Strawberry Shortcake - SCB

Here is another recipe from Southern Living’s new book The Southern Cake Book -2014

Strawberry Shortcake 
 Click HERE for recipe

Now Strawberry Shortcake is one of my favorite desserts. I love the traditional style where the cake is more of a biscuits and less of an angel food cake. Think of a fat, fluffy scone smothered in strawberries and whipped cream and you will get a hint of what I’m after. And while the shortcake version in The Southern Cake Book wasn’t exactly my ideal (a little too flat), I decided to expand my horizons and give it a try.

Well the end product turn out kind of pretty, but I wasn’t overly impressed with the taste.  The cake/biscuit part didn’t wow me. It was a little bland and nondescript. In the end I scraped off the strawberries and cream, threw the cake away, and stirred the salvaged strawberry into some vanilla ice cream.

So sad.  Where did I go wrong???? ;-(

The dough came together easy enough, but it was very wet and very sticky...

But the directions in the book warned of this and suggested using damp fingers to push and spread the dough around.  And it actually worked. I manged to fill all the gaps.

The only thing that I had trouble with was spreading the beaten egg whites over the top of the cake.  The directions says to beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.  Well I guess I beat them too long because try as I might I couldn't get those egg whites to spread evenly.  Looks a little lumpy, ah?

Here is the cake right out of the oven.  Notice the scorching of the egg white?   Oven possibly too hot for egg whites?  Hummm...  There was one difference between the online version of the recipe and the recipe in the book.  The book says to bake at 450 degrees for 8-10 minutes, but the online recipes says to bake at 300 degrees for 40 minutes.  I wonder which one is right?

I usually tastes cakes after I take them out of the oven, but I forgot in this case.  Stupid me because if I had tasted it first I wouldn't have wasted the strawberries and whipped cream.  Here is the cake being assembled...

And here is the finished cake.  Looks good, but in my opinion it just didn't have a great taste.  I probably did something wrong (I usually do), but with this cake I'm not even tempted to try it again. 

Mississippi Mud Cupcakes - Southern Cake Book

My second baking adventure using the scrumptious looking The Southern Cake Book by Southern Living was Mississippi Mud Cupcakes. 

The final product looked so cute with its dainty, fluffy tuff of Marshmallow Frosting, and clusters of nuts and chocolate.  Click HERE for the recipe on the Southern Living website.

But appearances can be deceiving because despite its silky good looks I found the cake itself a little dry. Not Sahara desert dry, but it definitely needed a tall glass of milk to wash it down.  If I make it again I would do some tweaking to the recipe, and also reduce the baking time by 3-4 minutes.  

The mixing process also dirties a lot of bowls and utensils. One set for the blending of sugar & eggs, one for the dries, and one for the sour cream mixture.

Eventually everything goes into one bowl.

And then the beautiful chopped chocolate are added as the last step.

Dropped into the prepared cupcake liners the batter looks more like brownies than cake.

But after baking they puffed up nicely.  I baked mine for 17 minutes (18-20 was the recommended time).

Slicing one open shows just a few hints of the chopped chocolate that was added to the batter. It definitely needs more chopped chocolate, lots and lots more chopped chocolate.

The Marshmallow Frosting was the most eye-opening part of this baking adventure.  It was a flavorful mix of butter, cream cheese, and marshmallow cream. I’m not a big fan of marshmallows, but I have to say this stuff was really, really good. Not too sweet, with just a hint of marshmallow and cream cheese.  Neither taste was overpowering.   It was the perfect blending of both.

Nice.

It also had a light airy consistency that added to its appeal. I think this will become my standard cupcake frosting. I also added a few drops of Americolor Bright White Food Color to bring the color back to pure white. Between the yellow butter and the brown vanilla extract the frosting had a slight yellowish cast.  A few drop of Bright White got rid of the frosting's jaundice look.

