2009!

Happy 2009 Everyone!

This time last year I made some resolutions that I was good about keeping for about a month. Yeah, so this year I decided not to make any except for maybe losing the 10 lbs I somehow gain between this time last year and now.

Weight has always been something that vexes me. Even when I was young, I was concerned I was "fat". In truth, I've never had to really truly worry too much about my weight. But I do have a comfortable range for myself and I'm a bit outside my range these days. Easy enough! It just means I need to curb on certain foods and step up some exercise.

And so it is with a heavy heart that I leave the Daring Bakers group. I learned a lot about baking from this blogger group and ate a lot of yummy things I made too. But with my new commitment to eating a little bit healthier I feel that my mission in life doesn't really align properly with this group.

Don't worry, I'm not closing down shop completely! I'm definitely going to try and keep up with this blog and tell you about some of the lovely things I get to eat.

Daring Bakers Challenge November

This month's challenge comes from:
Shuna Fish Lydon’s recipe (http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2006 … he-recipe/)

And hosting this month:
http://culinarycuriosity.blogspot.com/
http://blondieandbrownie.blogspot.com/
http://forayintofood.blogspot.com/

I'm late in posting due to a weekend of missing internet access. Oh well. Better late, then never?

I admit that I let out a long sigh when I saw that this month’s challenge was yet another cake with buttercream frosting. I’ve made so many cakes since joining this group and well, I like cake as much as the next person but I’ve never enjoyed buttercream frosting in any form. It has a mouth feel of biting into a stick of butter for me. So to say I was a tad bit disappointed might be an understatement. But you know, I joined this group so I could bake more and learn more. And well I had done those two things so being a part of Daring Bakers is well worth mastering buttercream!

This month’s challenge was a caramel cake with a brown butter frosting. I saw that there was a homemade caramel syrup that had to be made and immediately that was where I’d tweak the recipe just a bit.


I had a new bottle of Bittermen’s Bitters that had been created just for my clothing shops. It was cleverly titled the “Sexy Freudian Slip” and had the essence of ginger, lemongrass, anise and hot peppers. What I wanted was a bitters that not only worked as something edible but also something wearable as personal scent. And did it succeed? It did! It’s a lovely earthy little perfume that is rather interesting and a bit musky and spicy. Plus it helps to make damn fine cocktails too!

So I decided to shake some drops of my “Sexy Freudian Slip” into the syrup once it cooled. Upon tasting the syrup, the flavor of the bitter really came through very nicely and I was surprised how well all those flavors went with the caramel syrup. It was quite a tasty little creation and I imagine it might be fun to use as a sauce for vanilla ice cream. It would definitely keep your guests guessing what you used to flavor the sauce!

Once the syrup was done, I moved into making the cake. I didn’t have a cake pan that I thought would be deep enough so I made two cakes instead of the instructed one. I cut down the baking time but I still think I might have overcooked the cakes a little. I considered soaking them in something to moisten them up, but personally, I felt that to do so would have been cheating a bit. However, the dry cake might have more to do with my crappy electric oven. Cakes never seem to cook well in my oven. Sadness!


Once the cakes were done, into the frosting. And here is usually when I sigh deeply and think “oh yet another buttercream.” But this recipe was different! And actually really kinda cool. Browning the butter was kinda like a fun science experiment. Who knew that butter contained so many solids? I strained the butter filtering out most of the lumpy solids but some of them did get into the frosting. The frosting was ridiculously easy and came together quickly. I took a quick swipe at the bowl mostly to test the consistency. As I started before, I hate buttercream so I wasn’t expecting to like what I was about to taste.



And what a complete shock I was in for! The frosting consistency was a bit more tender that most stiff buttercreams I’ve tasted plus browning the butter gave a really kinda complex flavor to the frosting. It was in short, freakin’ delicious! Sadly, the flavored caramel syrup taste didn’t come thru at all but the frosting was still an interesting and tasty creation. I was quite pleased with it. And definitely will be making the frosting again. Who knew that browning butter would make such a huge difference in taste?

