Burnt Sugar Cake

Yes! I managed to bake a lot these past three days...I'll start here with what I baked on Thursday, and then probably post 3 recipes next week instead of just two to catch up (especially since I'm baking and cooking a lot more to post about next week, too!). This cake was for my friend Kerri's birthday on Thursday.

All the ingredients for this cake were really easy to gather, which is why I made it first. Still, I had a little bit of trouble baking this one: the burnt sugar syrup really freaked me out to make because I thought it would never work, and then the cake took much longer than the alotted time (I baked it a little less than 10 minutes longer than it says it should be baked for) so I was a little worried about it. Also, my mom's old 9-inch pans refused to give the cake up (I had the same problem baking carrot cake for Kerri here a year ago), but the cake still turned out fine: only one of the layers broke a little bit. It was a little sunken but I just added more frosting to the center at the end.

I didn't get to try this cake, but Kerri sent me a picture text to show me the inside of the cake when she tried it! She liked it, and said it had a little bit of a maple-y taste and something else that she couldn't remember.

Burnt Sugar Cake
Recipe from Southern Cakes: Sweet and Irresistible Recipes for Everyday Celebrations by Nancie McDermott

Burnt Sugar Syrup1 cup sugar
1 cup boiling water


Heat the sugar in a cast iron skillet or another heavy bottomed pan with high sides. Heat over a medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar melts into a clear brown caramel syrup. It should be the color of tea.

Gradually add the boiling water, pouring it down the sides of the pan so that if the syrup foams and bubbles up, you should be protected.
Continue cooking, stirring often, until the water combines with the syrup and turns a handsome brown syrup.

Remove from the heat and set aside to cool. Store the cooled syrup in a sealed jar if not using right away.

Burnt Sugar Cake

3 cups all purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup milk
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 3/4 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/2 cup Burnt Sugar Syrup (recipe above)

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9 inch round cake pans.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt and stir with a fork to mix well. Stir the vanilla into the milk.

In a large bowl, beat the butter and the sugar with an electric mixer at high speed for 2–3 minutes, until they are well combined. Stop now and then to scrape the bowl down. Add the eggs, one by one, beating well each time. Pour in 1/2 cup of the burnt sugar syrup and beat well.


Add a third of the flour mixture and about half of the milk, beating at a low speed, until just incorporated. Mix in another third of the flour and the rest of the milk. Finally, add the remaining flour.

Divide the batter between the cake pans and bake for 20 to 25 minutes until the cakes are golden brown, spring back when touched gently in the center and begin to pull away from the sides of the pan.

Let the cakes cool in the pans on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Turn out the cakes onto a wire rack to cool completely.


Burnt Sugar Frosting
3 3/4 cups confectioners sugar
1/2 cup Burnt Sugar Syrup (above)
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 – 3 tbsp milk

In a large bowl, combine the confectioners sugar, the burnt sugar syrup, butter and vanilla. Beat with a mixer at medium speed for 2 to 3 minutes, scraping down the bowl now and then to bring the ingredients together.

Add 2 tablespoons of the milk and continue beating until the frosting is thick, soft, smooth and easy to spread. Add a little more sugar if it is thin, and a little more milk if it is too thick.

To Assemble
Place one layer, top side down, on a cake stand or serving plate. Scoop about ¾ cup of the frosting onto the cake and spread to the edges. Place the second cake layer over it, top side down. Frost the sides of the cake, and then the top until it is evenly covered.




And here's the text Kerri was able to send me! I guess it wasn't as underbaked as I thought!

Pumpkin Cookies with Cream Cheese Icing

Okay, maybe I'm taking the weak way out. I've been jet-lagged and job-searching and haven't had time to bake anything new. But at least I'm giving you a recipe! Unfortunately, this is a recipe more appropriate for when I made them in October, but that's okay. I promise to make it up to everyone in a very good way, soon!

These cookies were delicious. Half my friends preferred them with the icing, and half without. I thought that the icing made them more like cookies, because without it they were more like scones because they weren't as sweet or dense as cookies.

Pumpkin Cookies with Cream Cheese Icing
Adapted from allrecipes by me. Found on My Baking Addiction

2 cups unsalted butter; softened
2 cups sugar
2 cups canned pumpkin (solid; not pie mix)
2 eggs
2 tsp baking soda
3 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp salt
4 cups all-purpose flour

Cream shortening, butter, white sugar and pumpkin. Add eggs and mix well.

Sift together the baking soda, ground cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice, nutmeg, salt and flour. Add to pumpkin mixture and mix well.

