[Inez] Birthday cake

Okay, so this is a month late, but I made myself a pretty birthday cake and I wanted to share it with you. I seem to be going through a hot pink thing right now (you should see my nails), and I like to have fun with my cake decorating, so I made the whole thing hot pink. I used this very cool, very time-consuming frosting method I learned about from the internet on the coconut cake I've told you about before. it starts like this:

This has basically a thick crumb coat/thin base coat. Then you squeeze on little drops of frosting with a pastry bag and smooth it out with a spoon or a narrow spatula. Like so:

I only did the top so that I could still coat the sides in toasted coconut (omg so delish), but I think it turned out quite nicely.

[Inez] Quilting (Part 1)

I decided to make a quilt for my bed.

I blame Pinterest. I saw this quilt on Pinterest that doesn't require matching up corners, and I said "Sign me up!" It doesn't really have a pattern per se, and I couldn't narrow down my fabrics so I ended up getting a whole bunch of them.

They're mostly in the blue/yellow/grey range, with a  few highlights for pop.

I spent Hurricane Sandy cutting hundreds of pieces of fabric from approximately 9 yards of fabric. My hand and wrist muscles ached by the end of it.

But then, ta da! ready to start sewing.

So far I have sewed each of the individual rows (19 of them) and the next step is to stitch the rows together. Then batting, backing, edging, and quilting. No bigs.

I've learned a lot already, and would do several things differently if I were to start anew right now... but I'm not starting anew right now, so I'm just going to roll with it. It will be busy and imperfect, but it will bring a lot of light and color to the room during the winter. And who knows, maybe it will start something. Maybe I'll be buying self healing boards and roller cutters next. We'll see.

[Inez] Sourdough bread

When Colin brought up the idea of making sourdough from scratch, I encouraged him wholeheartedly. Conveniently it coincided with the purchase of my new camera, so I was able to get some good pictures even though most of the action happened in the evenings.

The recipe he used comes from Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman. 

I didn't really know how sourdough happened, so the process was fascinating to me. The culture is started with rye flour mixed with water. That's it.

Here's what it looks like on Day One. It's very thick and very dark (from the rye flour):

When starting a new sourdough culture, you have to "feed" it twice a day for a week. What this means is that twice a day you remove half of the culture (it grows a LOT every day!) and add more flour (all purpose flour after Day One) and water.

It bubbles and grows and becomes paler and thinner. It also smells really bad for the first few days. It doesn't start to smell like bread until Day 5 or so.

After you've spent a week creating your culture, you can finally make bread. This is a much longer process than we anticipated. First you have to "build" your culture. That's where you take a little bit of the culture (1 oz for two loaves of bread) and make into a bigger amount by adding flour and water. Then you have to let it sit for 12 hours to make sure you have enough active yeast to leaven the whole batch. I just want to reemphasize here, because it took a little while for this to sink in for me: what we're doing here is making bread out of flour, water, and at the very end, a bit of salt. That's it. All of the yeast comes naturally from the interaction between the flour and air. It's really incredible.

So after you've built your culture, you add more flour and water until it starts to resemble bread dough. Knead, rise, etc. I wish I had taken a picture of the loaves before they went into the oven, because they kind of looked like oversized pancakes. They were about 6 or 7 inches in diameter and only about 2 1/2 inches tall. Halfway through their time in the oven something completely magic happened and they just exploded in height! We were all a bit nervous about what would happen, but it was really cool to watch. And then they came out of the oven and just looked beautiful:

Delicious, too. A success all-around.

The only catch to this story is that once you've got the culture you have to keep feeding it. Twice a day. From now until forever. So... we'll see how long that lasts.

[Inez] German Apple Pancake

This is one of my favorite breakfast foods to make when I can wait the 25 minutes for it to bake. My mama Jamie taught me how to make it. The magic number for the ingredients is 3:

• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1 apple, peeled and sliced

You also need a cast iron pan (preferably a ~12 inch pan -- mine is smaller and my pancake comes out very thick and not as crispy as I would like).