The next day, in time for Thanksgiving dinner, I assembled the cake. I toasted coconut and pecans to put between the layers with the frosting. And began frosting my cake. The frosting was a bit firmer due to time in the fridge overnight. I had to nuke it for a couple of seconds to get it pliable. My finished product:




I think that the cake came out a little too dry as a result of my two cake solution or perhaps due to my oven. The short term eating solution? Cutting a slice of cake and pouring a bit of milk on top of it. It sounds odd but it’s really good and solves the dryness isse. Besides who am I to throw away cake?!? The frosting was kinda this amazing thing and I wasn’t about to throw that out! Sadly, even though the “Sexy Freudian Slip” shined through in the caramel syrup, the flavor was all but lost in the final product. Perhaps I could try soaking the baked cakes in the syrup next time?

Overall, this cake definitely will take some tweaking from me to get it right! But it’s definitely a keeper and I’m thrilled that I had a opportunity to make it. And this praise is coming from someone who was not thrilled at having to make buttercream, so you know this sh_t is the tight!!!

'Zza: October Daring Baker's Challenge

I had a friend who called pizza, "zza". It took me a while to figure out what she was talking about but once I did, I was glad to have a friend who's deep love of pizza meant that she had a pet nickname for the food.

One of my absolute favorite foods, all my childhood memories is a moving evolution of pizza. My family moved every two years and so every move meant a new pizza supplier had to be found! Stouffers French Bread to Pizza Hut to Little Caesars and finally to Bertucci's, I loved it all! When I was 14 I found a wonderfully simple recipe for homemade pizza dough in the back of seventeen magazine. I still use the recipe and have the ripped out pages to refer back to.

So when I learned that this month's Daring Baker Challenge was pizza, I was over the moon! I couldn't wait to try a new recipe for dough. I looked over the recipe but was a little bummed by one small issue. It was a two day deal, which was okay, I could do all the work one day but the issue was timing. The second day's instructions said to pull the dough out of the refrigerator two hours before it needed to be ready. Sadly, with my schedule the way it is with the store and all, I'm lucky to get even an hour to prep before guest arrive for dinner! Luckily, E was doing the challenge with me and had the day off so she was able to come over to the apartment and pull out the dough.

Yay! But back to the actual process. I followed the directions and kneaded the dough a bit more than the 5-7 minutes instructed. I was concerned about the consistency of the dough. It seemed a bit tough to me and I was wondered it would turn out too hard (like the Ina Gartener pizza dough had done on me). I kneaded for more like 10-15 minutes and crossed my fingers that the resting time would allow the dough to really get soft and tender.

The Challenge this month also called for sauce. Didn't matter what kind of sauce but I like a simple pizza and so I thought if we made a tomato and cheese pizza well, a jar sauce wasn't gonna be very tasty. I decided to make a simple tomato sauce from scratch. It was so simple. I simmered a can of crush tomatoes and a couple of cups of red wine with a spoonful of tomato paste, a bit of chicken broth, a handful of dried and fresh basil, dried oregano and two cloves of garlic, Later, I added a slug of olive oil and pat of butter and tasted. It was good but something was missing. I sprinkled in some crush red pepper and tasted again. Still good but missing something still! I stood around and pondered, "hmm..."

I added freshly ground nutmeg and the tasted again, the sauce was awesome! Simple but yet complex. The nutmeg seemed to amplify all the other flavors in the sauce. It was quite lovely. Seriously, why is nutmeg not used in more recipes? Hmm... anyway, I highly recommended it for fall soups and sauces!

On Day 2, I came home to E prepping the toppings. A lovely sight indeed :) She had been kind enough to take out the dough and we were ready to rock and roll. I started to follow the instructions on how to toss the dough but I chickened out. I also chickened out on turning the oven up to 500 and left the oven at 485. (I've been a little scared since my oven door glass shattered due to roasted cauliflower). Luckily, E was kind enough to toss the dough for us. I did notice how tender the dough had become. It was perfectly stretchy and soft. Perfect!

E topped it with my homemade sauce and locally made fresh mozerella and slipped it on the pizza stone.

The final product? Awesome! It was a very, very, very simple pizza all made from scratch, but it might have been the best pizza I've eaten in a long time! The sauce was fantastic but the crust was really quite delicious. It was crisp and light and it cooked perfectly with no soggy edges anywhere!

For pictures and more detail, you should check out E's blog entry...here.

I've very pleased with this Challenge and will definitely keep this recipe handy! However, in the future I'll need to play around with the 2 hour ahead of time step. I'm thinking more like 1 hour or 30 minutes before instead ;)

Thanks for letting me play again Daring Bakers!!!!!!