Drop from spoon to cookie sheet. Bake 13-15 minutes at 350 degrees F.

Cream Cheese Icing

1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
2 tbsp butter, softened
4 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk

Mix the cream cheese with the butter, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla extract, and milk in a bowl. Heat in a microwave for 15 seconds. Drizzle spoonfuls over the cooled cookies and smooth with the back of a spoon or a spatula.

Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookies

And finally, my last day of baking in this kitchen. I'm leaving the East Coast and returning to the West Coast for the summer, where I'll continue baking. I made these cookies on Monday.

I still had leftover oreos from when I baked the last recipe, and I still had some more supplies, so I searched for a recipe that would let me use some of the things I already had without having to buy anything else...these were easy to make but didn't make very many. Still, they were very good and very sweet. The one I tried just melted in my mouth! If I made these again, I would double this recipe (the blog I got it from, Picky Palete, said this was halved) and bake larger cookies (mine were bite-sized so that I could make more).

Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookies
Recipe adapted from Picky Palete

1 stick softened butter
6 tbsp sugar
6 tbsp brown sugar
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla
1 ¼ cup flour
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
8 Oreo Cookies, broken
1 cup milk chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Cream butter, and sugars until well combined. Add egg and vanilla until mixed well.

Add flour, baking soda and salt into a large bowl. Stir to combine. Slowly add dry ingredients to wet ingredients then stir in oreos and chocolate chips until just combined.

With a medium cookie scoop, scoop onto a parchment or silpat lined baking sheet. Bake for 7-9 minutes or until cooked, but still soft. Let cool on baking sheet for 3 minutes before transferring to cooling rack.

Chocolate Panda Cake with White Chocolate Frosting

Before I arrived at college this year I think I had baked 4 cakes in my life, and that's a stretch. The first one I remember was in 9th grade, a recipe for La Galette des Rois for extra credit in my French class. Although it good, I was in 9th grade and it was hardly baked by me any more than my parents.

The second cake I remember was a cake-mix cake. I think my mom made the frosting. I cut it into a fish. At least, I think that was me...

The third cake was my first actual cake-from-scratch! My friend told me to make her a carrot cake, and using a recipe my mom found for me (and the carrots she processed for me in her food processor), I made the carrot cake almost all by myself! My dad kind of helped me take it out of the pans, which didn't really work, and I ended up mushing the cake up as the bottom layer...and I didn't take any pictures.

The fourth cake was actually a cake recipe that I made into cupcakes. A very dense, very chocolatey cake recipe from William Sonoma. The frosting was good, but was too soupy at first until I chilled it overnight. It definitely should have stayed a cake, not cupcakes.

And then I came here, didn't bake another cake until Lucy's strawberry birthday cake with a cakemix base, then made David's cake which was delicious but still not great, and then...wow, I just made a lot more cakes than I ever thought I'd make.

This one I made on Saturday for my friends who have summer birthdays, but namely for my friend Steven (aka "Panda"), who requested that I make him a cake. And I think that this one, out of all the cakes I've made so far, is my favorite. I just wanted to use ingredients I have here since I'm almost done with the year and didn't want to stock up on new supplies that I couldn't store over the summer. I didn't even know if chocolate and white chocolate would go together. But I really enjoyed this cake. The filling is a store-bought mix, but that's the only thing I cheated on! For real!

Panda Cake

Grand Fudge Cake
Recipe from Ghiradelli

3/4 cup Unsweetened Cocoa
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 1/3 cups milk
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Grease and lightly flour two 9-inch round cake pans.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and set aside. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Reduce speed to low, and add vanilla and eggs one at a time, scraping bowl after each addition. Alternately add flour mixture and milk (starting and ending with the flour mixture), while mixing on low speed. Continue to mix until smooth.


Pour into prepared pans. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the center of cake comes out clean.

Filling
Any white-chocolate mousse. I bought mine from the Tops supermarket. It made 2 cups, but I wish I had more, as I'll explain below.

I added 4 crumpled oreos to the 2 cups of mousse, and chilled it for 2 hours.

White Chocolate Frosting
Recipe adapted from Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate
You can find the recipe here


My frosting turned out much too soupy. I added some more confectioners sugar but then chilled it. It makes about 4 cups of frosting, which was definitely enough to cover the outside of the cake and probably could have been in the center as well if you didn't want to make the white chocolate mousse, but I really enjoyed the mousse at the center, it was a nice different texture for the cake.

Assembly

At least 11 oreos, 4 used for mixing into the mousse filling.

Take your bottom layer and cover it in chilled mousse filling. Then place the second layer on top.

