer active, but it will still take me a while to work my way through all of the attractive combos.

I've tried the horchata cupcakes and the mooncake cupcakes so far. The cherry chocolate cupcakes with fennel cream cheese frosting may not be far behind. And if you made the green ube cupcakes with bubble buttercream, you could have a truly multicultural St. Patrick's Day experience.

Tres Horchata Cake

I made my own horchata, largely per Chockylit's instructions. While it was an interesting process, it was quite involved. If I make this cake again, I will use store-bought horchata. Being the thrifty cook that I am, I couldn't stand the instruction to discard the almond and rice after squeezing out all the juice. So I saved the glup and used it in bread, where it was quite tasty -- it would be an excellent base for cinnamon raisin bread.

Instead of cupcakes, I made a 9 x 13 cake. After baking, I poked holes all over it and poured about 1/2 cup of horchata over it. When cool, I frosted it with the horchata frosting. In the end, it was a very pleasant cake, but didn't really wow me.

Mooncake Cupcakes

The mooncake cupcakes (a white cake cushioning a dollop of red bean paste), on the other hand, were very fun and tasty. Not being inclined toward a lot of fuss and bother this time, I used store-bought red bean paste, which was quite sweet. I can see that it would be nice to make your own and reduce the sugar.

I essentially followed the cupcake recipe. Chockylit doesn't specify, but the cupcakes take about 20 minutes to bake.

We formed balls of red bean paste that were a bit more than a teaspoon. As directed in the recipe, I carefully spread out the first layer of batter, and the balls sank to the bottom of the cake. Another time I would leave the first dollop of batter in a mound and perch the red bean paste on top of that. Even though the ball of bean paste appears to stay pretty self-contained, its flavor permeates the cake in a pleasing way.



While the fashion in cupcakes these days seems to dictate a 1:1 frosting to cake ratio, I've never been able to stomach that much frosting. It is true that a thin layer of frosting has much less presentation pizzazz, but it's really what's wanted in this recipe. Even with a modest amount of frosting, the combined sweetness of the red bean paste, cupcake and frosting is nearly overpowering.

We made green tea sour cream frosting by adding about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of matcha powder in our typical sour cream frosting recipe. If I'd had more matcha in the house, I probably would have added more. As it was, it gave the frosting an elegant pale green tint. One recipe was plenty for a dozen cupcakes.

Chockylit specifies salted sesame seeds. I don't know if you can purchase them that way, but ours were unsalted. I tried mixing a little salt in, but it didn't really stick and anyway, I don't think it's necessary, as the plain sesame seeds are very savory.

I found that if you want to sprinkle the seeds on the cupcake, you need to do it immediately after frosting, before the frosting has a chance to set. If you are rolling the cupcake in the seeds, time is of less essence.

Cake Love

As part of my recent immersion in all things cakely, I have been devouring a number of cake cookbooks from the library. At the moment, I am particularly enamored of CakeLove: How to Bake Cakes from Scratch. The author, Warren Brown, was a successful lawyer who had an early-life crisis and became a pastry chef. His aesthetic conforms to most of the articles of the cake manifesto. The book lives up to these promising starts.

I'm a sucker for surprising flavor combinations, and this book has some appealing ones, like mango/orange/cayenne, orange/lemon/grapefruit/cardamom, chocolate/lime, stout/pecan, and polenta/cacao nib/honey/cinnamon/cayenne/almond (whew!). The crunchy feet are a nice shtick, too. (Want to know? Read the book.)

The photos are gorgeous and, more to the point, they make you want to eat the food. Very much want to eat the food. The presentation is almost ostentatiously rustic. The emphasis is on appearing lavish and delicious rather than artful and polished. I'm all for that (cf Article 3).

Brown has clearly experimented a lot and thought through the chemistry. He is sometimes too flip in dismissing received pastry wisdom, but generally he seems to make thoughtful choices that reflect his values. For example, he doesn't care for cake flour, so uses all purpose flour plus potato starch instead. After trying it, I'm with him on that one. And he's a staunch advocate of measuring by weight, to which I say amen with all the fervor of the recent convert. I'm less certain about how much sugar he puts in pound cakes - the texture is divine, but the cake is almost too sweet.

There are a number of nice touches that make this a particularly useful cookbook.

• All of the recipes include alcohol-free alternatives. Although I'm fine with alcohol, I appreciate the substitutions, because we don't have room in our cabinets (or our pocketbook) to stock all of the liqueurs included in the recipes - some recipes have 3 or 4 different kinds of booze in them!
• All of the recipes include high altitude instructions. Not much use in Seattle, but surely helpful elsewhere.
• Brown breaks out the ingredients by the phases of the process (e.g. dry, wet, creaming) and urges that you set everything out before beginning. I'm rarely patient enough to do this, but it really does make life easier. Besides, think of all the prep bowls. I have a major soft spot for prep bowls.
• The book also has many clear, explanatory photos of the baking process. It's very helpful to see what things are supposed to look like at each step. And it's nice to see so many pictures showing dark male hands making cake. Not a common image in this country.

