Live Every Week Like It's Cake Week

Red Velvet is (apparently) my girlfriend’s favorite cake, and I would love to say that I made it for her, but in reality she lives 3000 miles away in California – where the weather is currently much, much nicer – so this batch of cupcakes is all for me.

Which is probably not really all that great for my thighs.

This recipe is from Bakerella, and is incredibly, incredibly moist with an almost runny batter that made my stovetop look like the site of a massacre.  They bake up deep red and soft, and look perfect with a huge dollop of cream cheese frosting on top. If this was actually for Valentine’s Day – when I started thinking about these – I might have tinted the frosting pink, but as February ends tomorrow, it stayed white. Regardless, the cupcakes look so good that I’ve already had two.

I halved the recipe, but the whole thing is posted here. I made a dozen cupcakes, a full batch would make twenty-four.

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Courtesy of Bakerella

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon cocoa
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups oil
1 cup buttermilk
1 Tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 oz. red food coloring

Preheat oven to 350F and line muffin tins with paper liners. Set aside.

Mix together flour, salt, baking soda and cocoa with a wire whisk and set aside.

In a separate bowl, mix eggs, sugar, oil, buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla, and food coloring until completely combined. Add wet ingredients to dry, and beat until blended and smooth.

Pour into prepared muffin tins and bake for twenty minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool, and prepare cream cheese frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting

1/2 C butter, at room temperature
8 oz of cream cheese, at room temperature
1 t almond extract
2-3 C confectioner’s sugar

Beat butter and cream cheese together until thoroughly blended. Add extract and blend again. Add sugar until you reach your desired consistency and sweetness.

Spread or pipe onto cupcakes.

Perfect for a special occasion. Also perfect for a Saturday night when you’re not in the mood to do anything productive. Which is most Saturday nights at my place.

Today is that Hallmark holiday known as Valentine’s Day, and if I were keeping with the theme, I would post something sinfully chocolatey – brownies, or Devil’s Food cake, or the Chocolate Bourbon cake – or maybe red velvet cupcakes, which I haven’t actually ever made and should try one of these days. But no. You’re getting an orange cake, because I love oranges, and I’m spending Valentine’s Day with my cat and the season premiere of The Amazing Race, so I’m not baking chocolate if I don’t want to, dammit.

This is not to say that I have anything against chocolate – it’s actually mostly to say that I don’t have enough Ghirardelli to pull off devil’s food today.

This is one of my more frequently repeated desserts, honestly; sometimes I make the whole thing in a 9×13, sometimes I make cupcakes, theoretically I could do the layer cake thing at some point, but today I’ll be halving the recipe and doing one 9″, single layer cake. The recipe posted is the whole thing, though.

The cake is from Allen at Eating Out Loud, and the frosting is from…the 1976 edition of the Betty Crocker cookbook, and is the only buttercream recipe I will ever, ever use. Ever. Don’t fix what ain’t broke, people, and this buttercream is perfect.

Orange Sour Cream Cake

Via Eating Out Loud

3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. orange extract
8 oz. butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup fresh orange juice

Preheat oven to 350F and grease and flour pan(s) (or line muffin tins with papers if going the cupcake route).

Cream together butter and sugar, and then stir in sour cream, vanilla, orange extract, and eggs until thoroughly combined. In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking soda and salt, and then slowly add to wet ingredients, mixing until smooth. Pour in orange juice and again mix until smooth.

Pour into prepared pan(s) and bake. If you’re doing this in a 9×13, bake for an hour. Make it 30-35 minutes for 8″-9″ pans, and 20-25 minutes for cupcakes. Set aside and let cool.

Orange Butter Frosting

Via Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, 1976 edition

1/3 C butter, softened
3 C confectioner’s sugar
1 1/2 t orange extract
2 T orange juice

Blend butter and sugar. Stir in extract and orange juice, beat until frosting is smooth and of spreading consistency.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!

This is a weird thing to admit, especially for a 29 year old baker, but I…have never used yeast before. Seriously, I haven’t. I bake cookies and quickbreads and pies and cakes (obviously), but yeast breads? Not so much. I’m pretty sure it’s the instant gratification factor: I don’t have the patience for a good rise (though considering I now have a jar of yeast, I may attempt it more often).

This isn’t really a traditional yeast bread – it’s somewhere between yeast and quickbread, and takes instant yeast and baking powder. I’ve had the recipe since before Christmas, and have been wanting to make it since then, but as is often the case, my grocery store? Had no cinnamon chips. (Other things not findable in East Coast supermarkets: orange cinnamon rolls, German Chocolate cakemix and Heath Bar Crunch Bits. I’m confused too.) So it didn’t get made until this month, when my mother mailed me three pounds of cinnamon chips.