My cake layers crowned and I should have leveled at least the bottom layer off, but didn't. I had about 2 cups of filling, which left a lot of space, but luckily I improvised by crumpling up 4 oreos and pressing them into the sides to fill up the cracks:


Cover the rest of the cake with frosting. I decorated it like a panda by taking an oreo apart, making sure all the "white stuff" stayed on one side, and taking a crumb and making that the pupil. I did this twice to make two eyes and two ears, and took another cookie apart to make the nose and mouth, like so:

And again, there was a lot of leftover frosting...

So yeah! Definitely try this cake! It was perfectly moist and there was just enough frosting! The combination was perfect!

Baking in the Dorm Kitchen

Wow. Sooo. Here's where I got to bake these past two semesters.

Baking in a college dorm has its ups and downs. One, people come by and compliment the smell, tell you it looks good, etc. On the other hand, they make you feel bad for not offering them cake or cookies, and sometimes you want to keep it a secret from your friends so you can surprise them but really can't because as soon as they smell something baking they come to check what's up. Two, it's a cute kitchen and the appliances work just great. But it's a little too tiny and cramped: hard to work with other people trying to use the stove or microwave, wash their dishes, and of course there are always the people who just kinda stand there watching you when you really want to invest in some quality time baking alone. Three, if I don't have a fork or bowl on hand and need one fast, usually people have them left around (note: none of those bowls, cups, peanut butter jar, etc are mine) that you can grab and use. Unfortunately, usually they're not clean. In fact, the sink is usually full of dirty dishes that make it impossible for you to wash your own dishes and clean up after baking. Why can't people clean up after themselves? Argh. But it's fine.

Next year I'm getting an apartment with my friend Lucy, and that should be better because we picked an apartment with a bigger kitchen. Just for me. Yay!

Plus, I'll get a bigger fridge. Look at what I've had to use this year (since I definitely don't like risking putting things in the public fridge):

Oh yeah, not to mention, all my room-temperature ingredients were stored between an armchair and my friends' fridge in our common room...

Double Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

Okay, here are the cookies Marrisa requested for her birthday! She really tried to avoid giving me any trouble. She knows I kind of (okay, more than just kind of) stress out every time I make people birthday cakes, so she told me to "just make peanut butter cookies like the ones in the dining hall". Now, I didn't know how to mimic the ones in the dining hall exactly. The peanut butter cookies in the dining hall can actually be pretty good. The only peanut butter cookies I've made before are the extremely simple ones with the criss-cross fork thing, I don't know, but super easy. The ones in the dining halls were like peanut butter versions of chocolate chip cookies, with peanut butter chips instead of chocolate chips...I don't know, all I know is that when I searched for peanut butter chip cookie recipes online, I only came up with one.

These are pretty good cookies. Not exactly like the ones in my dining hall, but they're better than any other peanut butter cookie I've baked before. I've never made a cookie that had powdered sugar over granulated sugar, and maybe that's why they had a smoother texture and sweeter taste. I pressed the cookies with my palms instead of using the criss-cross fork pattern like the recipe called for. Overall, a pretty easy cookie to make.

Double Peanut Butter Chip Cookies Yield 3 dozen (mine had over 4 dozen)
Adapted by Evil Shenanigans from The Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition

1/4 cup canola oil
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup smooth peanut butter (chunky also works)
1/3 cup powdered sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 bag Reese’s peanut butter chips (1 2/3 cups)

Heat your oven to 350 F and prepare to sheet pans with parchment.

In a mixer with the paddle attachment cream the oil, butter, peanut butter, powdered sugar, and brown sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg, egg yolk, and vanilla and mix until well incorporated.

In a medium bowl sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add to the peanut butter mixture and mix on low speed until most of the flour is incorporated.

Add the peanut butter chips and mix until well distributed. (You may want to do this step by hand.) Scoop onto the prepared baking sheet by the rounded tablespoon about two inches apart. Use a fork to flatten the cookie by pressing a criss-cross pattern on the top of the cookie.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the cookies are golden brown. Cool on the pan for three minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Chocolate Pie

My friend Marrisa's birthday was yesterday. She didn't want me to go all out for her and make a cake, and requested cookies which I'll post on Tuesday...but I just couldn't let her celebrate her birthday without something to cut into! So I searched for an easy, tasty recipe so that I could make both the cookies AND the "cake"...or in this case, a pie.

Again, having no hand-mixer was a problem because this pie had the whipped egg-whites on top, but instead of killing my own arm I had the lovely help of David. Hooray! This was my first time making any sort of pie, so I was kind of intimidated. Still, it turned out great!

