Baby Cakes (and a Recipe!)

Last week one night, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and a baking blogger that I follow had posted a picture of an incredibly gorgeous chocolate cake.  I showed it to my husband and exclaimed that I needed to bake cake more often - we are not enjoying enough cake like this!  Back when I worked at Phillips Exeter Academy a few years ago, I was the self appointed birthday cake baker and I spent many hours pouring over recipes and choosing cake recipes for each of the monthly employee birthdays in my department.  I never made the same cake twice and I always made two or three cakes at a time to bring in.  I would combine all the birthdays that fell in any given month and choose a particular day that would be our Cake Day.  Everybody loved and greatly anticipated cake days and I loved planning for them.  Nowadays, I make cakes just a few times a year.  When there are only two of you at home, making a huge layer cake just doesn't make sense unless you are going to pig out and eat it over a couple of days.  We just can't do that (we really want to but we won't).  So, inspiration struck - baby cakes!  I have a really good recipe that I actually found on the back of Trader Joes baking cocoa and it's called the "Easiest And Greatest Chocolate Cake Ever" or something like that.  I am going to share that recipe with you shortly.  You want this recipe in your file box!

Last Saturday night, I made a batch of the cake batter that I am going to spell out for you and I divided it in to the 9 pans you see above and baked them.  I wrapped them all individually and very tightly and stored them all in the freezer but one of the little ones.  On Sunday, right after church, I made a bowl of rich chocolate ganache and we split one of the baby cakes and layered on ganache and chocolate peanut butter ice cream for our Sunday splurge.  Heaven!  Then, tonight, we had two of our missionaries over for dinner and I thawed out another baby cake and this time I made a chocolate cream cheese frosting and made a wee layer cake sprinkled with mini chocolate chips.  That wee cake was cut in to four tiny pieces for our dessert - perfect.  Now, anytime we crave a bit of cake, we can have one with no leftovers.  I plan on making a few other types of cake batter and bake and freeze them too for variety (though chocolate is the favorite).

Here's the recipe and it truly is easy because you throw all of the ingredients in one huge mixing bowl and beat it all at once - no separating wet and dry although sometimes I do out of habit.  The cake is moist, rich, not too sweet, not too tender but not dense - just right!  It's a perfect devil's food type cake and it makes a ton of batter - more than you would need for a typical two-three layer cake.  If you want cupcakes, it makes 48!  When I make it for a layer cake, once I pour the batter in my pans, I use the leftover batter for however many cupcakes can be made.  For baby cakes, it filled four 4 inch pans and 4 six inch pans and I over filled them so the cakes would be high enough to split in layers themselves.
Typical 9 inch pans bake for 30 minutes; cupcakes and the wee cakes, start at 20 minutes - just keep an eye on the smaller pans and not all ovens perform the same.

Greatest AND Easiest Chocolate Cake (Trader Joe's)

3 1/3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 Tbl baking soda
1 1/3 cups baking cocoa
3 cups buttermilk (don't use regular milk)
2 cups sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 sticks softened butter
1 tsp vanilla
5 eggs
Beat it all together on high (start on low or it will go flying) for 3 minutes.  Grease and flour your pans and bake at preheated 350 degrees.  

On another cooking note, yesterday I made a huge pot of Alphabet Soup for our church Women's meeting; we had a wonderful Grammar Refresher class taught by a high school English teacher and it seemed appropriate.  The soup is made with hamburger, onions, carrots, green beans, corn, peas, beef broth, tomato sauce, and various herbs.  It was pretty tasty and we had leftovers so I served it again tonight to our dinner guests (and the baby cakes).

