melting your mouth

Well, it’s time for another Daring Bakers adventure, and what fun this one was! This month’s challenge was hosted by Daring Baker co-founders Ivonne of Cream Puffs In Venice and Lis of La Mia Cucina, with help from Fran of Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shea of Whiskful. The challenge is dedicated to Barbara of winosandfoodies.com and the Taste of Yellow LiveSTRONG event. In addition to this challenge, this month was also exciting because it brought a new Daring Bakers’ website, including public baking forums which you, dear reader, should go check out.

But enough with the business. You want to hear about cake! This month’s challenge was an Opera Cake. Though Opera cakes are usually flavored with dark ingredients like coffee or chocolate, these Opera Cakes were to choose light spring colors and flavorings. I’d recently been remembering a delicious white chocolate, honey, and lavender terrine I had when Mom and I visited Provence, so I immediately decided those would be the flavors I would pick.

Since Matt was out of town on baking day, Mom came over to our apartment and made the cake with me. I was sure glad — we had a lot of fun, and nothing was that hard, but there were times it was busy and it was good to have two sets of hands. I have to say, I’m pretty proud of how this came out. Aside from not letting the ganache firm up enough so that the glaze melted it a little, the cake looks beautiful, and it tasted delicious as well. Maybe a tad on the sweet side, but what kind of a complaint is that?! I was particularly glad of how much the lavender flavor came out. I thought it might be too subtle, but instead it asserted its presence just enough. Thanks Ivonne, Lis, Fran, and Shea, for a fun and whimsical challenge! Be sure to check out all the other Opera Cakes with the DB blogroll!

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As you may already know from a previous post, Red Velvet Cake is by far my favorite type of cake. So when I saw these Red Velvet Cake Balls from Bakerella, I had to try them. Her original recipe calls for a red velvet cake mix and cream cheese frosting from a jar. I’m sure that would be a much easier way to make them, but I decided to make them from scratch. I think ready-made cream cheese frosting tastes a little funny, and making a cake doesn’t really take that much longer than using a box anyway. The down side of this, though, is that they need to be refrigerated because of the cream cheese. I brought these to choir rehearsal a few weeks ago, but when I was calling them Cake Balls, everyone thought they needed a more elegant name, so I’ve decided to call them Red Velvet Cake Truffles from now on. This is obviously a recipe you can do a lot of playing with depending on the occasion (for instance, Bakerella now has an adorable Cupcake Pops version), so you may be seeing more of these in the future!

Red Velvet Cake Truffles

Here’s the basics of what I did, adapted from Bakerella. Feel free to let your creativity shine!

1. Make a quarter sheet cake. (I used the Red Velvet Cake recipe you can find here, which will fit in a quarter sheet pan, though just barely.)
2. While it’s cooling, make some frosting. (I used this cream cheese frosting, but without the peppermint.)
3. When the cake is cool, crumble it up into a big bowl. Add enough frosting so it will hold together in balls (probably about 16 oz, the size of one can of frosting).
4. Roll into balls, or whatever shape you wish, and chill in the fridge or freezer until nice and firm.
5. Melt some chocolate or candy coatings according to the directions on the package for dipping. (If you’re using chocolate, you probably will need to add a little bit of oil to it when you’re melting it.)
6. Dip the truffles into the chocolate or candy. I did some dark chocolate and some white chocolate. I thought the dark chocolate tasted better, but the white was prettier and looked more like a traditional red velvet cake. You could also drizzle them afterward with a different kind of chocolate or color of candy, dip them into sprinkles or other toppings while the chocolate is still warm. The possibilities are endless!

And the finish line…wait where did the crowd go…oh I am a bit late.  First, Second, and Last Place have all finished, cleaned, and gone home for a long winter’s nap, but here we are at last.

The Daring Bakers challenge for April, hosted by Elle from Feeding My Enthusiasms (who recently brought us Chocolate Bakewell Tarts) and Deborah from Taste and Tell, was right up my alley, if I were at the receiving end.  It was Chocolate Covered Cheesecake pops.   I love cheesecake, typically I like it with some sort of fruit inside or a nice fruit topping.  I have to admit I never made a cheesecake, so when I had only two hours before church I decided I would take it slow.  I enjoyed a nice cup of coffee and a muffin while strolling the isles of the grocery store finding the ingredients for my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce, which I will share later, and this great challenge.