This cake was very thick and chocolatey--VERYYY chocolatey. But it was also very, very easy.

First, I made the crust. I've always thought that making the crust was the hardest part. Maybe it was...and it probably usually is, but I chose the simple crust by the blogger who posted this pie recipe originally, Homesick Texan.

Crust
Recipe adapted from Homesick Texan

1 cup of flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup oil
1/8 cup milk

Mix flour and salt. Mix oil and milk. Pour oil and milk into flour and salt and stir until combined into a dough. Can add more milk if dry. Roll crust out between two sheets of wax paper, line a buttered pie pan with crust.

Chocolate Pie
Recipe from Homesick Texan

Filling ingredients:
4 tablespoons of cocoa or 1 1/2 squares of baking chocolate
3/4 cups of sugar
5 tablespoons of flour
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1 1/2 cups of milk
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
2 egg yolks, beaten slightly
1 tablespoon of butter

Meringue ingredients:
2 egg whites
1/8 teaspoon of salt
4 tablespoons of sugar

Any pie crust (recipe above)

Method:
Mix your sugar, flour, salt, cocoa, eggs and milk (all except vanilla and butter) with a whisk.
Cook while stirring on medium until it bubbles and thickens, about five to 10 minutes. If it becomes lumpy, just beat out the lumps.
Remove from heat and stir in your vanilla and butter.
Meanwhile, poke holes in your pie crust with a fork and bake it at 350 until it’s brown, about 20 minutes.
Beat your egg whites with salt and when they start to get fluffy add the sugar.
Pour the chocolate custard into the baked pie shell and top with the beaten egg whites.
Add 2 T of sugar for every egg white. Bake it until it the peaks on the meringue are lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

Dorie Greenspan's Devil's Food White-Out Cake

I'd been dying to try out this recipe for a while: the cake on the cover of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. I got the perfect opportunity for my friend David's birthday in early April.

This cake was dense and chocolaty with a very light frosting (which was coated with more cake crumbs). The frosting was hard for me to make, because it called for the use of a hand-mixer to whip the eggs...and since I didn't have a hand mixer, I had to beat the eggs by hand for a long time. Also, when I mixed the egg whites with the syrup mixture for the frosting, the frosting turned a light brown color which I was afraid wouldn't go away. It did, and I was left with that light frosting that made Lucy inform me she prefered this cake to her own. So I guess I'll be baking this cake again next year.

Instead of making a 3-layer cake with 8-inch round cake pans, I just made a 2-layer cake with the only cake pans I had, 9-inch. It turned out great, but I wish it was taller. It might have looked prettier. Anyway, I covered the whole thing with cake crumbs because I had a lot of extra, but the cake looked better when I didn't cover the top, since it was so short:


Overall this cake turned out great and was a big hit! It didn't last very long. You can find the recipe in Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. I'll have some more recent baked goods to share by the end of the week!

Strawberry Cake with Strawberry Frosting

I was going to post a bit about where I baked these past two semesters, but I'll save that for a later day: I figure I should probably put some more recipes up first.

This one I baked in January. It's an easy, cake-mix-cake recipe with additions to make it more special...additions that ended up taking me longer than I expected, but that's okay. I made this for my best friend at college, Lucy: she's not a frosting lover so the frosting was a little too thick for her, but everyone else loved it.

I had to look everywhere to find frozen strawberries, and ended up buying fresh out-of-season strawberries instead because that's all I could find from the local supermarket. Luckily the cost of this cake still didn't amount to the $25 ice cream cake Lucy requested last year:

Just a heads up on the frosting, I had to make 1.5 batches of it to cover the whole cake, inside and out.

Strawberry Cake
Recipes from Niki

1 package white cake mix
1 package (3 ounces) strawberry-flavored gelatin powder
3/4 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup water
3/4 cup mashed strawberries or sweetened frozen strawberries

Combine cake mix and gelatin powder in a large bowl. Beat in oil, eggs, water, and strawberries. Pour into 2 9-inch round greased and floured cake pans. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Cool completely before icing.

Strawberry Frosting (I had to make 1.5 batches)

1/4 cup butter
dash of salt
1/4 cup shortening
1 pound confectioners' sugar
1/4 cup mashed strawberries or remaining sweetened frozen strawberries (drain juice)

Beat the butter/shortening and confectioners' sugar together until smooth and fluffy. Add strawberries. Spread between cake layers, then frost top and sides.

Top off with decorations!

This cake was kind of crumbly. I guess I'd recommend sticking it in the fridge for a bit before serving.