Blood Orange Olive Oil Cake
I’ve been a bit obsessed with blood oranges this winter: I’ve been buying them by the bagful, I’ve made marmalade, and from the moment I saw this olive oil cake, I have kept at least 3 blood oranges ready and waiting in my fruit bowl so that I would be ready to make this at a moment’s notice.
Unfortunately, it took 2 weeks for that moment to finally arrive.
But arrive it did, and it brought a stunning cake with it. Like previous olive oil cakes, this cake is beautifully mild with a delicious fruity finish due to a high content of extra virgin olive oil. The oil also happened to impart a darker greenish hue to my cake which may not look so attractive, but I can assure you, it did not detract one iota from its delicate flavor and luscious texture.
The blood oranges add a bright citrus flavor, though milder than regular oranges, which just gently perfumes the entire cake. Zest is rubbed into the sugar, a technique I’ve tried before with results that I loved. Freshly squeezed blood orange juice is added as well as juicy jewel-toned pulp silvers, which are obtained through “supreme”-ing an orange- which ended up being quite a challenge for me. It seems so simple in theory: cut away all the peel and pith by following the curve of the sides of the orange, and then cut out each segment from the stingy connective membranes. And I’m sure I’ve seen it done many times on Iron Chef, and maybe a Top Chef quickfire challenge? But when faced with the challenge in my OWN kitchen… well, let’s just say I managed to extract enough segments from orange innards for the recipe, but not without a lot of lost juice and a big bloody mess.
But the cake was well worth the mess!
The cake is stunning in its simplicity with a mild citrus flavor, a slightly crispy “crust” on the first day, and a luxuriously rich texture (without feeling heavy, like other butter-laden cakes) that only improves the longer you can keep yourself from devouring the entire loaf… not that I would know. I liked mine with freshly whipped cream at the start and end of my day, and next time I will be sure to save extra blood oranges make the honey blood orange compote!
Lemon Blackberry Olive Oil Cake
I have been in denial about the arrival of Fall for the last month. I have nothing against Fall itself, in fact, since moving out here to the Northeast and witnessing the dynamic kaleidoscope of color in the trees, it’s arguably the best season out here. I love the crisp coolness in the air (usually very welcome after months of the sweltering summer humidity) and the fashion accessories that come with it: scarves, hats, boots, and jackets. Every year, I eagerly await pumpkin-spiced lattes, pumpkin scones, and pumpkin ale; I look forward to the arrival of varieties of squash and apples and their associated recipes of soups and pies. The only part of Fall that I DON’T look forward to is what inevitably follows Fall…the season that shall not be named (but rhymes with splinter and starts with a ‘w’). But now that we’ve already turned on the heater a few nights this past week and I’ve come down with my annual summer-to-fall-season-change bug, I can no longer deny that Fall is HERE.
As a corollary to my denial, I have not yet allowed myself to start baking with fall produce. Instead, I’ve been scrambling to bake with the last of summer’s fantastic bounty (peaches, berries, and plums) before they disappear until next year.
Enter this delightfully summery lemon-infused berry olive oil cake. Lemon zest is rubbed into the sugar, to release the essential oils, and when combined with fruity olive oil creates a mild, yet elegantly flavored cake. I put in some beautiful blackberries that I spotted at Whole Foods, and am so glad that I did because I haven’t seen them around since!
The cake is moist and rich, perfumed with lemon and olive oil. The lemon flavoring reminds me of this fantastic lemon confection because both cakes merely suggests the essence of lemon rather than smacks you in the face with lip-puckering acidity. But this cake is heart healthy in comparison, with less than half the amount of butter and egg yolks. I baked two of these beauties in one week (another testimony to the recipe’s greatness- an everyday cake that can be baked on a weekday!); after tasting the first, it didn’t survive to see outside of our apartment so I had to bake a second to share with others!
Poppy Seed Lemon Cake
I should be posting about strawberries and rhubarb and embracing the long-awaited appearance of spring/summer produce. (AND WEATHER!!! yippeee!! I think everyone within EARSHOT of me knows I’ve been eagerly awaiting this time of the year since last December!) Plus I’ve already posted a citrus-y dessert a week ago, and here I am, back with another lemon-flavored confection. Don’t worry, strawberries and rhubarb will make their grand appearance soon!