The final verdict came from my family at our 4th of July party.  Granted these cupcakes were competing with lots of festive red-white-and-blude desserts, but the cupcakes just sat there. Sad, lonely, forgotten.  A few were eaten but no one went back for seconds :-(

I took the leftovers home with me and ate them with ice cream. Nothing moistens up cake like melting ice cream.

So this adventure turn out a little disappointing. If I try these again I would do something to add moisture to the mix.  Maybe add some oil to the batter (2 Tablespoons), double up on the amount of chopped chocolate, and decrease the baking time by 2-3 minutes. I would start checking for doneness at 14 minutes and err on the side of undercooked instead of overcooked.

Overall I would give the cake 3 stars, but the Marshmallow Frosting gets the highest rating of 5 finger-licking stars. That stuff is good.

Amaretto-Almond Pound Cake - Southern Cake Book

I bought another baking book today... I think I have over 500 of them now by now.

But this was is different, this one is unique. This one is special because I would really like to bake every cake in this book. How often does that happen? The name of the book is The Southern Cake Book (2014 edition) by Southern Living.

I purchased this book because it was featured in the Lagniappe section of New Orleans’ (no longer daily) newspaper – The Time-Picayune. The reporter made it sound so luscious and delectable that I just had to have it. And when the book arrived I wasn’t disappointed. The photos are gorgeous, and all the cakes look delicious. I couldn’t decide which one to bake first, but I finally decided on Almond Amaretto Pound Cake. I LOVE Pound Cake, and I love Amaretto. Win-Win.

The recipe was easy to follow and the batter came together without any problems. The only thing out of the ordinary was that you added the eggs as the last step. Flour first and then the eggs.  Odd.  I wonder if there is some chemistry to mixing the ingredients in that order. Where is Alton Brown when you need him?

Into the pan the batter goes… I’m still loving my HIC silicon fluted pan. I find the silicon pan doesn’t burn the outer edge of the cake as much as the metal pans do. I also love the bright red color! But my pan only holds 10 cups and the recipe calls for a 12-cup pan, so I cut the recipe in half and baked for about 40 minutes. I also didn't include the sliced almonds on the top of the cake. I have a brother visiting that has severe nut allergies.

The last step in the process is to make an Amaretto syrup to pour over the top of the warm cake.

Well, hum… Something went wrong with this step. I followed the instructions, I swear, but I guess I cooked it too long and I ended up with Amaretto candy instead of syrup. It was too thick to absorb into the cake (like the recipe describes), instead it coated the top of the cake and dribbled down the sides.

After a while the Amaretto “syrup” got pretty hard and broke apart when I cut a slice. But it still tasted awesome. Very almond-y. And the cake was moist enough without the added moisture from the absorbed syrup. Yummy…

So I would definitely list this pound cake as one of the best I have tasted. It rivals even the famous Elvis Presley Pound Cake or my even my Pound Cake Love recipe. This one is a keeper for sure.

Here is a link to the recipe on the Southern Living web site.

I also learned an interesting factoid from this recipe. Amaretto flavoring is made from apricot pits. Who knew?! And because the Amaretto is made from apricot pits you will find that it tastes very similar to almond extract. Why? Because almond extract is made from bitter almond oil which gets it flavor from a substance called benzaldehyde. Benzaldehyde is found in almonds of course, but it is also found in the the kernels of “drupes” or stone fruits like peach, apricots, plums, and cherries. So check the label of your favorite brand of almond extract and see if it gives you the source of the bitter almond oil.  Your almond extract could be made from almonds, but it could also be made from peach pits, or even a combination of different stone fruits.  Very interesting. Here is a link to Cook’s Illustrated ’s overview of Almond Extract.


Happy Baking....

Carol

Update:  Ha!! After looking at the recipe posted on the Southern Living web site I found a discrepancy between the directions shown in the book and the online version.  And that discrepancy has to do with the glaze.  Ha!   The one thing that I messed up on!! Double Ha!  So it wasn't a stupid, Carol, moment after all.

