[Inez] Lemon raspberry cake with lemon curd whipped cream (and colors)

You didn't think I was done with those sprinkles, did you?

I also wasn't done with lemon cake. I found this recipe and modified it a bit to my liking. It's a lemon-raspberry layer cake. I filled it with with raspberry sauce, lemon curd and lemon curd whipped cream (yum!) and frosted it with lemon curd whipped cream. Oh yeah, and I dyed it colors.


What's the occasion, you might ask. I'm not going to say I don't
believe in baking for occasions, because I definitely do believe in baking for occasions! Let's put it this way: I take a Quakerly view about baking fun stuff. Quakers traditionally believe that we shouldn't celebrate holidays because every day has the potential (and should be) a holy day. I believe that any day can be an occasion big enough to warrant a pink cake with yellow frosting and dinosaur sprinkles.

Let's talk about the cake. It's a sour cream cake, so it's moist and dense. It does not rise very high. If you want a sky-high cake you're going to need to make a lot of layers or use a different recipe. That said, I think this cake was a good vehicle for the flavors.

Lemon Raspberry Cake (makes two 8x8 layers)

• 1 1/2 c flour
• 2 1/4 t baking powder
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/2 c butter, softened
• 3/4 c sugar
• 1 1/2 T lemon zest (I just used the zest from 1 lemons)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 c sour cream (I didn't have quite enough so I used about 1/3 c sour cream and topped it off with yogurt
• 1/2 c fresh lemon juice (juice from 2 fairly large lemons)
• 1 1/2 c raspberries, fresh or froz

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and wax paper your pans. Sift together the flour, bp and salt in a small bowl.

Cream butter and sugar. Add the zest... You should be pretty excited by this point. I certainly was.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating well. Oh, take a look at your raspberries now. I ended up cutting mine up a bit, but you don't want anything to hold you up once you've got the wets and the dries mixed together -- you want to be able to put the batter straight in the oven. Raspberries look good? Great.

I'm not sure why, but the recipe wants you to fold in the lemon juice and sour cream. If you're adding food coloring, do it now. I just kept adding red until it looked pretty.

Now fold in the flour mixture. Then fold in the raspberries!

Divide it between the pans right away

and bake for about 25-30 minutes, or until it's just turning golden on the edges and the center springs back up when you touch it lightly. OMG, pretty.

Cool five minutes in the pan and then flip it out onto a rack to finish cooling. I put it bottom down with the wax paper still on so it doesn't stick to the rack. If you're not assembling right after they've cooled, cover them with plastic wrap so they don't dry out at all.

Now there's still the lemon curd, raspberry sauce, and whipped cream to go. No problem. Take a break, have a snack. Loosen up your wrists, because you're about to be stirring for a while...

Lemon Curd

I made so much extra (I have a jar of lemon curd in my fridge! Fancy, eh?), but this amount should do you just fine:

• 1/4 c lemon juice (juice from one good-size lemon)
• 1 egg 
• 1/4 c + 2 T (give or take a bit) sugar
• 2 T butter

That's it! You could add zest, too, but then you have to strain it when you're done. Pooh-pooh.

Whisk the egg well, and then mix the egg, sugar, and lemon juice in a heavy bottomed saucepan.

Yeah, the daylight went away. Sorry.

Okay, put that mixture on low heat and start stirring. First it will get thinner as the sugar dissolves, then it doesn't do anything for a while. A long while. Just keep stirring away. Then all of a sudden you'll feel it start to thicken! It's very cool. It gets a bit thicker, and then eventually starts to bubble. Big bibbles that struggle to make it to the surface. Awesome. Let it bubble for a minute or three and then you're pretty much done. Put it in the fridge (covered) to cool.

The raspberry sauce is no problem after that. I took about a cup of frozen raspberries, thawed them in the microwave, mashed them up pretty good, and then threw them in a saucepan with about 1/4 cup of sugar. Put it on low heat, and stir it until it's pretty hot and the sugar is definitely dissolved. Sprinkle on a bit of corn starch (I think I used about 1/2 teaspoon?), and whisk it in. Stir for another couple minutes or until it's as thick as you want. Put that in the fridge, too.