This ain’t your average lemon poppy seed cake/muffin/loaf. Oh no. Deb from SmittenKitchen correctly re-christened this beautiful cake as a POPPY SEED lemon cake, re-distributing the emPHAsis on the RIGHT sylLAble because it really IS uniquely less lemon and much more poppy seed. I had never realized how POP-y poppy seeds actually are… when present in large enough numbers to capture your attention, poppy seeds really crackle and crunch quite animatedly, and add a pleasant nuttyness to the cake. So for the first time in the history of the lemon poppy seed show, the lemon plays the supporting role to the poppy seed STAR!
The minimal amount of lemon zest serves to simply perfume the cake with the essence of lemon without ever reaching the tart acidity so common in lemon-flavored baked goods (which is entirely lovely in its own right.. it is just not THIS cake). The cake also has the most interesting texture, coming from 2 sticks worth of melted butter, 8 egg yolks, and only 1 cup of flour/cornstarch, and NO leavening agents. At first I thought the cake was a bit dry… but then I realized it was just rich… and dense with the flavor of BUTTER, the scent of lemon, and the crunch of a seemingly infinite number of poppy seeds (yet still texturally light, if possible). omg.
The only difficult part about this cake (besides coming to terms with the fact that I pretty much ate all 2 sticks of butter and 8 eggs worth by myself) was that despite liberal greasing and flouring of the baking pan, my cake still stuck a bit, as you can see here by the patches revealing the impressive density of poppy seeds.
Poppy Seed Lemon Cake
from Smitten Kitchen, originally from Kurt Gutenbrunner via Food & Wine
2/3 cup sugar
8 large egg yolks
1 large whole egg
1 1/2 tablespoons finely grated lemon zest (from 2 lemons)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
Pinch of salt (edited to add this)
2 sticks (1/2 pound) unsalted butter, melted and cooled a bit
1/2 cup poppy seeds (I erred on the side of caution, being unaware of how amazing poppy seeds can be, an used a heaping 1/3, but next time i would go the whole 1/2 cup!)
- Preheat the oven to 325°F Butter and flour an 8-inch fluted Bundt or tube pan generously (I only had a 10 inch, so used that). Butter the dull side of a 10-inch piece of foil.
- In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk, beat the sugar with the egg yolks and whole egg at medium-high speed until the mixture is pale yellow and very fluffy, about 8 minutes.
- Beat in the lemon zest.
- Sift the flour and cornstarch over the egg mixture and fold in along with the pinch of salt with a rubber spatula.
- At medium speed, beat in the butter, then beat in the poppy seeds.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan and cover tightly with the buttered foil. Bake for 45 minutes, or until the cake pulls away from the side of the pan and a cake tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Remove the foil and let the cake cool in the pan on a rack for 15 minutes. Invert the cake onto the rack and let cool completely before serving, at least 30 minutes.
A Funfetti Wedding Cake: Testing… testing…
My good friend Jamie is getting married in June (yay!)! Jamie and her husband-to-be Brad have enlisted a few of their large circle of friends to help out and participate in their wedding, from the photography to officiating the ceremony to the music during the ceremony. My friend Kate and I offered our help with the wedding cake.
Brad and Jamie knew EXACTLY what kind of wedding cake they wanted:
From the box.
Kate looked up a few recipes for funfetti cakes from scratch, but Brad was adamant: FROM THE BOX.
So with the hard part out of the way, we started to think about the fun stuff… the frosting!!! We consulted with the bride and groom on what kind of frosting/filling they wanted with their funfetti cake (nothing crazy, keep it simple, no fondant, no funky decorative flowers, no fruit), and this weekend, we tested a few different frosting and filling recipes: a quick standard vanilla frosting from America’s Test Kitchen, a swiss buttercream (from the always amazing Smitten Kitchen, whose wedding cake project is an inspiration!), and a chocolate ganache filling.
The swiss buttercream was a bit difficult to pull together, as Deb from Smitten Kitchen had fully elaborated in this post. Kate and I anxiously watched with noses to the Kitchen-Aid as the curdly-looking frosting whipped ‘round and ‘round the bowl, crossing our fingers that it would eventually pull together! But just as we had began to give up all hope, the mixture did transform from a curdly, liquidy, unappetizing mess, to a smoother consistency, to finally, a full and luxuriously pillowy-looking frosting. And then we tasted it. And it was very… buttery? Perhaps because we were trying such a small batch and perhaps our meringue just didn’t come together right from the beginning. We really wanted to love it… because it was from Smitten Kitchen! She has amazing taste; I want to make everything on her site and have loved everything I have made from her site! But, sadly, it just wasn’t the one. At least not for today on this cake.