Not Quite Daring, More Along the Lines of Cute and Sweet

I was very, very excited about this month's Daring Baker Challenge. I was starting to get discouraged with the sheer amount of butter cream I was making every month. I've never been a fan of the taste of butter cream and so it was starting to feel like it was seeping out of my pores.

So I was so happy to see the Challenge take a new turn this month. Eclairs!!!!! The basic form for the recipe this month was from famed Pierre Herme. The rules stated by our lovely host blogger said that we needed to keep at least one chocolate element. Hmmm, nice. That wasn't going to take much arm twisting for me.

Lately, I've been craving Nutella. I can't keep it in the house because much like dulce de leche, Nutella falls into the category of Crack for me. So I thought I'd do a challenge that included nutella in some way, shape or form.

I decided that I'd make a Nutella "pastry" cream by mixing it with whipped cream and piping it into the pastry shells. This challenge was not only going to be interesting to me (as all of them are) but actually was going to be something I was excited about eating too.

I've never worked with choux pastry before and because there is a heating step to making the dough, I always assumed that choux was hard to make. And that couldn't have been further from the truth!

Luckily, E had already gotten all the ingredients together for us to use. So all I had to do was measure and mix. After I quickly measured and dumped everything into the heavy bottomed pan for heating, including the flour! Eeeek, I had to dump out my first try on the mix due to my flour mistake, but even still, the dough came together fast.

It looked really cool in the bottom of my pan. One cute little dough ball that later because a fairly sticky and gooey dough. Because I'm a fairly utiliartian cook/baker, I don't know a pastry bag or tips. Instead I loaded the dough into a 10 gallon plastic bag and cut off the tip. I considered making mini eclairs like Elizabeth had done but hers were very cute and I didn't want to compete with such cuteness. So I went the opposite direction and made big fat rounds out of the piped out choux pastry. Into the oven they went. I will say that we had to double, maybe even triple our baking time (well I did, of course, but so did E and she made the mini ones). So the baking time on the challenage seem a bit off. In any event, the puffs came out of the oven looking awesome. Behold!

They smelled divine. Egg-y and buttery. I was really excited. I let them cool and went about making a hole in the side of each of them so I could pipe in my whipped cream/nutella. Once I did that, I went ahead and nuked the nutella (or whole food equivelant that E found for me, thanks babe!) for 40 seconds. It was melty and perfect. After whipping my cream to firm peak form, close to butter, but not quite there, I folded in the melty nutella. Using yet another plastic pouch from my stash. I loaded the nutella whipped cream in and cut off the tip.

Much to my dismay, I couldn't pipe the cream into the holes I made. The choux pastry puffs were a bit more dense that I had imagined. So I gave up and just sliced them down the side and put the cream in the middle. It actually worked out better for me because it meant I could really load up the pastries with that yummy nutella whipped cream. Mmmm....

Afterwards, I drizzled on the glaze that Elizabeth had made for her eclairs. It had Iclandic dark chocolate in it. I broke off a piece and liked it alot. But I'll be honest. I didn't see much difference between that chocolate or hershey's dark chocolate. I guess I'm just a low brow girl ;)

I was very pleased with the final product.
Look at how cute they are! How did they taste? Um, let's see chocolate, nutella, whipped cream and freshly made choux pastry...that's a recipe for delicious!!! Needless to say, I was really pleased with the results. The choux was airy and eggy but still more dense than what I imagined it would be. I was actually very happy with the resulting pastry. Fairly simple to make, fairly cheap ingrediants and teedaaahh, eclairs!

The nutella whipped cream wasn't as complex in flavors as what Elizabeth did with hers. She used local Mexican chcolate bitters and added other spices as well to her filling. But there's something to be said for the simple. And since I was craving nutella, this challenge hit the spot with me!

Thanks for picking this as August's challenge. I absolutely loved it!!

I'm a Buttercream Machine

Or at least that's how I'm feeling these days. With four challenges under my belt and three of them involving cake and buttercream, I feel like I'm well schooled on buttercream and that actually being well schooled came in handy for this challenge.

The recipe called for quite a bit of hazelnuts and when I went to my Ghetto Shaws, there were only three measly 1/2 cup packages of hazelnuts. Arugh. Okay, I already knew I wasn't going to make the "hazelnut praline" hooey but I still grabbed a bag of pecans just incase.