It looks like boring old raspberry jam but it smells like raspberry heaven.

When everything is chilled, make your whipped cream. The recipe called for 1 c whipped cream but frankly that wasn't enough. Do this:

• 1 1/2 c whipping cream
• 3 T confectioners sugar
• (food coloring)
• 5 T lemon curd

Beat the whipping cream and sugar (and food coloring, if you choose) until beautiful peaks form. Don't overdo it! I overdid it a little bit. I blame the lighting. If it starts looking the slightest bit rough in texture, stop immediately. It should be smooth and light, but hold good peaks. Fold in the lemon curd.

The lighting was terrible for pictures, so I'm just going to explain this next bit:

Spread a thin layer of raspberry sauce on top of the bottom cake. DO NOT SPREAD IT ALL THE WAY TO THE EDGES. Seriously. Leave yourself at least half an inch. 

Spread a layer of lemon curd on top of the raspberry sauce. Ohhhh man.

Take some whipped cream and line that outer edge of the cake, where you didn't put the raspberry sauce and  lemon curd. (This is a little intense, but it will help you understand what I mean.) Then plop some on top and gently, gently spread it around. Do your best to meet the edge layer of whipped cream and the top layer, so that it traps the sauce and curd. Don't put too much whipped cream or it will make the cake unstable.

Put your second cake on top and frost it with the rest of the whipped cream.

Note: I recommend eating as much as possible of it on the first day. The whipped cream doesn't hold up the greatest over time.

[Elise] Sunset Velvet Cake

For my last piece for the food coloring month of April, I decided to go out with a bang. I baked all afternoon to make what I have decided to call Sunset Velvet Cake. It's like Red Velvet Cake but a little bit different.

Basically, I took a pretty standard Red Velvet recipe and tweaked it a bit. Because all of my round pans are different sized, I split the recipe in half and baked each layer separately (making three half recipes total).

For each layer I accidentally used way too little food coloring... 1 tsp instead of 1 oz. BIG difference. You would think I would have noticed something was up when the first layer was pink and not red... oh well.

The way the recipe said to add obscene amounts of food coloring was by mixing it with the buttermilk. This is a third of the way through adding the buttermilk and flour mix alternately.

To be able to get the pan ready for the next layer as quickly as possible I lined the pan with parchement paper by clamping the springform over the square piece of paper and then trimming the edges off.

Here I just moved the orange cake to a cookie sheet to cool while I spread the yellow cake in the pan.

While the third cake was in the oven I made the frosting. I doubled my standard cream cheese frosting, then made it delightfully yellow.

One 10" Round Layer
bake 25 min at 350F

1 1/4 c. cake flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. cocoa powder
1/4 c. butter
3/4 c. white sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. orange extract
1/2 c. buttermilk
1 Tbsp. food coloring*

*Food coloring: So, if you like what you see in this cake I actually used 1 tsp. red in the bottom layer, 1/2 tsp each of red and yellow in the middle layer, and 1 tsp yellow plus a few drops of red in the top layer. However, I had originally planed on having each layer being the intensity of red velvet cake, to do that the recipe called for one ounce of food coloring per layer. After seeing how intense these came out with 1/6 the food coloring the should have had, I think a compromise between the two amounts is best, hence 1 Tbsp. So:

Bottom layer: 1 Tbsp. red
Middle layer: 1 tsp. red + 2 tsp. yellow
Top layer: 1 Tbsp. yellow



Frosting the cake was really fun. The layers were stiff enough that the parchment peeled off nicely and they could be stacked quite easily (you could pick a whole layer up carefully and not have to do anything fancy to keep it from breaking). I had no problems with crumbs getting in the frosting, after having let each layer sit in the fridge until completely cool. Finally, I garnished the cake with some strawberries I had left from the strawberry-rhubarb cake (I honestly don't know why I hadn't finished them sooner!)

I was so worried about how the inside would look and how the orange would taste with the chocolate. Turns out I didn't have too much to worry about; It was beautiful and delicious.

While this cake was so scrumptious, I am so caked out. No more cakes until graduation. I don't even know if I'll bake anything before graduation. This was my last hurrah (for now) and now it's time to buckle down and get some work done. With that in mind I am declaring May 'fun Summer drinks month!'