First of all, preheat your oven to 425. Right before you mix your ingredients, put your cast iron pan into the oven to get hot. Then mix your milk, flour, and eggs. You could put it through a sieve to avoid any lumps in the batter (you'll see what I mean in the last picture -- I did not put the batter through a sieve).

Now put 1-2 tablespoons of butter in your cast iron pan to melt (leave the pan in the oven). Slice your apple if you haven't done that yet and mix it into the batter. 

Pour your batter into the cast iron pan:

10 minutes at 425 Fahrenheit.

25 minutes at 350 Fahrenheit.

Eat immediately with maple syrup and peanut butter or yogurt (or whatever you fancy).

[Inez] Baby Blanket #2

The first baby blanket I ever made was about a year ago, for my nephew Kaleb. My neighbors and friends Sarah and James had their first baby about two weeks ago, so I made them a blanket when I was in Minneapolis recently. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out!

The underside.

Here is it finished except for the yarn on the corners of the squares to hold the sides together.

[Elise] Jam filled popovers

Ok. I have clearly not been holding up my end of the blog here, but really, how do I compete with a wedding cake?? I must say I am supremely jealous that I no longer live in D.C. to munch on test cakes. I will have to drool from here, and make my own delicious things.

First up, a long overdue post on my experiment with jam filled popovers.

I started with the basic popover recipe out of the joy of cooking. But I decided I wanted to see what would happen if I put jam in them before they went in the oven (because it's so hard to put jam on them after they come out of the oven and you just want them all to be in your mouth). So each popover got a little dollop of jam right before the whole thing slid into the oven.

 

The end result!

 The results were delicious, but stuck to the pan. Apparently the jam both sinks and also rises as its liquids boil away in the oven. The part of the popovers that stuck to the well greased pans were the jelly lined bottoms. Another interesting result was that almost all of them had holes clear through the entire popover (as modeled by Matthew). Delicious as they were,  I think next time I will stick to normal popovers and adorn them to my hearts content (and burning fingers displeasure) after they come out of the oven.

[Inez] Wedding cake: practice round (part 2)

Alrighty friends, so we've gotten through Day 1 and Day 2 of making a practice wedding cake. The cakes are baked and frosted in individual tiers, and they have just sat in the fridge overnight. Not too long before the wedding (or event in which you invite all your friends to eat the enormous amount of cake you just made), you want to assemble the cake and make it pretty. I say not too long before the eating event because I don't have a box or other container large enough to hold an entire wedding cake, so it's just going to be sitting in the fridge, and you don't want your frosting to dry out or anything.

The first step in assembling your tiered cake is to remove each tier from the fridge and inspect the frosting for any damage that may have been incurred by your totally homemade cake covering mechanism. I had some extra vanilla frosting, so I just went around and added a very thin layer of frosting  which I had softened up quite a bit so it was like the consistency of mayonnaise. Because the cake had just come out of the fridge, the existing frosting was very firm, so I was able to easily smooth out any imperfections without messing with the existing frosting job.


Then you need to add some dowels. You can get plastic ones that are sort of like strong straws, but they cost a lot more. These were pretty cheap. Insert a dowel into your cake and mark it where the frosting comes up to. Then cut it just a bit above that mark. Mark and cut all dowels for the layer so they're exactly the same height.

Colin was the master of dowel-cutting. He opted to use a vice grip for accuracy.

I stuck five dowels in the bottom (12 inch) tier, and three in the middle (9 inch) tier.

You can see there is a slight gap between each layer. That gap kept me from having a heart attack when I placed each tier on top of the one beneath it.

Then, make it pretty! I played around with a few different piping tips and methods.

The bottom one is pretty, but I didn't do it very evenly. I was figuring it out as I went. I'll be practicing that between now and wedding day.

Sometimes I felt like the gap made it difficult to pipe evenly and well, especially with the middle tier. It just didn't have enough to stick to. If I use the shell design (see the lower border in the picture below), I may put a small plain rope of piped icing that I can then build off of with a pretty border.

Now, for the actual wedding cake I'll be decorating with flowers. Of course, I don't have the flowers yet. The cake looked nice, but very plain. So at Colin's suggestion, I made some pretty little decorations with one of the piping tips I have. I really like this one, because you don't have to do anything except pipe on a little blob, and it comes out looking like a flower!

