Cakes That Think They Are Pies

Lots of reasons to celebrate this week! Freddie came home from college yesterday and I made a traditional dinner for the last night of Chanukah. Freddie doesn't like chocolate desserts so I had to decide between a banana cake and an apple cake. When I forgot to pick up some bananas at Findlay Market last week, I knew it had to be the apple cake. The bananas have to be completely brown and mushy to make the banana cake and that takes at least a full week of advance planning. RHC has a gorgeous recipe for an Apple Upside Down cake and that's what I made.
This cake is gorgeous and is similar to the apple cake I made for Rosh Hashana (Martha Stewart) in that the apples are coated in a caramel sauce. The difference is that this cake is meticulously composed so that the apples make a gorgeous design on the top of the cake.
Here are the apple slices "arranged" in the bottom of the cake pan:

Batter is then "plopped" on the top of the apples (Rose's word, not mine). It is then baked right-side up. and unmolded right away.
Lift off the pan and it looks exactly like the photo in the book.
I would not recommend Rose's recipe for Bourban Whipped Cream unless you seriously like bourban. There is nothing subtle about this whipped cream and the next time I make this cake, I'll just go with plain whipped cream (made from real whipping cream, of course)!

Tonight, Scott and I are going to a holiday party at his brother's house and I wanted to bring a dessert that was not only delicious, but looked spectacular. I went with the Lemon Meringue Cake from RHC. I have had more than one disaster with lemon meringue pies -- the meringue shrinks when I put in in the oven to brown -- but this cake, though extremely time consuming and difficult, looked to be fool-proof with regard to the meringue. First of all, the meringue was an Italian meringue made with a sugar syrup that I boiled to the firm ball stage (248 degrees). Also, the recipe called for plenty of it, so I didn't have to skimp when I coated the cake. I only wish I could figure out how to brown the sides better (convect bake? blow torch?), but, other than that, I am quite pleased.


I'm still running. Just not today.

Chocolate Cupcakes

Before I get to the fun stuff, I ran three miles on the treadmill today. Slow is the word. I walked (slowishly) for five minutes to warm up. My average HR for the three miles was 135. I watched the season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm while I ran.

Mile Pace HR

Lap 1 12:25 130
Lap 2 12:59 140
Lap 3 13:23 140

Last week these slow runs were kind of fun. This week, I'm finding that they are hard. That's part of the challenge, I guess. And really, this is an optimal time to be trying a different kind of training because I don't have any races looming on the horizon. I have nothing to lose.

Now, the fun stuff. Scott gave me Rose's Heavenly Cakes for Chanukah (my selection -- are you kidding???). I've been baking out of Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Cake Bible for almost twenty years and The Pie and Pastry Bible is my go-to cookbook for pie, so when I saw this new cookbook at Barnes and Noble recently, it was a no brainer. I had to have it. I can already tell that there are some editorial improvements over The Cake Bible. For example, in The Cake Bible a lot of the important notes about the recipes came at the end of the recipe. Sometimes there were more than one and it was easy to miss one. Like a textbook, it is replete with notes, astrisks, and arrows (my additions)reminding me not to miss a step. Rose's Heavenly Cakes seems to be better organized and I like how each recipe is accompanied by a photograph rather than having a section of photos in the center of the book and having to search out the one you are creating.

Today I christened the book by baking cupcakes for Sarah to give to her friends as holiday gifts. Since gourmet cupcakes have become popular, it is nice that RHC has a chapter devoted to baby cakes and cupcakes. I always feel like a mad scientist when I try to convert a cake recipe to a recipe for cupcakes and am never sure of the baking time. Even though I practically stand in front of the oven and watch the darned things bake, I've still taken cupcakes out of the oven that are better suited for use as hockey pucks. With a cupcake recipe, all the guesswork is done in the test kitchen. 350 degrees/ 20-25 minutes. Done.

I decided on a peppermint buttercream icing. The thing about real buttercream is that once you've tried it, you'll never go back to that stuff that's made with pounds of confectioners sugar. There is a drawback though. I would have loved to make a pure white icing, but I have no idea how to do it when the recipe calls for egg yolks and butter. If the cupcakes weren't going anywhere, I might have made a white chocolate ganache. Sarah intends to put each cupcake in a little gift box, so I was aiming for a little bit of stability.

Making buttercream is like magic. You start with egg yolks and end up with icing. It took years before I was brave enough to try it because I couldn't imagine how it would possibly work. But it does. I'll show you:

Here are my egg yolks

Rose calls this "neoclassic" buttercream because of this little cheat. Here I am using a mixture of corn syrup and sugar instead of a sugar syrup. I'm heating it up until it's a rolling boil.


While still hot, the corn syrup mixture is added to the egg mixture and, using the hand mixture so the syrup doesn't fly all over the bowl, I beat the mixture for about five minutes.


Here it is before I add the butter (well, it is called butter cream, after all)!

After the addition of all the butter:

I knew Sarah didn't want yellow icing on her cupcakes, so I crushed up some peppermint candy and mixed it in. I also added some peppermint schnapps since I didn't have any peppermint flavoring. Anyway, I know I'd rather have the schnapps, wouldn't you?




I don't know if you can tell, but the peppermint candy, even though I crushed it finely, really thickened up the icing. It's like chunky peanut butter (well, not that thick). For the second time this week, my pastry tip got clogged with bits of stuff -- in this case peppermint. I was using the jumbo star tip too! (If you're a careful reader, you'll remember that my pastry filling tip got clogged with bits of fruit when I made jelly doughnuts). Ok, so I had to think of something else. Here it is!