The book just tells you to spoon the hot glaze over the cake.  From the picture of the cake I thought that meant remove the cake from the pan and start spooning the glaze over the top.  Wrong!  The online version goes into a lot more detail, and tells you to start the glaze 10 minutes before the cake comes out of the oven.  As soon as the cake comes out start spooning the hot glaze over the BOTTOM of the hot cake.  Do not remove the the cake from the pan.  Spoon the glaze over the cake while it is still in the pan.

So I didn't mess up (well not completely).  Therefore I'm taking this cake out of my "You did something wrong" column and putting it in the "book had a miss-print column".

I'm going to try the cake again this weekend (for the 4th of July), and  I will post a new picture of my perfectly glaze cake as soon as possible.

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Marbled Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake - Yummmm

Red Velvet is my favorite cake flavor, and Pound Cake is my favorite type of cake. Put the two together and you get delicious. Add Cream Cheese and you get sinfully delicious.

I love everything Red Velvet so I have been toying with the idea of compiling all my favorite Red Velvet recipes into an e-book, but a quick search of Amazon found that someone had already done it! Damn, too late again.

Check out Debra Hart's Red Velvet Everything. The book has recipes for Red Velvet Cobbler, Red Velvet Tea Cakes, Red Velvet Fudge, etc, etc. So many choices so little stretch left in my jeans.

For my first Red Velvet Everything baking adventure I decided on Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake. Just the name makes me drool. The recipe starts as a basic cream cheese pound cake but it gets fancy in the last stage when you split the batter add the Red Velvet “elixir” to one half.

At this point I have one bowl of red batter on one of yellow batter.  Next the recipe instructions tell you to add 1-1/2 cups of flour to the red mix and the remaining 1-1/2 cups to the yellow mix.   Huh???  That step had me worried.  I didn’t think to weigh the bowls of wet batter to ensure that they each had the same amount.  Did I get more batter in one bowl and less in the other?  Would this throw off the ratios and put too much or too little flour in relation to the butter/sugar/eggs?  Would my cake be too wet or too dry?  Would my Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake be a flop?Oh the horror!!

Well, too late to worry about it now.  But NEXT TIME I will weigh the batter to make sure the amounts are equal,  or better yet mix in the flour before dividing the batter.   That would eliminate any potential screw-ups.

 

Next the instructions tell you to drop spoonfuls of the batter into the prepared tube pan alternating between the red and the yellow batters.  I bought a new silicon tube pan just for this cake.  For some reason my oven burns every cake I bake in the traditional metal bundt pans, so I wanted to give the silicon pan a try.  The HIC Fluted Pan is a pretty red color, which sadly doesn’t show up well against the red batter of the cake.  Sorry….

So I’m moving along happily filling my pan spoonful by spoonful when I realized I have too much batter and not enough pan.  The recipe didn't list what size pan to use, so naive little me just assumed that the batter would all fit in the pan "I" happened to select.  I’m constantly amazed at how oblivious I can be…

But not to worry.  I greased up some of my mini tube pans, and soon I was spooning again.

In fact the batter shows up much better against the metal pan.

Next you swirl the two colored batters together.  Pretty.

Then bake.  I baked the mini tube pan for about 30 minutes, and the big pan for about 1 hour and 45 minutes.

The mini pan cakes came out perfect.

But the large cake was slightly over baked.  I baked until to toothpick tester came out clean, but next time I would take it out when a few crumbles still clung to the tooth pick.  Better to under baked than over baked.

Next came a simple sugar glaze.  Then the slicing and big reveal.

Too cute.  The red and yellow swirls look amazing.  The colors are still distinct, but they swirl together like young lovers.  So romantic.  Definitely a cake for Valentine’s Day.

The larger cake looks just as swirly and delicious, but I had to add some whipped cream to give it a little moisture.

