De Baking Psychopath

This is one of those sort of cakes that I remember from my childhood, and I hope that everyone has something similar to look back upon as well. Simple, unfrosted, potentially eaten anytime from breakfast to snacktime to after dinner. My young palate was happy enough with box mix cake, but my adult palate is savoring this not-much-harder-to-make cake. The base is a super moist, slightly tangy, barely sweet buttermilk cake, and the juicy berries studded throughout just scream summer picnic and a need to be paired with some ice cream. I've made this with blackberries and strawberries, and both were delicious. Whatever variation you make, it is just simply yummy. Berry Buttermilk Cake (adapted from Gourmet via Smitten Kitchen ) Ingredients: 1 cup all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 baking soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 stick unsalted butter, softened 2/3 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 finely grated lemon zest (optional) 1 ...

It's official: birthday cakes on this blog have gone 3D. I'm starting to go into unexplored waters with this inaugural cake, the suitably epic Death Star Cake. A friend's new bride threw a party in honor of his birthday, and in the early stages of planning for the party, I proposed a collaboration on the making of the cake. She proposed a Star Wars-themed cake since he loves Star Wars (like any respectable nerdy young man of our generation), and after a couple of weeks of research, we put our plan into action. The day before the party, we got together to bake two cake recipes: a yummy yellow cake in regular 9 inch round cake pans, and a chocolate whiskey cake in Wilton's Sports Ball Pan Set . The day of, we stacked and frosted the cakes with Creamy Vanilla Frosting (note: I made this frosting the night before using it and would discourage everyone from doing the same. It tends to curdle up when you defrost it, even if you whip it with a mixer again. It keeps the te...

This cake was made for a multi-purpose party: two birthdays and one graduation. There is nothing new about this cake recipe-wise. The yellow cake is taken from the spectacular Pecan Praline Bourbon Cake , and the frosting is none other than my mother's chocolate cream cheese frosting . But the combination of the two elements, along with a generous dousing of Kahlua, can only be described as synergistic: a level of deliciousness that exceeds the sum of the individual components. Layers of Kahlua-soaked cake. Cake being swaddled in a thick layer of creamy frosting. At this point I could have been finished...but it looked so plain . So I tried to do some piping, then some stencil work, both of which failed miserably and had to be wiped off. I ended up coating the top with a sprinkling of black cocoa for contrast. The taste of the cake is reminiscent of a chocolate tiramisu, so the cocoa was very appropriate as well as classy. Ready to eat! As the birthday boy would say, "N...

Pecans. Bourbon. Soft yellow cake. Light and creamy cream cheese frosting. I don't know what else to say in introduction to this cake. Other than that it was "so f***ing good!!" as commented by more than one person who ate this cake at a party for which the theme was a celebration of the American Southern culture. The only thing I could have done to make this MORE Southern was to add some peach jam or liqueur, but I had neither on hand, but in any case, the cake certainly was more than sufficiently yummy without it. The cake layers were soft and moist but sturdy enough to allow for easy manipulation when I was building the cake. The frosting I lightened up from the original recipe in two ways: 1) less powdered sugar than was called for in ratio to the cream cheese, and 2) folding in a container of Cool Whip, a tip borrowed from my mom's chocolate cream cheese frosting recipe . Although this made the frosting more prone to get oozy at room temperature, it sets up a...

On April 12, this blog turned 1 year old! Although I did not have a post ready to celebrate this joyous occasion, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you, my readers, for sharing this culinary journey with me. Approximately 65 recipes posted this year! I've meanwhile probably accumulated a to-do list of at least 5 times that magnitude with all the recipe books I've bought and recipes I've printed or copied, so stay tuned for more deliciousness in the year to come!

The big birthday bash has come and gone. It was a very busy weekend: shopping on Friday, baking all day Saturday, and then the festivities on Saturday evening. Here was our menu, with links to recipes used, if available: Savory An assortment of crackers, baked flour tortilla chips, and toasted baguette slices Crudite and Hummus (store-bought) Smoked Salmon Dip Warm Spinach and Artichoke Dip Pasta Salad (brought by friend) Homemade Roasted Sweet Potato Fries Assorted Puff Pastry Hor's Doeuvres (bought; Costco) Sweet Kid's Thumbprints with Orange Marmalade or Blackberry Jam ( Baking: From My home to yours, pg. 163) Chocolate Toffee Cookies Tate's Bake Shop Thin and Crispy Cookies Tiramisu (made by friend) Black and White Chocolate Cake ( Baking: From My home to yours, pgs. 258-260) Party Favors One big fat chocolate chip cookie ( the famed NYTimes recipe ) So I actually have a pitiful number of pictures of the party, and even more pitiful is that I forgot to take my usu...