Then I added some little silver sugar balls.

And in the end it looked like a real wedding cake.

A couple of notes: In the picture below, you can see that the cake turned sort of blue on the bottom slice:

The bottom layer of filling has red food coloring and did not dye the cake. The middle and top layer of filling had jam next to the cake, with filling in between the layers of jam -- and it dyed the cake. So I'll not be using jam, and will be using food coloring.

Another note: I used a vanilla bean in the plain frosting, and you can see vanilla bean specks in the frosting covering the cake. I won't be doing that for the real deal, just for a more uniform look.

[Inez] Wedding cake: practice round (part 1)

I know I just posted about a cake I made a week ago... but I made an even more exciting cake last weekend. Hope you're cool with that.

This does not include the ingredients I already had in the house.

So first, to review. I'm making a wedding cake for my dear friend Steph, who was my freshman roommate, my sophomore roommate, my junior roommate, and would have probably been my senior roommate if I hadn't done Quaker house. As it was, I spent about as much time at Steph's apartment as my own, senior year. See there's this funny thing where if you're a senior trying to write your thesis and you live with a bunch of sophomores, they JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF QUIET. I mean, glad you had fun, people. And glad I had another living room I could go write in.

Um, anyway. Steph. Wedding cake. Oh yes, review: 12 inch tier = hazelnut cake with chocolate filling, 9 inch  tier = vanilla cake with raspberry filling, 6 inch tier (plus additional sheet cake to feed the masses) = chocolate with orange filling. I'm flying out to California in 15 days to make this happen.

Day One: bake six layers of cake. Each tier will have two layers, and each layer will be torted for greater height and a more exciting cake-to-frosting ratio. I didn't take pictures of the baking process because how many pictures of flour can I really expect you to appreciate? Here's my fridge after all the cakes were baked:

Eat food, watch Dr. Who, sleep.

Day Two: Make four kinds of cream cheese frosting (fillings detailed above, plus vanilla cream cheese frosting to cover the outside of the cake).

Here's my Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe.

• 2 pkg cc
• 1 stick butter
• 1 t vanilla and/or 1 vanilla bean
• ~1 c confectioners suger (to taste... I usually do a bit less than a cup)
• ~1-1.5 c whipping cream 

Cream the butter first before anything because otherwise sometimes you may end up with little butter bits that don't mix in all the way if the butter isn't quite soft. Then add the cc, vanilla, confectioners sugar, and beat until fully combined. Whip the cream and fold in.

Before adding whipped cream.

Raspberry: Measure out about 1 cup of raspberries, strain slightly to remove some of the liquid. Add to butter/cc mix before folding in the whipped cream.

Chocolate: Melt 4 oz semi-sweet baker's chocolate, let cool somewhat. Add to butter/cc mix before folding in the whipped cream. Reduce confectioners sugar to about 1/2 cup.

Orange: Add the zest of one orange, 1 T orange juice, and a scant 1/4 t orange extract to butter/cc mix before folding in the whipped cream. Add more of anything to taste -- but go easy on the orange extract; it can easily overpower the frosting.

Fold in the whipped cream with a gentle touch. These are clouds, baby, you don't want to crush them.

The frosting will about double in size when you add the whipped cream. Awesome.

When you've got all the frostings made up, fill and frost each individual layer as if it were its own cake. Do it right. Make it pretty. Don't worry too much about the bottom edge.

Now here's the deal. If you've refrigerated the frosting, you have to let it sit out for a while before frosting. If it's still cold, there will be lots of air bubbles that get in the way of smoothing it out. You can fold the frosting again to encourage it to soften up. It may lose some of its fluffiness, but it's worth it if you don't have the time/patience to let it sit out.

Put these bad boys in the fridge. Cover them up. Don't worry too much if you bang them a tiny bit getting them in or out, you can fix them tomorrow. Go to the pizza place down the street with your friends, have some dinner. Have a beer. Go to sleep.

Coming soon: see Part 2 for assembly and decoration)