So all-in-all my first test from the Red Velvet Everything cook book was a great success.  Now I just have to figure out what to bake next.  With 50+ recipes in the book it will be a hard decision to make.

The people at work are going to love/kill me,

Carol



PS: for a similar version of Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake check out this YouTube video by Cicone.

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Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake

By Debra Hart

From the book: Red Velvet Everything

Ingredients

1-1/2 cups   Unsalted butter, softened

8 oz              Cream Cheese, softened

3 cups          Sugar, granulated

5                    Eggs, large

1-1/2 tsp       Vanilla 

1/4 cup         Buttermilk 

2 TBLS         Cocoa Powder, sifted

1 tsp              Apple Cider Vinegar

1 oz               Red Food Coloring

3 cups          Cake Flour



Directions

• Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Grease and flour a tube pan. 
• Cream butter, cream cheese and sugar together. 
• Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. 
• Divide the batter between two bowls. Weigh to ensure that they are divided equally. 
• In a separate, small bowl combine buttermilk, cocoa, and vinegar. Whisk until smooth. Stir in food coloring. Add the red mixture to one of the bowls of batter. Stir until combined. 
• Add 1-1/2 cups of flour to each bowl of batter. Beat until just combined. (I just stirred the flour into the creamed mixture, I didn’t bother with the beaters.) 
• With a large spoon drop spoonfuls of batter into the prepared tube pan alternating between the two colored batters. 
•  Using a knife, gently swirl the two colors. (Don’t over-swirl. You want the colors to just wrap around each other.) 
• Bake at 300 degrees F for 1 hour and 35-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out (nearly) clean. 
• Allow to cool for 10 minutes and then gently remove the cake from the pan.

If desired glaze the cake with a powdered sugar glaze.

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Low-Carb (Chocolate-Chip) Peanut Butter Cookie - Disaster with Isomalt (or maybe not)

I was reading the recipe book: Low Carb Desserts by Martha McBride, and I noticed a lot of the recipes used Isomalt instead of granulated Splenda. The Isomalt is a sugar alcohol which has a lot less (net) carbs than the Splenda.

(Note: some sources believe that sugar alcohol should not be "netted out" and all the carbs from sugar alcohol should be counted in your daily intake.)

I didn’t realize I could bake with Isomalt so I purchased some crystals and immediately mixed up a batch of my yummy Low-Carb (Chocolate-Chip) Peanut Butter Cookies; subbing the granulated Splenda for Isomalt.

From the begining the cookie dough looked strange. The Isomalt crystals were large and were very obvious in the dough. (Note: Later I found that you could get Isomalt Powder. Stupid me.)

But at this point I still had high hopes. I figured the crystals would melt during baking, and my PB cookies would look fine.

Well let’s just say they didn’t look fine. Some of the crystals did melt, but not in the way I expected. After about 8 minutes in the oven I checked the cookies and found each cookie surrounded by a pool of ooey-gooey, bubbling mess. (Sorry I didn’t get a picture. I was too freaked out.) When I pulled the cookies out of the oven the gooey mess hardened and trapped my cookies into an Isomalt candy sheet. (Cool science experiment, but a depressing baking experience.) I roughly cut the cookies out of their Isomalt trap...

And then carefully trimmed the rubbery substance from the edge of each cookie. I wanted to cry. All that beautiful PB wasted.

After I dried my tears I tasted a cookie.   Hmmmm...   Not too bad.  A little chewer than they normally are but still good. I had another, and then a third (and possibly a fourth). Maybe the Isomalt did have a place in my kitchen.

But then the rumbling in my tummy started. My gut started to twist and cramp. It dawned on me that the Isomalt was SUGAR ALCOHOL, and I had eaten four of those little cookies. If any of you have overindulged in sugar-free candy, you know what I was going through. The warning on the bag of Russell Stover's Sugar-Free Candy states: “Excessive consumption may cause a laxative effect.”