I meant to get a picture of the dessert - my friend Taryn made large sugar cookies and she frosted them with a delightful green icing and wrote (with icing, very finely) words that we associate with grammar, like noun, adverb, pronoun etc.  Clever and delicious.  I highly recommend a grammar refresher for all of us - you have probably noticed how poorly we speak as a nation, even journalists and writers, and our kids and grandkids are not being taught grammar as thoroughly or consistently like we older folks were.  Forgive me if you ever find a grammar mistake in my blog posts -  I do overuse commas and hyphens but at least you will never hear or read incorrect subject or object pronouns from me.  Bits from last night's class - don't say "me and my sister" are driving to the lake - say instead, "my sister and I".  You wouldn't say "me drove to the lake" so why would you say "me and my sister" did?  And "fewer problems and less pain" - know the difference.  Lesson over!  Fun class!  Now go make baby cakes!

What The Rain Drove Me To

I gotta tell you, I was really grateful for the rain we received for 2 1/2 days; steady, cold, miserable, much needed rain.  Sunday I was very excited as it began and of course it was still warm outside when it did and I was in great spirits.  And I made a list of what I would do when it rained with a couple lines of what I would do if it didn't because you can't always trust the weather forecasts.

I have quite a bit of yard work left to do so I was slightly annoyed that it wasn't warm enough to work outside; in fact it was very chilly, like the high 40's here at the seacoast so we turned the heat on.  I felt a sense of urgency to do a bunch of indoor stuff because once summer is here I don't spend much time inside if I can help it and indoor projects have to wait until winter.  Inside the cozy house I spent a couple hours in a big linen closet sorting and filling five huge contractor size hefty bags to haul to the Salvation Army.  Then I made curtains for the Ocean room and the Queen room.  And mopped all the wood floors.  And watched a movie on my iPad.  And then the dark, overcast gloom got to me and I had to do something to make me feel cheery and cheer so I decided to bake.  And I kept baking.  Whole wheat bread, whole wheat chocolate chip banana bread, double chocolate banana bread (we had a lot of super ripe bananas in the fruit bowl), Road Trip cookies (chocolate cookie dough with lots of peanut M&Ms - recipe from the cook book "Death By Chocolate"), gluten free chocolate chip cookies (experimenting for three family members who have wheat allergies so to have cookies for them on hand) and these gluten free cookies were amazingly good!  Like really delicious!  I would eat them just as eagerly as regular because they were that good.  You use a combo of oat and brown rice flour and potato starch in place of all purpose flour and let the dough rest in the fridge over night before baking.  I baked chocolate chip walnut biscotti (let's see if it keeps in the pantry for two years and still tastes good like the ones we bought in Italy).  You can see that just about everything I made had chocolate chips in it. Oh, and a lime pound cake.  And meatloaf, and the start of ham and bean soup for a friend who just had surgery.  All of the baked goods went into the "happy" or "sugar Sunday" freezer - we didn't just sit around and eat this stuff (though we wanted to!).  I also had to spend some time at the Yellow House because the old wall oven around which a brick hearth was built from around the 60's finally died for good.  I searched for months while it was dying to find the smallest full size (24 inch) wall oven possible and when we went over to place it in the hearth we needed 1/2 inch in width to make it fit - drat!  By a miracle I found a stone mason and electrician to both come over the next day to both widen the space with a mini jack hammer and install the oven.  While they worked inside, I stayed outside and pruned the driveway roses, the hydrangeas, weeded, pruned rhodies, and dug up several hostas and astilbes to take back to the Rye house.  The renters are pleased with a new oven and I am relieved.  After all that drama and then success, Dan took me to see a movie matinee, Far From the Madding Crowd - I highly recommend this movie and being swept in to the English countryside helped with the rainy day's gloom.    Now the rain is gone away and has done its magic on our parched earth and I've been back out in the yard planting more perennials in the newest flower borders.  And climbing trees. Here are pictures of all the week's activities.

                                                            Road Trip Cookies - tasty!

                                                     Gluten free Choc Chip Cookies - wonderful!

This looks like a meat loaf, and I did make one, but it's the huge double chocolate chip banana bread!

                                    Sprouted whole wheat, spelt, and amaranth flours in this bread

                                               Great crumb - perfect for toast and sandwiches

                          Yeah, I ate an end right after they came out of the oven - with butter and jam

    Biscotti going in for the first bake.  Then you slice them on the diagonal and bake them again

We waited until the third day to eat these (kinda) per the recipe recommendation.  