We assembled a few cakes with different combinations of fillings and frostings for judgment:
- chocolate ganache in the middle, vanilla frosting outside
- a 50/50 mixture of the chocolate ganache and vanilla frosting on the inside, vanilla on the outside
- chocolate ganache inside, the 50/50 mixture of the chocolate ganache and vanilla on the outside
Verdict?
ALL super tasty (umm, duh, it’s cake and frosting!). The chocolate ganache was rich and decadent without being overly sweet- it won everyone over as the filling. The 50/50 mix was super tasty with the ganache filling, but everyone had their reservations about having a brown-colored wedding cake. (Especially after Kate’s cackle-y reaction every time someone mentioned the word “brown”… and then everything went down the toilet, and everyone was on the floor in laughter..) The vanilla frosting was just classic, and seemed like the perfect choice for a simple outdoors summer wedding.
Stay tuned for updates on our wedding cake adventure… we are on the search for the perfect decorative sprinkles (in celebration of the funfetti!), the MIT in us are tempted to test how the frosting holds up in the possible heat and humidity of a June day using a hair dryer and a hot shower, as well as test different structural support configurations, so hopefully our cake won’t be featured on this blog!
Semi-Homemade Twinkies
Last weekend, Andreas and I watched Zombieland, and though I am usually not a zombie-movie kind of girl (or any movie where aliens/possessed people/crazies/serial killers/vampires pop out suddenly to a suspenseful symphonic soundtrack), I actually enjoyed this movie! The movie was more like a smart comedy that happened to have zombies in it, and unlike after watching other zombie movies, I felt no need to leave the lights on when I went to bed and had no trouble falling asleep.
Woody Harrelson’s character is hell-bent on finding the last Twinkie in Zombieland, and gleefully (and creatively, might I add) takes out any zombies that stand in his way. Towards the end of the movie, Andreas turned to me and whispered, “We should try to make Twinkies!” And so we did.
I found a few recipes online, here and here, and decided to follow this one mostly because of the ease (it crossed my mind to make the cake batter from scratch of course, but laziness inevitably won out) and also because I happened to have a box of yellow cake mix that I had bought before we even moved into this apartment (2 years ago!) for some long-forgotten reason; it felt good to finally use it for something. Andreas constructed little baking vessels using aluminum foil and spice bottles to give each cake its twinkie-like shape.
Originally, I attempted to make the filling by making my own marshmallow creme, from this recipe. I managed to make the cream, and it was thick and full… and then I abandoned it to watch Apolo Ohno compete in the men’s final 1000 meter (I never realized how exciting short track speed skating is until this year!) and when I returned, the cream had deflated to a much more liquidy mess. No amount of beating could get back the whipped texture, so we scrapped that filling and started over with heavy cream and some sugar. I know using cream kind of makes this a non-Twinkie, since the reason Twinkies have such long shelf-life (25 days) is because they are made entirely of non-dairy products, and thus do not spoil as quickly (though the 10-25 year shelf life is an urban myth, per this article), but it’s what we had on hand and we knew it would be tasty. Using surgical precision, Andreas cut out little trenches along the length of each cake to make room for plenty of filling. Improvising a pastry bag with a ziploc bag with the corner cut out, I filled each cake. After replacing the top of the cake to hide the filling, they were ready to eat! I’ve never had a real Twinkie before, but these little guys were pretty tasty.
Question: If you were stuck in Zombieland, what food item would you risk fending off zombies to find??
Semi-Homemade Twinkies
from Todd Wilbur, Top Secret Recipes, there is also a youtube video
1 box (16 ounce) yellow cake mix
* The cake mix has a pretty tinny artificial flavoring (stronger than just a vanilla taste) that I am not really a fan of, so next time around, I would certainly look for a vanilla cake recipe that uses beaten egg whites to maintain the light sponge-y texture.
2/3 cup water
4 egg whites, beaten until stiff peaks form
Filling
1 cup heavy cream, beaten until thick
1/4 cup confectioners sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla
- Preheat the oven 325 degrees. Grease or lightly coat with nonstick spray molds. You can use muffin tins, home-made tins (step by step pics here), or a real twinkie pan.
- Disregard directions on the box. Mix cake mix with 2/3 cup water until smooth.
- Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Gently fold in the egg whites into the cake batter until just incorporated.
- Fill each mold about 3/4 full. Bake for 20-30 minutes, until lightly browned and a tester comes out smooth. Cool completely on a rack before filling.