Believe you-me, that warning is no lie.

After my gut returned to normal I decided to make another batch just so I could get a picture of the melting Isomalt in action. But guess what?  The cookies baked up fine the second time !#@!

You can  see a little bit of the Isomalt "candy sheet" on the bottom and outer edge, but nothing like the first time.

What was going on????

The only difference with the second batch was that I cut it down in size (1/4 batch), AND I forgot to put the vanilla extract in the mix. Could the vanilla extract have caused the Isomalt to ooze, or was something else at work?  It is a mystery of cosmic proportions. 

But the mystery will have to remain unsolved cause I'm all out of peanut butter, and I have a ton of PB cookies to eat.  But I learned my lesson!!  Only 2 cookies a day.  That sugar alcohol is a killer.
 

Below is my tried-and-true PB cookie recipe.  Substitute Isomalt if you are curious/brave.

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Low-Carb (Chocolate-Chip) Peanut Butter Cookies

Makes 30 cookies, 67 g total; 2.2 g carbs each 

Ingredients:

1 cup low sugar peanut butter (I use Simply Jif at 2 net carbs per Tablespoon) -32 g carbs
1 cup granulated Splenda -24 g carbs
1 large egg, beaten - 0.5 g carbs
1 Tablespoon heavy whipping cream - 1 g carbs
1 tsp vanilla - 1.5 g carbs
1/2 cup Hershey's Sugar Free Semi-Sweet Baking Chips (optional) - 8 g net carbs (add 56 g if you don't believe in subtracting out the sugar alcohol)

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• In a bowl combine peanut butter, Splenda, egg, cream, and vanilla. Stir until combined.
• Add the chocolate chip and gently stir until evenly mixed.
• Drop 1 tablespoon of cookie dough onto a parchment lined cookie sheet. Allow two inches between cookies.  (I use a small ice cream scoop to get them all the same size.)
• Gently flatten the cookie tops..
• Bake for 12 minutes are until golden brown.

Enjoy...

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Best Ever Banana Cake

Best Ever Banana Cake is a huge name to live up to, but this cake does just that.

It is ultra-moist and filled with the flavors of ripe bananas, nutty pecans, and tangy buttermilk. But it is definitely more cake-like than bread-like. Think Carrot Cake texture and density with bananas instead of carrots.

The recipe begins with, surprise, surprise, BANANAS. Sweet, ripe bananas. The smell of bananas is not subtle in this recipe. It is in-your-face screaming “Here I am.”

Mixing the batter is a little time consuming and messy. It took three bowls in all. One for the bananas, one for the dry, and one for the sugar/butter creaming. 

 And the recipe makes A LOT of batter. This one could easily be cut in half. I wanted to make cupcakes instead of one large cake, and I ended up with 24 cupcakes and 3 mini tube cakes. If I had had the room in my oven I would have 36 cupcakes, but the three trays just wouldn’t fit.  Mama wants a double oven for Christmas.

Here is a link to the "Best Ever Banana Cake" recipe on Food.com and the 1100+ reviews. Read a few pages of reviews before you bake the cake. Base on the reviews I did modify the recipe and reduced the sugar from 2-1/8 cups down to 1-3/4 cups. For me it had the perfect level of sweetness, but if you prefer a more bread-like taste you might want to reduce the amount of sugar even more.

I baked the cupcakes for 21 minutes at 325 degrees, and the moistness was perfect. Not too wet, not too dry. I also skipped the “freezer” step where you take the cake from the oven and pop it into the freezer for 45 minutes. None of the many reviewers thought this improved the cake to any great degree so I didn’t bother rearranging my freezer to accommodate all the pans.

It was my weeks to bring treats for the “Cake Club” at work, so I brought these as my offering. They were a huge hit. Everything was gone in 45 minutes and I got 5 requests for the recipe! 5! That is an all-time record.

This Best Ever Banana Cake sure does live up to its name.  Open wide...