                                   Stone masons carving out 1 inch in width for 24 inches back

                                                 Now the electrician hooking the wires

                                                                  Ta - da!!!!!!!

Thursday night's dinner - salad made mixed with the leftover meat loaf

         Valance I made for the Ocean rooms windows - I only sew straight things.

Looking out at the rainy world while hanging said valances.

                                                       Window scarves for the Queen room

       Siberian Iris border - these were planted by a former owner and I think they need to be thinned.

    Lots of new plantings in the enlarged sun border as we call it.  Not good light - late afternoon.

    My daughter just sent me this pic of the strawberry plants we planted a month ago that are fruiting

I had planted 75 dahlias and now that it's rained - they are popping up!  

 I planted this new rose, EBB TIDE, back in April and look at the beauties that have burst forth!

                        Tonight I climbed a huge tree in the woodland garden and sat awhile

  I rolled a big stone over that had fallen off the wall and now it's a great step for me and the

          grandies to climb up in to the tree.

 Dinner tonight - first lobster bisque of the season from the Rye Harbor Lobster Pound

We split a bisque and a small lobster roll. 

                                                       That was my week so far.

An Evening With An Orange and Leftover Milk

 We're going out of town for eight days later this week and I had half of a gallon of whole milk sitting in the refrigerator leftover from a baking project last week due to expire and then an orange sitting in the fruit bowl that needed to be eaten last week.  I decided to see how I could use both the milk and orange instead of throwing them out.  So a baking binge began.  I first made a double recipe of the cake layers for the gorgeous pink cake see below.  The cake is a yellow butter cake with whole milk as the liquid in the batter.  I super wrapped the four layers and froze them.  When I'm ready to serve the cake, I'll defrost and ice with the killer pink colored butter cream.  This is a cake we sampled at Amy's Bread in NYC and it was amazing.  I have both of her cook books and three of the four recipes I made today were from her book The Sweeter Side of Amy's Bread.

I next made 100% whole wheat biscuits; again with whole milk for the liquid in the batter.  I had intended to roll out the dough and cut the biscuits but decided to drop them in greased muffin tins, sprinkle on grated cheese and bake.  Wheaty, buttery and tender.  I wrapped all these up as well and they'll stay frozen until we need them to accompany soup.

The biscuit dough was made in the food processor where you pulse all the dry ingredients, cut in your butter, and then add the milk and pulse just until it starts to come together.   

Finished biscuits

While the biscuits were baking, I used the rest of the whole milk for a decadently rich chocolate pudding from Smitten Kitchen's blog.  This is an incredible chocolate pudding.  You don't use eggs in it; just cornstarch, sugar, salt, milk, unsweetened and bitter sweet chocolate and vanilla.  I could have eaten the entire pan full but I settled for a few spoonsful.   I don't know if I can freeze pudding to thaw and eat later.  I have to investigate that.  I know you can with egg based pastry cream and I could certainly make pudding pops.  I made a batch and a half which I know we won't eat in two days so I'll do some research.  

When the pudding was finished and cooling, I used the orange to make a batch of Orange Sugar Cookies.  It's a rich butter cookie dough flavored with the zest of one orange; you roll the dough in balls, flatten with three fingers, sprinkle with sugar, and bake.  I found the flavor good but a bit bland for my taste so I melted bittersweet chocolate and dipped in the bottoms.  When Dan came home from some meetings tonight, his eyes lit up as he looked at the baking mess all over the kitchen and the island covered with all my delicious work and he asked what I was up to.  I replied that I needed to use the leftover milk and orange before our trip and he laughed and said "so instead or throwing away two dollars worth of milk, you decided to use it for many dollars worth of baked goods".  Ha!  Good point.  And good food!  

 I adore the combination of orange and chocolate!

Unrelated to my baking, this morning I potted up some paperwhite bulbs to look forward to as I get ready to say good-bye to the amaryllis that is on its way out after weeks of generous blooms.