Being that I don't own a food processor, I decided I would try pulverizing my hazelnuts for the cake in my blender. Um not the brightest move. (Sorry that the picture isn't flipped for your viewing pleasure).


The parts of the nuts that got chopped started to get a little gummy in the blender and some parts didn't really get chopped at all. Plus, I got a supreme case of the lazies and didn't toast the nuts (I really should have!) so that meant the big chunks of nuts later got filtered out when the dry mixture put sifted thru the mesh sifter. Whoops!

However, for all my hazelnut mishaps, the batter came together nicely.

It seems light and frothy and I was excited about what sort of cake it would produce.
The cake came out perfectly golden and springy to the touch. I was very, very pleased with the results. Onto the buttercream. Alright, so it wouldn't have been a "drama" if my Granny's hand mixer hadn't died in the middle of making the frosting. Drats!

There was no way I was going to be able to beat the semi soft butter into soft whipped buttercream by hand. What was I going to do? Luckily I remembered that the buttercream recipe from my first challenge, the Dorie Greenspan party cake of March was different in that the butter was melted. So I knew I could melt the butter, allowing me to stir it in by hand and end up with a fantastic buttercream.

And you know what? It worked out great! I had a split second of doubt as I poured the melted butter in and started stirring but it quickly came together.
It was shiny and beautiful if I do say so myself ;)

I started on my ganache. The recipe said use a very good quality chocolate. Hmm...personally I'm a nestle's choco chip girl!


The ganache was so easy to make, and I loved pouring it over the cake. I was suppose to smooth it out and make it look all pretty and uniform but I liked how the cake looked with the ganache dripping down the sides. And since I already knew I wasn't piping out hazelnut praline cream all over it, I left the cake be as is.

Actually, I'm very pleased with how my cake ended up looking. I happened to have friends over the night I was ready to serve it. All agreed the cake was very good. Moist and pleasant enough but not near enough hazelnut flavor. Drats! I really should have toasted those darn nuts. Damn my laziness. Oh well, at least I know now for next time ;)

Creating a Creature From the Blue Lagoon...

Or this month's Daring Baker Challenge!

This month's challenge was a pretty tough one for me, but unlike last month's end results, I was terribly proud and pleased with the end product. Would I make it again? Perhaps, unlike the Opera Cake that I would say no to, this one I would consider - the bread is really rich and would make a wonderful holiday gift. Plus it's a great base for many filling options. This recipe makes a lot of dough! And I still have the other half of the dough in my freezer waiting for when I feel the need to have my apartment smell wonderfully buttery and yeasty. The only drawbacks to this bread are as follows:

1.) It's damn time consuming.

2.) My hand smelled like butter for two solid days in a row. I guess this might not be considered a drawback to some, but it's not a great motivational tool when I'm at the gym and trying to concentrate on the spinning instruction telling me to feel the burn.

3.) I suck at making dough wells! I'll get to this later in this post.

But overall, I was very proud of my work on this challenged and others who sampled it, enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Originally, I thought I'd do a savory braid but after emailing the host blogger (who was so sweet and prompt with her replies) I understood that I needed to stick with the more traditional fruit sort of filling. Hmmm....

Well, it turned out that blueberries were all 2 for 1 at the ghetto Shaws! Wooohoo, so I went ahead and stocked up. I love blueberries and have been known to go thru an entire pint as a snack in one evening. I considered just using the blueberries and glazing them with a bit of apricot jam but then remembered that I had also stocked up on lemons. I thought a nice combination would be lemon curd with fresh blueberries.

I remembered a recipe for lime curd in one of my Barefoot Contessa cookbooks and also remembered that she wrote a sub of lemons was acceptable as well.

Okay, okay, I know I said that I was taking time off from my relationship with Ina but I had also seen her make this on the show and ever since had wanted a reason to make it too. It looked like it had just the right about of tart pucker and sweet.

So I mixed the ingredients all together and it looked like this:

It's hard to see in the picture but it resembled yellow curdled milk. It was lumpy and frothy and just gross. However, I wasn't worried. But I had watched her make it on TV and she notes that it will look like this and as it gets cooked, it will come together and thicken up. Now, if I were to just follow the cookbook, I would have been concerned with the state of my curd. No where in the Barefoot Contessa cookbook say anything about the curdle-y appearance of the curd.