My mother is awesome.

This recipe comes from King Arthur Flour, producers of my go-to brownie recipe and purveyors of what is apparently really excellent flour that I’m too cheap to buy. Maybe someday, when I’m feeling flush. In the meantime, it’s Gold Medal, and I’ll continue trawling the KAF website for great recipes.

This recipe is apparently great for toasting; I wouldn’t know, since I just cut thick slices and ate the hell out of it. I also didn’t quite get the cinnamon chips mixed in properly, and it’s probably even better if they’re evenly distributed instead of…crowding the edge.

I’ll just consider it my own little twist on the recipe.

Easy Cinnamon Chip Bread

3 C AP flour

1/2 C sugar

2 t instant yeast

1 t salt

1 t cinnamon

1 C warm milk

1/4 C unsalted butter, melted

1 egg

1 t baking powder

1 C cinnamon chips

Cinnamon-sugar, for topping

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, yeast, cinnamon and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together the milk, butter, and egg. Combine the wet and dry ingredients, beating till smooth. Let the batter rest at room temperature for 1 hour, covered, then stir in the baking powder and cinnamon chips.

Spoon the batter into a greased 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan. Sprinkle the top with the cinnamon-sugar.

Bake the bread in a preheated 350°F oven for 35 to 40 minutes, until it tests done. Remove the bread from the oven, let it rest in the pan for 5 minutes, then transfer it from the pan to a wire rack to cool completely.

Seriously good, perfect for breakfast or dessert. Or breakfast, dessert, and a mid-afternoon snack.

Oh my God. This soup is like a religious experience.

I’m primarily a baker, but given that I’m technically not supposed to eat cake for dinner – yeah, I don’t get it either – I cook other foods too, and this time of year, its often soup, because nothing’s better than soup when it’s so cold and windy out that the snow is falling sideways. I only wish I was joking, people. It was bad yesterday. It was definitively a Soup Day

I still had most of a 5 lb bag of russets, so I made it a Potato Soup day.

This is the kind of recipe that supports a lot of experimentation. The basics are very basic – potatoes, onion, garlic, and stock – and a lot of changes can be made to change up the taste. Mine is seasoned with mustard powder, nutmeg, salt and seasoned pepper, and gets a lot of its flavor from the bacon fat I sauteed the vegetables in. You can just as easily use butter or olive oil, and season with Italian herbs or with dill or celery seed for a different flavor entirely.

Personally, I’m not going to change this one up much more; I nearly moaned when I ate my first bite last night.

The Best Motherfucking Baked Potato Soup Ever

6 medium russet potatoes, peeled and diced
1 Spanish onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
5 slices of thick-cut bacon, chopped
4 C chicken stock
4 oz soft goat cheese or goat cream cheese
1/4 C half and half
1/4 C AP flour
1/2 t dried mustard
1/4 t nutmeg
1/4 t sea salt
1/4 t California Seasoned Pepper

Chop bacon into half-inch pieces using kitchen scissors and render in a large pot. Remove bacon when crisp, draining on a towel, and saute onion until tender but not brown in the bacon fat. Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds or until fragrant.

Add flour and whisk until the flour is completely combined and the mixture is thick and bubbly. Add mustard and nutmeg and stir to combine.

Add diced potatoes and stir to coat. Season with salt and pepper. Pour in chicken stock and cook, covered, until very tender. It took around twenty minutes for mine, with a fairly small dice, but may take longer with larger pieces of potato.

Mash potatoes with a potato masher until the soup is thick and there are no large pieces remaining. Add goat cheese/goat cream cheese and whisk until melted. Add half-and-half, and stir to combine.

Add reserved bacon and stir to combine. Serve hot.

It’s an easy recipe, but unbelievably delicious, and perfect for an easy supper on a cold night; given that it’s just as cold today, I suspect I’ll be eating it again.

This was originally supposed to be Chocolate Spice Bread from Nick Maligieri’s The Modern Baker, but I was, um. Out of sour cream. And then I accidentally added twice as much cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. And had to add an extra egg. And substituted goat cheese for the sour cream.

In other words, this is not Nick’s chocolate spice bread, but it is one of the most decadent chocolate desserts I’ve made, and that includes the afternoon I spent getting drunk on chocolate bourbon cake.

Chocolate Spice Cake Loaf

1 1/2 C AP flour
1/3 C dutch process cocoa powder
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 t cinnamon
1 t nutmeg
1 t ground ginger
3 eggs
1/2 C granulated sugar
1/2 C brown sugar
5 T melted butter
4 oz goat cheese, softened
1 t almond extract

Sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, spices and salt. Set aside.