Yum!

[Elise] Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumb Cake and the Perfect Chai

What a great way to spend a warm spring afternoon, but sitting in the sun on the porch, eating an almost pie-like strawberry-rhubarb crumb cake and drinking a nice cup of chai. My roommate Shianne and I have been making copious amounts of chai ever since I found the perfect recipe.

Chai for Two

Either boil or microwave to just below boiling:
1 1/2 c water
2/3 c milk

Pour over 12 sugar cubes (6 tsp) into a teapot (or six cubes per mug)
Steep two chai teabags, or equivalent loose tea for directed length of time.

Enjoy!

This is the shortcut way, modified from a recipe found at 2B A Snob, which has the individual spices if you wish to make chai completely from scratch.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumb Cake

This recipe is from Sugar Plum. I only made two small tweaks: The first, a teaspoon of cinnamon in the cake batter, and the second I used maybe 10 drops of yellow food coloring instead of just one (qualifying this post, ever so subtly, for food coloring month). Another note, for anyone else needing to know how much rhubarb to harvest or buy (sadly, still no garden of my own) the 2/3 of a cup is slightly less than one stalk, though if you ask me, you should use a whole cup, or rather, the whole stalk, why waste!?

Step one: Mix the batter and spread it in a 9 inch round pan. The batter was so light and fluffy... heavenly really.

Step two, top with chopped strawberries and rhubarb and bake.

Halfway through baking (or should I say, when the cake is half-baked ;-) remove the cake from the oven and add the crumb topping.

When the cake finishes baking, make sure to leave the springform on for at least a half hour, as the cake essentially comes out topped with molten sugar. After a half hour, it is perfectly warm and delicious.

While it is called a crumb cake, and made like a crumb cake, because the cake itself is so light and delicate, it deflates when you take it out of the oven and ends up almost more like a pie (an incredibly delicious pie) so pie-like that my friend Mike refuses to believe that it is a cake. If they were square, I think us Minnesotans would have to call them bars (read with heavy accent).

Lemon-blackberry cupcakes + colors!

I have been dreaming about these cupcakes for a month. Okay, not these specific cupcakes. Mostly cupcakes with THIS MUCH COLOR. Sorry the pictures kind of suck, it was night time.


I made these lemon cupcakes but with less lemon and the addition of blackberries. 

So, lemon-blackberry cupcakes with cream cheese (+colors!) frosting. To be honest, I was a little disappointed with this cake recipe. It felt a little heavy to me. I don't think I did anything wrong. I think next time I would just make a tried-and-true white cake recipe and a bunch of lemon zest.


Anyway, that's not really the important part. The important part is that then I made some cream cheese frosting (recipe below), divided it into 4 parts, and made it colorful.

I got this jar of 6 different kinds of sprinkles not too long ago, so obviously I went crazy. I don't know if you can tell, but the neon sprinkles on the cupcake in the foreground are dinosaurs. What! and the red and blue and yellow ones in the background are cars and trucks. The coolest. And pretty tasty, too.

Cream Cheese Frosting

• 8 oz cc
• 6 oz butter
• ~2 t milk
• 1 1/2 c confectioners sugar
• food coloring!

Cream the cream cheese (ha) and butter. Add the milk. Gradually sift in the confectioners sugar. Mix well.

[Elise] Ugly Cake

I have no idea who first came up with the Ugly Cake concept. I first heard of it from my friend Justine, who got it from our friend Caitlin. Basically, it involves box cake and food coloring... and FUN. You make a few different colors of batter, and glop them all together, maybe swirl them a bit, and BAM you have an ugly cake. It's marevellously fun and you get to lick four bowls instead of just one (and unfortunately wash four bowls, but that's ok). Also, you should be utterly honored if someone give's you an ugly cake, it means they love you. The uglier, the better.

The first time I made got an ugly cake I was so surprised how deep and vivd the colors get. It's really wonderful. The four colors you see here, clockwise starting from the top left, are: A lot of green and a lot of yellow (there gets to be a point when you stop counting), a lot of blue with some greeen, a lot of red with a single drop of blue, and a LOT of yellow with some red. The teal blue color was my favorite.