And sure enough it came together after a good 10 mins on low heat. Glossy and heavenly smelling. As I waited for it to cool, I sampled a little bit. And sampled a little bit more. Holy bee-jezus! It was good stuff. Tart and yet just sweet enough. Rich and creamy and completely decadent because 2 sticks of butter went into the curd. It was delicious. So it looks like maybe Ina and I are back together, but it's only a temporary trial period for now. I'm still dating other people ;)

Since I'm not a hardcore baker and rarely make anything that calls for yeast (pizza dough being the only exception in my life), I felt that there were a few gaps in the instructions. It begins by telling me to mix the yeast with cold milk...

Alright, so I knew that I needed to activate the yeast but the only way I'd know that is because I have used yeast before. But had I not, I'd hate to think what my bread would have become with unactivated yeast and cold milk...matzo?

Anywhooo, I mixed the milk and yeast and other ingredients together and made my flour well. I made the mistake of dumping the liquid all into my little well. Um and this happened...
So the liquid broke through the flour barricade and I panicked and trying to add flour to the liquid thinking "well it will thicken up". Yeah, clearly a panic move that only made matters worse. So I cleaned up the mess and started over. But this time, I gradually added the liquid a little at a time. Again, not sure the recipe said anything about doing that but it certainly made the situation less traumatic and kept everything in my well.

The dough was left to rest and when it came time to "turn" it with butter the first time, I spread the butter quite thickly. The instructions never said how thick the butter layer should be and since I've never worked with butter in breads (again, remember what I said about pizza?) I didn't know that it would have been better to spread a much thinner layer down. As a result everytime I turned the dough it oozed butter on my kitchen counter and a LOT of it. It got to the point where I had to cheat and scrap the butter off the counter (don't worry it was clean) and add it back into the dough. It also means I sorta lost track of the way I was turning mid way through. Oh well. I hoped for the best for my oozing butter dough.

I let it sit in the fridge overnight and the next day was greeted by my little butterball. It already smelled divine! Mmm, butter and yeast! I rolled it out and even used a ruler to help me get the measurements perfect. I had a great looking little rectangle. But again, confusion arose over which ends I should be making my cuts. The long way or the short way? I took a gamble and did it the short end of the rectangle.


Although I don't think that was "right", it did allow me to put a lot of my filling down the middle. I piled on my homemade lemon curd and 2for1 blueberries. I folded down my ends and began "braiding". I got to the end and realized my braid looked more like an alien than anything else. This discovery was just reinforced by bread dough eye sockets and blueberries for eyes.


He kinda looked like R2D2. But I instantly loves him!! So after a good long proofing session and a little egg wash, into the oven he went.

I tend to think my oven sucks when it comes to baking but this recipe really allowed my oven to finally shine! Look at how evenly golden my creature got:

I was so pleased. Behold, my final Daring Baker creation:

I was pleasantly surprised that the blueberries and curd didn't all come leaking out. It looked awesome. And the taste? Really, really fantastic. Almost like a homemade breakfast strudel. It was rich and I couldn't eat more than one slice. So I gave it away to friends. They said it was really good too. Given my messy missteps, the bread really exceeded my expectations and then some. So yay!!

Thanks again, Daring Bakers!

Daring Bakers May - Apricot and Ginger Opera Cake

I found this month's challenge, well challenging. I tend to love baking but I'm nothing more than a homespun baker. My cakes and cookies always look homemade. A little rough around the edges but tasty nonetheless.

I wasn't sure what flavoring I'd use. I tend to not like the flavor of white chocolate and I've never really done a lot with butter cream b/c all I ever really taste is butter. The mouth feel of butter cream is something I don't tend to enjoy. But I joined this group as a way to grow and learn so if part of the challenge calls for white chocolate and butter cream, well, I'm certainly happy to give it a shot and test it out!

Still uncertain what flavoring I'd do, I took a T-ride to Trader Joes where I was told I'd find almond meal for a fraction of the cost of Wholefoods. While I was at TJ's I noticed fresh apricots. I picked up some of those and got to thinking that one of my favorite flavor pairings is ginger and apricot. Panini, a bakery that has been closed for a while now, use to serve up apricot and ginger scones and they were pretty darn tasty. So I decided that my opera cake would include fresh ginger, fresh apricots, apricot nectar and some white peachello that was leftover from another dinner party.