Whisk eggs with sugar. Add melted butter, goat cheese, and almond extract and beat until smooth. Add dry ingredients and beat until combined.

Spread in a greased loaf pan and bake in a 350F oven for 40-50 minutes or until a clean knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for five minutes, then remove and cool completely before serving.

I figured that yet another recipe full of substitutions and minor errors was the right way to end the year. It is, after all, the way I bake 90% of my recipes.

Procrastination is an art form, dear almost nonexistent readers. Procrastination is why I’ve put off baking this coffeecake for almost two weeks now, and procrastination is why it’s being baked right now, at 10 pm. Because the other option is working on the writing project I’ve been putting off for a month, and heavens, we wouldn’t want to that, would we?

Of course not.

This recipe is basically Kitchen Brother’s Cranberry Buckle, with one important, essential, imperative addition: orange extract. Unnecessary, you say, when there’s already zest? Please, there can never be enough orange, especially in combination with cranberry.

That’s your lesson for today.

Cranberry Buckle

Streusel
1/2 C unbleached AP flour
1/2 C packed light brown sugar
2 T granulated sugar
1/2 t ground cinnamon
Pinch table salt
4  T unsalted butter (1/2 stick), cut into 8 pieces, softened but still cool
Cake
1 1/2 C AP flour
1 1/2 t baking powder
10 T unsalted butter, softened but still cool
2/3 C granulated sugar
1/2 t table salt
1/2 t grated orange zest
1 t orange extract
1 1/2 t vanilla extract
2  large eggs , room temperature
4  C fresh cranberries

Mix dry streusel ingredients, add softened butter, chopped, and rub between your fingers until the consistency of wet sand. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 350F and grease a 9″ cake pan.

Whisk together flour and baking powder, set aside.

Cream butter, sugar, salt, and orange zest. Add eggs and vanilla and orange extracts. Mix until smooth, and then add dry ingredients, mixing until the flour is thoroughly combined.

Fold in cranberries. I highly recommend you do this with a wooden spoon rather than a spatula, lest your spatula snap in two. As mine did approximately half an hour ago.

Transfer dough to pan, pressing it into corners until it is even. Gather streusel in your hand and form a large clump before sprinkling it over the cake.  Repeat until the cake is coated and the streusel is gone. Bake for 55 minutes.

I can’t vouch for its taste, but it smells fabulous.

This is based vaguely on a Paula Deen recipe, except I doubled the spices, changed molasses for maple syrup, and switched the vegetable shortening for butter (Yes, I too was shocked at the existence of a Deen recipe without a pound of butter.) They turned out well, heated the apartment on this extremely cold December day, and made my kitchen smell like Christmas, so I consider it a success.

Ginger Spice Cookies

3/4 C butter, softened

1 C brown sugar

1/4 C maple syrup

1 egg

2 C AP flour

2 t baking soda

2 t cinnamon

2 t ground ginger

1 t cloves

1/2 t salt

Granulated white sugar, for rolling

Preheat oven and either grease cookie sheets or line with parchment or a Silpat. Set aside. Cream butter and sugar. Add maple syrup and egg and mix until smooth. Sift together flour, baking soda, spices and salt. Add to wet ingredients and mix.

Form dough into 1″ balls and roll in white sugar. Flatten gently with the heel of your hand and bake for 12 minutes, rotating once.

They’re quite spicy and the maple flavor I was expecting was nonexistent. If you want a milder, sweeter cookie, halve the spices – it probably would have a more maple-spice flavor then.

This, my friends, is the best blondie you’ll ever make, period. It starts with my mother’s basic caramel brownies recipe – which, like many of my mother’s best recipes, comes from the 1955 edition of the Minonk United Methodist Church Cookbook – but instead of the prescribed nuts, add a cup of heath bar crunch bits. The kind with chocolate, although the brickle bits would probably be awesome in their own way.

I used the Heath bits the first time I made these, and though I’ve made them since with chocolate chips and with walnuts, and with pecans, nothing really comes close to the rich sweetness that toffee brings to the party.  This is the epitome of blondies, and I probably would have finished my latest batch already except for the fact that I’d sent them to California for someone’s birthday.

Heath Bar Crunch Blondies

1 1/2 C AP flour, sifted

1 t salt

2 C brown sugar, firmly packed

2 eggs, lightly beaten

2 t baking powder

2 t vanilla extract

1/2 C butter, melted

1 C HEATH Bar Crunch Bits

Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Add melted butter, sugar, vanilla and eggs and stir to combine. Fold in HEATH Bar Crunch pieces.

Spread in a well-greased 8×8 pan and bake at 350F for 30 minutes.

