Entries in cake (13)
Mevrouw Cupcake Goes Daring!
Last week E, in comment to my mild frustration at trying organizing my busy social calendar around yet another baking project, said to me "well, you don't have to bake all the time." While it is true that I'm not always in the mood to bake or feel that I'm really just squeezing it in, most often just preparing my mise en place is all it takes to swing my mood back into baking mode. For me it is less about choice and more about this undeniable desire to create beautiful morsels with butter, sugar, flour and eggs. Even when things go horribly wrong, even when I lie awake tossing and turning at night worrying how the final product will turn out, even when I make something that I know isn't particularly my taste, just because I want to experience making the recipe, I still love every second of the creative process that is baking.
When Lucy tagged me back in April for six words meme it didn't take long to come up with the six words I'd use to describe myself, but it has taken a while to share them, but here they are...
At my best...
in the kitchen.
(Claudia, Karen, Rebekka, Joy, & Kim consider yourself tagged)
In my heart of hearts there is no place I feel more at home then in my lovely kitchen, and although professional training is not in the cards at the moment, there is no reason that I can't make the most of my amateur talents and thirst for knowledge. For these very reasons, I have finally mustered up the courage to join the Daring Bakers, who I've been watching wistfully from afar since their humble beginnings in November of 2006.
mari
in recipes, cake, meme, Daring Bakers
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Master Baker: A Vanilla Trio
To say that I love vanilla is a bit of an understatement, but I really, really, really do love vanilla. I use it in everything from baked goods to vinaigrettes, I've feasted on grilled lobster served with vanilla oil, drank cocktails mixed with homemade vanilla vodka, and even worn vanilla oil as perfume. My love for vanilla was most certainly influenced by my mother, who always used pure Mexican vanilla extract and whole vanilla beans when I was growing up. Once accustomed to the complexity in flavor and aroma of real vanilla, artificial vanilla flavoring just won't do.
mari
in ice cream, recipes, cake, Masterbaker
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TWD - Fluted Polenta & Ricotta Cake
As you are probably well aware, the whole point of Tuesdays with Dorie is to bake our way through Dorie Greenspan's baking bible, Baking: From My Home to Yours. Every week a different member of TWD chooses the recipe of the week and we all give it a go, posting about our experiences on the following Tuesday. I love the fact that I'm working my way through an entire cookbook, a task that until now, I've never accomplished. Hell, I have cookbooks on my bookshelf that I've never made even one recipe from, for that matter. The only draw-back to this otherwise fabulous initiative is that you're not always going to like every recipe and you're not always going to be in the mood for the work that some recipes may require.
I hate to say it, but when I read the recipe for this cake, I felt pretty lukewarm about it. First of all, I don't like dried figs. Fresh figs are lovely and they taste like watermelon, but dried figs and their tiny crunchy seeds, hmmm...not my thing. I was contemplating substituting some other dried fruit, like apricots or dried cherries; but then my strange and wonderful boyfriend, who is notoriously a picky eater, told me that he loves dried figs. What a weirdo, my guy, but in the end I decided to follow the recipe to the letter and leave the figs in. I could always eat around them, right?
mari
in cake, Tuesdays with Dorie, quick & easy
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TWD - Bill's Big Carrot Cake
First off, a big thank you to Amanda of slow like honey for choosing this week's recipe, it may well be one of the easiest recipes that I've made for Tuesdays with Dorie so far. No need to set butter out hours in advance to ensure that it's up to room temperature, no separating of eggs nor whisking of egg whites, not one step that could be called complicated unless you don't happen to have a food processor with which to grate your carrots; and even then it's not really difficult with a box grater, just labor intensive.
mari
in recipes, cupcakes, cake, Tuesdays with Dorie
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When Cake is Called for...
Actually, is there a time when cake isn't called for? I don't happen to think so, but then again I'm not known for my restraint when it comes to the good life.
mari
in baking, recipes, cake, fellow bloggers
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Cake + Ice Cream = 1 Happy Lady
A week ago last Friday, Deb of Smitten Kitchen posted about coffee cake, and not just any coffee cake, 'Big Crumb' Coffee cake with Rhubarb. I drooled over the lush images of red skinned rhubarb floating in vanilla cake batter and sent a psychic message out into the food universe with the hope that some rhubarb would cross my path in the very near future. Fast forward to last Saturday, I'm at the market shopping for apples for tomorrow's TWD recipe and what should I see but some beautiful rose red stalks of rhubarb!