...allow me to introduce: chocolate square cupcakes! For whatever reason, this year I've been doing a lot of birthday related activities for myself. I don't know if it's because my mother's been reminding me for months that my birthday is coming up, or if this is a special birthday to me because the age I am turning is my childhood favorite number...but from an objective standpoint, I'm not sure why I am anticipating my birthday more this year than in the last two years where I've had my zodiac year as well as significant-fraction-of-a-century birthdays. But in any case, I've already made birthday cupcakes for a joint birthday lunch at lab, almost two weeks before my actual birthday, and I'm making grandiose plans to make a fancy celebration cake from my recently-acquired copy of Baking: From my home to yours for my upcoming birthday party. For the birthday cupcakes, I called up my fancy-cake-making little sister and asked her what she'd recommen...

This may be one of the ugliest Bundt cakes with icing I've seen or made, but at the same time, it is one of the tastiest-looking cakes I've seen as well. Cursed fast-drying icing!! *shakes fist at imaginary pot of icing* GRR!! You will not defeat me next time!! Happily, this cake will grace many more events in my lifetime because of how delicious it was, and so I will have more chances to make the appearance look presentable! Mid-November is a time for whiskey. Not because of some arcane cultural tradition, but because one of my classmates, who is particularly fond of the stuff, has his birthday in mid-November (celebrated belatedly in early December this year). For the last couple of years I have tried to find cake recipes in honor of the occasion, and this recipe outdid my offering for last year, I think. I started out with the Chocolate Whiskey Cake as found on My Baking Adventures and pretty much made the cake as according to the recipe verbatim. Half a cup of whisk...

Moist yellow cake with a Nutella swirl. Frangelico (hazelnut-flavored liqueur) soaking syrup. Chocolate-Nutella ganache. To top things off, a sprinkle of chopped toasted hazelnuts. Drooling yet? I am. Remember that exam that I recently survived? Somewhere in the middle of it all, I promised myself that once it was all over, I would bake myself a big freaking cake to celebrate. And this week, that time had come. It had to be a Bundt cake, in honor of the upcoming National Bundt Day on November 15 and fellow baking blogger Mary the Librarian's quest to spread Bundt love to the world. She made a Nutella Bundt cake that looked absolutely awesome. She'd used a yellow cake recipe and swirled some Nutella-flavored batter in for striking visual appeal. Meanwhile, I've had my eye on Smitten Kitchen's Best Birthday Cake , so I figured that this would be the perfect time to test-run this yellow cake recipe. I followed the recipe verbatim for the yellow cake, which is enou...

Q: Do you really need that much Red 40? A: No. A typical red velvet cake will contain between 1-2 oz of red food coloring. This equals to 2-4 tablespoons of food coloring in two layers of cake. I don't know about you, but that seems rather excessive to me. Especially since I've made red velvet cake twice now with just 1 tablespoon, and it's plenty deep red for me. But maybe that's because I love deep shades of red like maroon and Falu red , and the relative small amount of food coloring I add, in combination to the boost of deep brown cocoa that is in the cake, gives me the rich maroon that I would more appropriately associate with such a sensuous cloth as velvet. Who wants velvet in tomato-red anyways? Not me. So here is the cake color as I make it: Figure 1. Cake of a lovely deep maroon hue. My kind of red. I was asked today about what kind of cake "Red Velvet Cake" really is. It has a few tablespoons of cocoa, but not enough for any chocoholic to l...

One of my classmates brought a PB&J sandwich for breakfast every single freakin' day in our first year of medical school. For his birthday that year, I decided to make a PB&J cake in his honor. It was a chocolate cake, with a strawberry jam layer in the middle and peanut butter frosting on top. Unexpectedly, it was another one of my other classmates, Mark, that took a fancy to this flavor combination in cakes, and he's requested it for his own birthday ever since. So when he decided to throw a get together for his birthday yesterday, I decided to re-invent the PB&J cake for this year's offering. After some Internet searching, I found myself linked back to one of my favorite baking blogs, Bake or Break , for a peanut butter pound cake with milk chocolate chunks strewn throughout. Perfect. I decided to throw some strawberry jam into the cake for good measure, and to top things off, I made a strawberry sauce to bring out the strawberry-peanut butter combo. Mar...

Today was a pre-birthday celebration for one of my friends, and he loves orange and green, and so when I mentioned to him I'd like to make a cake with orange and green frosting in his honor, he exclaimed, "Ooh, can ya make a Ninja Turtle? Michelangelo's my favorite!" Dubiously, I looked into it. I figured if I could find a stencil (the kind you find to carve on pumpkins), then I could probably do a simplistic version of it. I'm not the best artist in the world, let me tell you. This was the simplest I could find: Most pictures were from the live-action movie, or from little action figures, or from some bad-ass version of the cartoons, so they look really buff and angry but also drawn with too much detail for me. So I printed out the picture above, cut out the head, and blew it up a bit on my photocopier to make it roughly the right size to trim from two 9-inch diameter cakes. And here, I'm proud to present, is my Ninja Turtle cake: I am sooooooo happy with h...