Once home from church about 2:30 I quickly started adding the time and knew it was going to be tight, but now real ways to rush it.  The ingredients gathered above I thought made a great picture and a great start for the baking.  I only wish it wasn’t the best part, well at least one of the highlights.

The cheesecake itself went together fairly seamlessly.  Getting the cheese to soften up was the only tricky part, as I ignored the part about having it a room temperature.  After baking almost twice as long as the recipe stated we were finally ready for the two stage cooling.  Once to get it to room temperature.  Secondly to get it nice and set for cutting.

I decided I didn’t want to make pops but rather used cookie cutters.  This was a fairly messy and frustrating choice at first but I quickly got the hang of it.  Soon I had about 4 large plates full of triangles, squares, balls, and one mini cheesecake sliced to perfection.

Off to the freezer, and I was off to bed…well I thought I was.  With some encouraging words from my loving wife I was back in the kitchen melting chocolates in the double boiler.  Out of the freezer and into chocolate easy enough.  Soon I realized  lots of chocolate was getting wasted and pooling at the bottom of each piece.  A call up to my wife who successfully had done this a few weeks earlier for a bit of support.  Together we played with the temperature and it all went downhill from there.   My wife reminded me that the many times she had done chocolate this never happened.  The second batch, milk chocolate this time, went even worse.  This went crystalline very quickly.  I wonder if this was the fact that I washed and not thoroughly dried the double boiler between rounds.  About the only successful in that batch was the mini slice that you can see below.

I did ultimately enjoy doing this recipe.  I also enforced for myself that I am not a great baker without the support of one of the strong women in my life either calling the shots or right there helping me along.  But if you find a good recipe or even just the need for anything to be simmered, sliced, chopped, grilled, flipped, or fried I am right there ready to charge ahead.

Oh yeah I almost forgot they do taste wonderfully.  My wife likes the smaller ones with more chocolate and I adore the larger ones with more cheesecake.  I do find that I eat around the outside and save that last glorious bite from the center for the very end.  Enjoy!  And while you’re at it, check out some of the other Daring Bakers’ lovely creations on the blogroll.  If you want to try these yourself, you can find the recipe (which was adapted from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey) on Deborah’s post.

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Morven at Food Art and Random Thoughts. It was another wonderful Dorie Greenspan recipe — I’m seeing a lot of these lately. Baking from My Home to Yours is definitely on my wish list. I served Dorie’s “Perfect Party Cake” for our Easter lunch with my parents. This is a lemon flavored cake topped with a lemon meringue buttercream (also called Swiss buttercream) frosting and raspberry jam filling. I followed the recipe pretty much as directed, though it was supposed to be topped with coconut and I left that out. I don’t know, maybe it would be good, but coconut just doesn’t really go with lemon and raspberries to me. So I garnished it with lemon slices instead. If I’d had a tad yellow food coloring I probably would’ve added it to the frosting, too.

Anyway the cake was delicious, especially the frosting. It didn’t really rise that much, but it was plenty tall enough anyway. Someone apparently leaked to Dorie that we were making her cake, and so she got a message to us that some people had told her they’d had problems with the cake not rising, and she thought it might have to do with the flour. She thus recommended substituting 1 C minus 2 T all purpose flour for the cake flour, which I did. So I don’t know, it still didn’t rise much, but I thought it had a very nice texture anyway. It was really moist and pretty light.

The buttercream is rich, but I thought it nicely balanced the cake. (Mom thought it was a bit too heavy and that I should’ve been a bit lighter on the butter, and of course mother always knows best…) To make a Swiss buttercream frosting, you first cook the meringue (egg whites and sugar) over a pot of simmering water, and then beat it until very stiff before beating in the butter, and then, in this case, lemon juice. I will definitely be trying this again!

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I know, it’s the new year, and everyone’s got all kinds of resolutions to exercise and eat healthier, and the last thing you need is more pictures of delicious sweet things. So, I promise this is the last of the Christmas sweets. This is a traditional yeast bread/cake often made by Moravians, usually at Christmas time, but sometimes other times of the year as well. My mom grew up in the Moravian Church, but doesn’t remember making sugar cake herself until I was little and she made it for the Candle Tea (a kind of church bazaar at Christmastime) at Raleigh Moravian Church in North Carolina. She got the recipe there from Mae Marshall.

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