Now, you could dye frosting and do a similar thing on top, but I've never been a fan of vanilla frosting (with an exception for cream cheese frosting, YUM) so I topped it with good ol' chocolate frosting from a can (I mean, it goes best with box cake). It turned out great!!!

[Elise] Six Weeks: T-43 Days

Ok. In a massive move of procrastination (and really it does need to get done, just maybe not right now) I have made a list of every food item I have. This happened out of an absolute necessity to reorganize my cupboard, where until a few hours ago I had things stacked precariously and other things hidden I had forgotten I had. As I began to slowly remove items from the cupboard, I realized that with two years of food stores built up and a little over a month until I move, I had better make a list of things the should get used before moving.

So, while waiting for my "Ugly" Cake to cool (post forthcoming) I decided to post the list, as a challenge to myself for the next six weeks, and I will try to post at least one thing a week made from this list. The list also includes current perishables that need to be used much sooner. The lavender and beef bouillon I don't need to use up, they're just been sitting in my cupboard for a long time and I think add and interesting touch to the list.
 Ideas welcome!!!

Meanwhile, because I don't have any pictures to give you of my list, here are some Spring flower pictures I've taken so far.

1 Sweet Potato
1 Yam
3 med. Red Onions
1 sm. Yellow Onion
Frozen Peas
Frozen Brocolli
Frozen Corn
2 stalks Rhubarb
Frozen Raspberries
2 lg. Jonagold Apples
2 Frozen Bananas
1 pkg. Strawberries
1 jar Lingonberry Preseres
½ jar Habañero Jam
lots of median grain White Rice
½ c White Quinoa
½ c Red Quinoa
1 c dry Black Beans
2 c Wild Rice
lots of Oat Meal
3 egg yolks
1 can Evaporated Milk
1 c Chocolate Chips
½ c Cocoa Powder
2 T Vanilla Sugar
3/4 c Powdered Sugar
1 c Molasses
2 c Corn Syrup
2½ c Dried Currants
1 c Whole Raw Almonds
1 pkg. Yeast
lots of Bread Crumbs
lots of Bread Flour
½ can Coconut Milk
Red Curry Paste
Cooking Lavender
Beef Bouillon

[Inez] Baklava

I know that April is food coloring month (I'm so excited about this theme), but I found myself with some phyllo that needed to be used up. So I made...

...baklava. I used this recipe that I found through Tastespotting. I made a few slight changes, though. First of all, I halved the recipe and put it in an 8X8 pan. Also, I put less sugar in the syrup and more honey. I love honey.

Okay, I'll explain the process. First you make a syrup out of water, sugar, honey, rose water (I used hibiscus tea because what was I going to do with the rest of the rose water if I bought some and only used one teaspoon for this recipe?), and lemon. It was a little too lemony for me -- I would recommend halving the lemon juice.

Then you make the filling -- nuts, brown sugar, cinnamon, and cloves. Or whatever you want to put in. Let loose! I didn't have any walnuts and I didn't feel like going to the store. So I used hazelnuts.

They were good, but I think it would have been better if I had toasted them a bit. They were a little chewy for my taste. Maybe I just should have cut them up finer? Flavor-wise they worked well, though. Also, I know it's a minor sin, but I did not clarify the butter. That was just laziness.

Anyway, then you butter all the layers of phyllo, put in the filling, butter more phyllo....

Ideally, you would have a phyllo buddy. Someone to uncover it, hand you a piece, and then quick! cover it back up. It dries out pretty easily, and the longer it's exposed the more it sticks to itself. Basically you just have to embrace the fact that it will rip and not be beautiful. It really doesn't matter. It will still be delicious.

When I finished putting it all together, I had some extra butter. I poured it over the top. More butter is always better, right?

The recipe I used called or 75 minutes of baking, but I baked mine for an hour and that was definitely enough. The last part is fun -- you take it out of the oven and immediately pour the room temperature syrup over it. The syrup sizzles and steams and it smells phenomenal. Then cover it with foil and let it soak in and get really delicious. Let it sit for as long as you can stand... which for me was not very long.

But honestly, I think it's better the next day, when all the flavors have had a chance to fully meld and the syrup has been absorbed. Divine.