I came home and go into my crocs and prepped for an evening of baking.

The cake batter came together rather quickly and easily. I grated fresh ginger into the batter and poured some apricot nectar in as well.
But the issue is always my oven. It seems to have two vastly different temperatures. And the result of cooking the cakes at the same time in the same oven based on the Daring Baker instructions resulted in this:

Hmm, I should have known better, since I know that my oven is kinda weird and baked one jelly roll sheet at a time. I went ahead and used the slightly overcooked cake anyway b/c I just assumed that the syrup would moisten it enough.

Into the syrup, I put a serious shot of the peachello and a big chunk of fresh ginger chopped big enough so I could fish it out once it was done cooking.
The apricots I quickly popped into some boiling water and fished out. I let them cool and peeled off their fuzzy skins and set them side.


The mousse also got a shot of grated ginger, apricot nectar and peachello.

The hardest part of this challenge, for me, was the buttercream recipe. I ran into issues when I went to add the boiled sugar (up to 220) to my egg mixture. The sugar did harden but it hardens so quickly that I didn't use quite a bit of it. As you can see, a lot of it ended up on still in the side of my pot and also on the side of my bowl. This buttercream recipe stressed me out. It seemed so wasteful to not even get a chance to use so much of the sugar due to hardening on the side of my pan. Did I do something wrong???
Since Elizabeth had decided to join Daring Bakers too, we decided it would be fun to have a bake off at her place and taste our different takes on Opera Cake. So I decided to put all my cake components into go-to containers and assemble at her place. I would make the glaze her at her place too. Bagged and ready to go, I waited for the bus to take me to Dot.

Little did I know that I'd be waiting for over 40 mins for a bus that would never arrive. Aaaauuurrrgggghhhh. It was so frustrating that I opted to go home and just assemble my cake there.

I opted to glaze the cake the next day after it had chilled a while. Clearly, I need to work on my professional cake glazing skills! Finally it was done.

How did it taste?

I liked it a lot. I wasn't very pleased with the texture of the almond meal from TJ's. Elizabeth had used blanched almonds and made her own meal and I liked the texture of her cake much better. But the flavor of apricot and ginger tasted great with white chocolate. I wish I had used a bit more grated ginger, but I was conservative b/c I didn't know what baking would do to the ginger. Next time, I'll add a lot more! Plus the syrup did moisten up the overcooked cake piece quite a bit and I was very pleased with that too.

I don't think I'll ever go thru the trouble of making an opera cake again but it was nice to try and if you're ever looking for a nice spring flavor combo, I think you can't beat fresh apricot and ginger.

My First Daring Baker Post

The question has often been posed: does bacon make everything better? And actually, I fall in the camp that bacon does make everything better. But it was high time to test out that theory. And since I had a birthday coming up and a Daring Baker Challenge to complete, I thought what better way to test my theory than a bacon themed birthday party with a party cake made with bacon too?

It was during a dinner date with E that a brainstorm of sorts happened. What would the menu of a bacon themed party look like? E thought it was would great to take food typically not made with bacon and re-envision them with bacon as an ingredient. I agreed. She came up with a bacon "maki" with grits as the "rice" wrapped around egg and topped with a slice of bacon. I wanted to serve bacon cheeseburgers, bacon "spring rolls" (which later became salad with homemade buttermilk dressing and bacon) and also the party cake for Daring Bakers. I had thought about tweaking the recipe to include bacon but since it was my first challenge, I didn't want to earn the label of "rebel" this early on.

But I did go home that evening and read the Daring Baker recipe a couple of times and decided that this challenge was in fact flexible enough for me to play around with. And since I loved the combination of chocolate and peanut butter, I thought I'd use that with the bacon as decorative flavor and texture component on the top of the cake. Chocolate, peanut butter and bacon?! Well, it sounds good to me!

The first thing you should know about me is that I love cooking and baking, but the "science" often alludes me. I know to follow baking recipes almost to the letter because most baking requires precision. So it's rare for me to add or sub in anything when it comes to baked goods. But this bacon party inspired me to be a little bit more, well, "daring" (hah).