Excellent warm or cool, but somehow the most decadent when still soft from the oven.

I’m never quite sure how to classify the muffin. Technically speaking, it resides in the the quick bread category, along with biscuits and scones and banana and zucchini bread, but I’ve adapted cake recipes to make muffins and I imagine I could reverse that in some cases. There are definitely more cake-like muffins out there. This isn’t one of them.

I first came across Elise’s Blackberry Muffin recipe back in 2005, and wanted to try it then, but when I blogged about it on my now inactive blog, my mother promptly sent me her sweet muffin recipe from Betty Crocker and informed me that they made the best fruit muffins ever, and I never got around to Elise’s. Then I was hunting around for something to bake today, came across them again, and finally, four years later, I’ve made them.

They might be the best raspberry muffins ever. Don’t tell my mother.

The secret is the sour cream, which makes for a fluffy, slightly dense, moist muffin. It’s also only got 2/3 cup of sugar, so it’s not overly sweet either; it’s perfect, and I’m currently devouring them as an accompaniment to my tomato and spinach soup for dinner tonight. I chose raspberries, my favorite fruit for muffins, but blueberries or the original blackberries work fine too.

Raspberry Sour Cream Muffins
2 C all purpose flour
1 T baking powder
1/2 t salt
2 large eggs
1 C sour cream
2 t Half-and-Half
2/3 C sugar
8 T warm melted butter (1 stick)
1 t vanilla
1 C frozen raspberries

Position rack in center of oven. Preheat oven to 400°F. Grease a standard 12 muffin pan or line with paper muffin cups.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.

In a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, sour cream, milk, sugar, butter and vanilla.

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and mix together with a few light strokes, just until the dry ingredients are moistened. Add the berries. DO NOT OVERMIX. The batter shouldn’t be smooth.

Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the middle of 1 or 2 of the muffins comes out clean, 17-20 minutes (or longer). Let cool for 2 to 3 minutes before removing from the pan. If not serving hot, let cool on a rack.

It actually makes 18 instead of 12, which amazed me, because even when a recipe says it makes 18, I only ever get 12.

Battle Two in my ongoing and unsuccessful war against my Bundt pan, I baked this cake for National Bundt Day. Which was two weeks ago. And had so many plans to bring it into work and wow the four other employees with my cake prowess, but again, I was defeated by a bundt pan that doesn’t want to release cakes.

Possibly I should stick with sheet cakes and round cakes and cupcakes, but I refuse to be vanquished by a Calphalon pan. But I digress.

This cake, other than the pan disaster, also heralded me realizing that my microwave had a minor smoking problem, required the purchase of alcohol and espresso powder, and had one of the most spatter-y batters ever, but it was incredible. When I dug into the broken quarter directly after it came out of the pan, I thought it was possible that I could actually get drunk on this cake. I don’t consider this a bad thing.

From the New York Times via Elise at Simply Recipes, it takes an entire cup of whiskey. Trust me on this: use it all. It makes for an immensely flavorful, immensely moist cake that, yes, you may be able to get drunk on.

Chocolate Bourbon Cake

1 C unsalted butter, softened

2 C AP flour

5 oz bittersweet chocolate

1/4 C instant espresso

2 T unsweetened cocoa powder

1 C bourbon whiskey

1/2 t kosher salt

2 C granulated sugar

3 eggs

1 T vanilla extract

1 t baking soda

1/4 powdered sugar, for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 325F and grease and flour a 10-cup bundt. Set aside. Melt chocolate in microwave or over a double boiler. Let cool.

Place espresso powder and cocoa in a 2-cup glass measuring cup. Add enough boiling water to make 1 C. Add 1 C of bourbon. Stir until cocoa and espresso has dissolved. Set aside.

Beat softened butter until fluffy (2-3 minutes on high). Add sugar and beat until well combined. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each addition. Beat in the vanilla extract, baking soda and melted chocolate, scraping down sides of bowl with a rubber spatula.

With the mixer on the lowest speed, beat in a third of the whiskey espresso cocoa mixture. When liquid is absorbed, beat in 1 cup flour. Repeat additions, ending with whiskey mixture. Scrape batter into prepared pan and smooth top. Bake until a cake tester inserted into center of cake comes out clean, about 1 hour 10 minutes for Bundt pan (loaf pans will take less time, start checking them after 55 minutes).

Transfer cake to a rack. Unmold after 15 minutes and sprinkle warm cake with more whiskey. Let cool. Sprinkle powdered sugar through a mesh sieve over the cake before serving.

Everything went well until the unmolding part. Also, I didn’t bother sprinkling with more whiskey – it didn’t need it, but your mileage may vary here.