After writing such a positive review, I thought I'd better try a couple of recipes to make sure they were any good. I needn't have worried.

The Sassy pound cake combines mango and orange with just a hint of cayenne for warmth. It is especially fabulous the day it's made, but keeps reasonably well. My version wasn't very strongly flavored because, unfortunately, I didn't have any orange liqueur or orange oil. Don't worry about the cayenne. It just adds a little lingering warmth that you might not even peg as pepper if you didn't know what it was.

To make 12 cupcakes I multiplied all the ingredients by 1/3. In retrospect, I would only have cut the cayenne and baking soda in half. Cupcake papers are pretty much essential, since the cake is so delicate - the cakes would be very hard to get out of the pan otherwise. A spring-loaded ice cream scoop is good for dispensing the batter.

The Chiapas pound cake is the one with the laundry list of ingredients (sorry, I mean "dizzying melange"). Very good cake, but not dizzying. Each of the ingredients is just too microscopic in quantity to pack much punch. The flavor does mature after a few days and the cacao nib taste becomes more pronounced, which is nice. (What's that, you don't have cacao nibs in your pantry? Chopped almonds might be a good substitute). The cake is especially tasty with the addition of a honey meringue frosting sprinkled with more cacao nibs. A 1/3 recipe made about 10 cupcakes. Fill the empty cups with water for even cooking.

The Mojito pound cake was the first recipe I tried that had less than crystal clear instructions. It calls for 1/3 cup of freshly dried mint without specifying how much fresh mint you need to start with . I found the oven-drying process that he recommended tedious enough that I didn't choose to make more after I discovered that I had not guessed right about how much fresh mint to use. (If I had planned ahead, I would have used the food dehydrator.) So, the mint was exceedingly faint on day one, but the lime was just right and the cake was as tasty as all the others. A friend reported that it was quite nice with a direct application of rum. It was also good with meringue. After several days, the flavors had melded beautifully and the mint was finally noticeable. A 1/2 recipe made about 16 cupcakes.

I made the Mojito cake on a very hot day, which inspired me to imagine a polar bear cake as an antidote to the heat. I came up with a pretty good design, but didn't have time to execute it. Look for it in these pages someday soon...

A Paean to the Joy of Cooking

Lest readers think I am a slave to the Moosewoodempire, I should say that another favorite cookbook in our house is the very hep 1953 Joy of Cooking-- so up-to-the-minute that it even includes special instructions for making cakes with an electric mixer.

A cookbook is not just a compendium of recipes. It is a book with a voice, and I am completely charmed by Irma Rombauer's voice.

"To give this book the impression of sobriety and stability it deserves, the alcoholic cocktails have been relegated to the chapter on Beverages. There they may blush unseen by those who disapprove of them and they may be readily found in the company of many other good drinks by those who do not." (p.1)

"The old definition of 'lady' is 'cake-giver.' Whether you bake a cake as an attention for a friend, send a box of cookies to a homesick child or hand a pan of gingerbread over a back fence, the gesture is one of fellowship that adds to your stature and enriches your life. Besides, it's fun to be a 'lady.'" (p. 592)

"A layer cake is a complete course. Unfortunately, it is frequently served in addition to a dessert, which dwarfs it." (p. 639; Wow! Can I go back and visit this time period, please?)

on Orange Cake - "A gorgeous gilded lily presented without apologies." (p. 644)

on Chocolate Spice Cake - "Having firmly made up my mind that this collection contained enough chocolate cakes, I have lost my strength of character sufficiently to lower the bars to let this one in. Its epitaph might well be--'If I am so soon done for, what was I begun for?'" (p. 613; I think this means it's a very good cake that will be eaten quickly, but I'm not sure)

on Mystery Cake - "It would not occur to me to bake it for my own purposes as I have many others to choose from that are better..." (p. 614; but how could you resist making a cake for which one of the ingredients is a can of condensed tomato soup?)

on German Cherry Cake - "There are, of course, different versions of the same cake. Mine is a fairly modern one which may call displeasure down on my head. However, even a German Cherry Cake rule must bow to the Zeitgeist." (p. 638; "rule" is the author's word for "recipe"; we can vouch for this one - it is a very tasty tart - not really a cake)

"Is there anything better than good coffee cake? I am told that the deposed King of Spain 'dunked.' Perhaps that afforded him some comfort." (p. 623; I have included a link for those of you who, like me, are not as historically fluent as we should be)

on Crumb Spice Cake - "This really deserves mention of some kind but I have run out of adjectives." (p. 615; a legitimate plea, given the thousands of recipes in the book)