The set up was rather easy. And I decided I would bake the cake the night before the party and cover the cakes and ice and assemble the day of the party.

I added a cup of hersey's baking cocoa to the dry ingredients and I was sure to use cake flour for this challenage too. I used swan down brand. In the pic below you will also see my late Grandma Howley's trusty hand beater. I love it because it works like a champ and well, every time I use it, I think of my Grandma H.
I also added a bit of instant espresso powder to the dry mix too. I'm a devotee of Ina Gardener and she says that coffee brings out the intensity of chocolate and often combines the two. I used this stuff. I've had this jar for ever and I use it when I make tiramasu too. Anything calling for chocolate means this stuff gets added to the mix as well.
I finished mixing and when I took a look at my final cake batter, it looked, well a lot thicker than most cake batters I've ever worked with.

It was more of a brownie batter and this caused me a bit of concern. I decided I'd just loosen it up a bit with a buttermilk. The batter was still thick but I poured it into the cake pans and baked anyway.

The cakes came out and looked, well, hmm...
cracked. I cooked them for only 31 mins...maybe I should have done even less time. I was a little nervous about the cakes because of the cracks. I hadn't ever baked a cake and have it crack like that. What did it mean exactly? How would it taste? I was also disappointed in the lack of rise. But I read other Daring Bakers' entries and noticed that many of them had trouble getting their cakes to really rise either.

I will say that it smelled divine. But what's better than the smell of chocolate, butter and sugar? Not much, if you ask me! And um, cleaning the cake batter bowl with a spoon was a tasted endeavor. It tasted great in raw form, so I hoped that it wouldn't be much different in cooked form!

I made the frosting by halfing the butter in the cream and subbing in peanut butter instead. I figured the fat content in the peanut butter would make up for the missing butter. I've never been a huge buttercream frosting fan and so never tried my hand at making it. I have to say, I really enjoyed making this recipe. It was much more time consuming than my usual habit of making cream cheese frostings or confectioners sugar with some milk frosting or just plain old whipped cream, but the end result was pretty amazing. The frosting was shiny and quite delicious. The peanut butter flavor was very apparent. Frosting the cake was a breeze and it looked quite nice with it's crumble of bacon on top. This cake also has a layer of cooked crumbled bacon in the middle. Who needs raspberries when you have bacon!

Here is my finished cake. If I wanted to make a real show stopper, I would have made another batch of batter. It wasn't a very tall cake but the bacon on top was quite a conversation starter.

The food was great and a fun time was had by all. E made bacon martinis for all and my friends Harin and Ed took over cooking the burgers. Sure the copious amounts of bacon meant that the smoke detector was set off three times over the course of the evening but whatever.

And as for the cake? Well, it was pretty dense and dry. I was really disappointed and ended up throwing much of it out. If the cake had been a lot moister, it would have been a fantastic cake! The bacon really brought out the nuttiness of the peanut butter and it was smoky and salty. The frosting with the bacon was the best part of the cake.

My conclusion? Bacon does indeed make everything better!

Thanks Daring Bakers for letting me join. I had a blast with this challenge and can't wait until next month's!

Daring Baker Post for the Daring Baker Blog

Added: (Please note: this isn't my original Daring Baker post)

I tried to post this to the Daring Baker website b/c I wanted to get a little feedback as to thoughts on why the dryness of the cake occur and how to remedy such an issue early on. But the google server is a hack!! Ugh, so I'm posting it here in hopes that at a later time, I can post on Daring Bakers and get some constructive feedback.


I completed my first challenge and was semi pleased with the results. Perhaps most importantly to me, I'm delighted and honored to have joined this group and I'm looking forward to the challenges to come!

Since I was hosting a "bacon makes everything better" party and this month's challenge had so much flexibility (I read the challenge rules a few times just to make sure I was playing nicely), I decided to modify it to fit with the theme...chocolate cake with peanut butter buttercream frosting and crumbled bacon in the middle layer and on top.

It worked out, okay. The cake was a bit dry (was the thickness of the batter a sign? or were the cracks in the cake after baking a give away?) but I feel that that was more do to user based error than recipe error. The icing was fantastic and it was a lot of fun for me to try my hand at making buttercream. And the bacon? It actually worked great with the cake!

Thanks so much for having me here. I'm excited to be a part of such a kick-butt group of bakers.
--Leah
I Came to Eat!