E is a big fan of rhubarb and encouraged me to pick some up, not that I needed any encouragement. I paired it with David Lebovitz's crème fraîche ice cream (page 59 in The Perfect Scoop). Not at all necessary, but so good.
I love cake and ice cream, you can wake me up at any hour for cake and ice cream.
mari
in baking, ice cream, cake, fellow bloggers
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Sexing Up the Competition
I'm pleased as punch to help support the important (and delicious) cause that Rachel over at R khooks is advocating with her Stop the Traffik Chocolate Competition. I happen to be one of those oddbods (Rachel's words) who isn't a true chocolate lover; although I have been known to eat a good quality chocolate bar one square at a time, over the course of a couple of weeks. This fact does not, however, stop me from caring about the quality of the chocolate or the means by which the cocoa was cultivated. No child should be sold into servitude in this day and age, and I commend those companies who share this view and offer fair-trade alternatives to products that we love to love, like chocolate and coffee.
mari
in baking, chocolate, cake, food blog events, good causes
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Lemon Cake to Chase Away the Blues
I’ve been pretty despondent this week about the state of the weather in the Netherlands. It’s basically been raining for the last month (yes, four weeks ladies and gentlemen, I counted), with very little sun and a whole lot of grey skies. I don’t do well without sunshine, and you might ask yourself why then do I live in Northern Europe? This is the very same question I ask myself at times like this.
Ever since I bought my beautiful Weber, the weather has been most foul. I have to swallow a thick green glob of envy, every time I read about those lucky folks (I won’t mention names) out there in the blogosphere enjoying fun-filled barbeques under the sun with their friends. So far, we’ve only grilled for two, almost always under threat of showers (or standing in the rain) and eaten the grilled bounty inside at the dinner table.
Yesterday was no exception to the rule, but I thought weather be damned, I’m getting the Weber out! I wanted to get happy and I wanted to do a little celebratory, “you’re free from overtime games studio slavery” bbq’d steak dinner for E, in hopes that whipping up some tasty vittles for my sweetie might bring a smile to my face. Unfortunately, we had our first slow-start barbeque experience, and it took way too long to get the coals to a perfect grilling state. Which meant that by time we could finally put my marinating steaks on the grill, I was the opposite of happy; I was grumpy Krystal Monster (which is my middle name and E’s pet name for my evil alter ego). My spirits were dampened by the rain and my psyche derailed by a dangerously low blood sugar level, but the smell of steaks sizzling over charcoal kept me going.
Rainy day recipe to bring summer to your dinner table:
Take two good sized steaks and let them come up to room temperature. Sprinkle both sides with Pimenton de la Vera (Spanish smoked hot paprika) and freshly ground course pepper, and then brush both sides with a combo of Worcestershire sauce and good quality olive oil, and finish with a rub of minced garlic on one side of each steak.
Place two fresh sweet corn cobs in a pan of salted water and bring to boil, reduce heat to low and simmer until your can smell sweet corn wafting through the kitchen.
Wrap new potatoes individually in aluminum foil and set on the grill until they test done. Do not put them on the hot coals (like we, the amateur grillers did), as they will become carcinogenic potato briquettes. Do make a sauce with sour cream, lots of freshly pressed garlic, and fresh herbs like mint, dill, basil, parsley chervil and chives for your potatoes (which will even make your over-grilled potatoes taste good). Skip the salad and any other veg, unless your grill starts quicker then ours did and you can thus avoid eating at 9 pm.
The grand finale:
Make this cake with all the love in your heart for your loving (and in my case long-suffering) boyfriend (or whomever) who loves all things lemon. You’ll be tempted to ravage it before you even douse it in the lemon syrup, but wait. Wait till its completely cooled, then slowly dribble the glaze over the cakes and walk away to give the glaze time to set. You won’t be sorry.
Enjoy on the couch with your loved one, while watching trash TV and drinking tea. Feel joy bubble up from your belly and become a smile on your lips.
Many thanks to Mandy over at Fresh from the Oven for posting her new favorite lemon cake recipe and referring to her first favorite lemon cake recipe, which is the very same recipe that the folks over at Leite’s Culinaria saw fit to post, after many requests from their readers. Great minds think alike!
mari
in baking, daily life, ranting & raving, cooking, cake, dinner, salads, bbq'ng
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