- Make filling, beat heavy cream in a medium bowl until thick, about 3-5 minutes. Add sifted confectioners’ sugar and vanilla. Transfer filling to a ziplock bag and squeeze cream to one corner. When ready to fill cakes, cut the corner off.
- Using a small sharp knife, cut a rectangle along the length of the cake, without cutting all the way through. Remove the rectangle and fill with the filling but squeezing the ziplock bag. Replace the displaced rectangular slice of cake.
- Eat twinkies.
Almond Cake
I’m drooling a bit, just thinking again about this dessert. For those almond-lovers out there, this is for you. It’s a slightly dense, sweet and buttery cake with INTENSE almond flavor; it can be a perfect after-dinner bite… or an early morning wake-up bite… or late afternoon tea-time bite. Throw on some toasted almonds, dust generously with powdered sugar, and a quick fruity sauce and it can also be a fabulously romantic Valentine’s dessert.
The cake is simple, only seven ingredients, one of them being almond paste. Almond paste is the deliciousness also found in my favorite pastries: almond croissants and bear claws. I bought a tube of almond paste awhile ago for the sole purpose of baking this cake.. and a year or so later, finally opened up the tube to bake this cake. I found that 1/2 the tube was soft and rather pliable, while 1/4 was almost rock solid, and 1/4 existed somewhere between the two consistencies. I thought briefly about sprinkling it with some water and softening it in the microwave (à la brown sugar), but I figured that it would be more time efficient to forge ahead with the first step of the recipe and use my electric mixer to beat it into paste-y submission. I mixed… and mixed… and only succeeded in breaking the paste down into hard clumps of various sizes and wildly flinging said clumps out of the bowl to distant parts of the kitchen. At this point I could have taken a hint and dumped it all back into a heat-proof bowl and zapped it in the microwave, but stubbornness prevailed and I started the second step and added the butter. A few minutes later, after scooping wayward buttered almond paste particles back into the bowl, I managed to get a somewhat fluffy butter mixture with much smaller almond paste bits and at this point, conceded defeat to the almond paste and just finished the batter. I spooned the slightly curdled-looking batter into mini-tart pans (new kitchen friends!) to bake, and sent a fervent prayer to the baking gods that the pebbles of almond paste would melt into the cake crumb.
Perhaps the baking gods took pity on me, or perhaps this was all normal almond paste behavior, because I ended up with beautifully almond flavored cakes without a trace of those hard almond chunks. I threw together handful of raspberries, (seedless) raspberry preserves, and some orange juice to make a quick raspberry sauce, but you could imagine all kinds of fruit based sauces (compotes, coulis, or CHOCOLATE) that would complement the cake nicely. This cake is so very very good, and if something so awesome could result from such a fiasco starting off, then this indeed is a great recipe to have in your arsenal.
Almond Cake
adapted Smitten Kitchen, adapted from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon
Butter and flour for the pan(s)
7 ounces almond paste
1/4 cup granulated sugar
4 ounces (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and chilled
2 tablespoons honey
3 large eggs
2 tablespoons amaretto, plus additional for brushing (I didn’t have any, and substituted with 1 tablespoon almond extract)
1/3 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
pinch of salt
1/3-1/3 cup sliced almonds, toasted
confectioners’ sugar
Preheat the oven to 350F. Butter and flour four 4 by 1 3/4 inch high mini springform pans, or butter and flour the bottom and sides of an 8 inch round cake pan. If using the 8 inch pan, line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper. (I used five 4 by 1 inch tart pans so each cake ended up a bit thinner).
- Place the almond paste and sugar in a large bowl. Begin to cream the mixture on low speed to break up the almond paste, then increase the speed to medium for about 2 minutes, or until the paste is broken into fine particles.
- Add the butter and mix for 4-5 minutes, or until the mixture is light in color and airy. It is important to mix long enough or the cake will have a dense texture.
- Mix in the honey, then add the eggs one at a time, beating until each one is fully incorporated before adding the next. Add amaretto (if using), flour, and a pinch of salt, and mix just to combine.
- Scrape the batter into the prepared pan(s) and smooth the top. Bake the small cakes for about 15 minutes (mine took about 25, not sure why…), the large one for about 25 minutes, or until the cake is golden and springs back when pressed. Transfer to a rack to cool.
- Brush the top of the cake(s) with amaretto and sprinkle with the toasted almonds. Dust with confectioners’ sugar. The cake(s) can be stored, well-wrapped, at room-temperature for up to 2 days. Serve with whipped cream, crème fraîche, fruit-based sauce, or fruit.
