I'd like to introduce you to a new segment on this blog called "plainbellied BAKES!" Last week I made homemade cream puffs, reduced fat vanilla pastry cream and reduced fat cocoa pastry cream. It was all delicious! This week, I'm starting in on cakes.
Have you ever seen that movie "Matilda" with Danny Devito? There's this part where Bruce Bogtrotter is caught for taking some of the principal's cake and is forced to eat the rest of it. I have no ambition to eat 50 lbs of cake in one sitting, but I have had the image of that cake in my mind for probably 15 years and haven't found it yet. I want that cake! I'm starting with tooling around with chocolate cake recipes, but I think ultimately it's going to take a good, spongey chocolate cake, pierced and drizzled with a runny chocolate ganache that can soak in to the cake, plus a thicker ganache between layers and a fudgey chocolate frosting. I think that's a goal worth pursuing.
I think the cake I came up with might fit the bill, but it was a little, tiny bit over baked this time around. Just a tad on the dry side. That's okay. It will still work for testing out the fillings, etc.
Here is the cake I made:
I just have to point out that my cake baked perfectly level. I haven't trimmed the top or anything. But all the chocolatey experiments are for another week, so that cake is safely frozen for now. This week I'm actually getting ready for Valentine's Day. I've spent far too long planning the menu: sparkling juice with heart ice, mini meat balls with ketchup hearts, homemade baked mac 'n cheese baked in a shallow pan so I can cut it out with heart cookie cutters, carrots with ranch and lemon pepper broccoli (the veggies were Her Nibs' choice), plus a chocolate cake with a vanilla buttercream meringue frosting. The cake was actually the first thing I decided on because I wanted to learn to make that frosting. I scoured the web and read at least a hundred reviews of various recipes and came up with one I wanted to try. (It's a crazy process. It takes about two hours. I even *had* to buy a candy thermometer.) I knew that my small family couldn't handle a full cake (at least, not in a healthy way), so I also made a small cake in my Pyrex 4 cup measure. Here it is:
By the way, that butter in the background is all for the frosting. So I made a mini cake, used a ruler and toothpicks to mark 3 even-ish layers, sliced it and did my first 'crumb coat' ever! That's the initial thin layer of butter cream to catch all the crumbs to make sure they don't mess up the final layer of icing, but you probably knew that already. Now all my cake is frozen, so it will be ready to frost and decorate for Valentines.
For decorations, I'm leaning towards roses made from fruit roll ups. This cake is more about recipe experimentation than decoration, though. But I warn you, cake is on my mind! I can't stop thinking about how I would turn each of my sculptures and collages into a cake. I even neglected my daily TV watching to read cake books. If I'm as consistent with this as I was with my long-forgotten 'Art Pacts', or my political punditry, or even my recent foray into Paintbrush, you have nothing to worry about. Then again, who knows? Maybe the whole blog will become "plainbellied BAKES!"
