Sometimes you have to move cakes

And if you're me, you don't own anything that actually encloses or protects a cake or keep it from moving.

But you sure do have packing materials from a tv.

And now for something completely different.

Remember the ham cake? I made another one, but in reverse. It's a ham shaped like a cake, instead of cake shaped like a ham, because Matt requested it for his birthday.

I bought a ham and baked it according to the package instructions, with a little Grade B maple syrup and water in the bottom of the baking dish.

Then I hacked it to bits.



I trimmed the biggest ham steaks into rectangles roughly the same size. There was some patchwork involved.

Behold, my tower of ham.



Potatoes were set to boil.



Glaze. Those pre-glazed spiral-sliced hams annoy me because the inside of the ham doesn't get glazed, just the outside. So I decided to do something about it by glazing the entire cut face of each layer of ham.



Contents of glaze: grade B maple syrup, ketchup, brown mustard, brown sugar, mushroom salt, balsamic vinegar, paprika, ginger, garlic granules, and possibly some other stuff.

Glazed.



Put under the broiler for a few minutes:



It turned out all runny and juicy. I was going more for a creme brulee type crust, so next time I will pat the meat dry and use a completely dry phase glaze mix. If there is ever a next time.



Mashed potatoes, made with heavy cream and cream cheese instead of milk and butter. I thought to myself, "how can I make the potatoes stiff enough to support ham slices, but still creamy?" This is how. We are all going to die of fattiness because of those potatoes.

Assembly was your standard stack-and-frost affair, which proceeded smoothly after an emergency run to the store to get MORE POTATOES. I got a can of French's fried onions to use as "nuts" on the sides of the cake (which worked well to disguise the rough frosting job on the sides). I used a sandwich bag with the corner cut off to write a message using the leftover ham glaze. I am pretty darn proud of my piping job.



Aaaand the money shot:

Ham cake recipe

Here's the recipes I used, in case you wanted to make a ham cake of your very own:

Red Velvet Cake

2.5 c. sifted cake flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. cocoa powder
2 oz. red food coloring (2 Tbsp.)
1.5 c. sugar
1/2 c. unsalted butter, softened
2 eggs, room temperature
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. white vinegar

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter and flour a 9x13 pan, two 9" rounds, or three 8" rounds.
2. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a small bowl, mix food coloring and cocoa powder to form a paste without lumps; set aside (adding a small amount of white sugar helps make cocoa powder dissolve)
3. Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in eggs, one at a time, then add vanilla and red cocoa paste. Scrape bowl down to ensure even mixing. Add flour mixture in thirds, alternating with buttermilk and ending with a final addition of flour. Beat until well combined, scraping bowl with spatula.
4. Add vinegar and mix well to combine. Pour batter (or spread, it's rather thick) into pan(s) and bake for 25-30 minutes (a few minutes longer for 9x13 pan) or until cake passes the toothpick test.
5. Cool cake in its pan until it is warm enough to handle, then de-pan onto a plate or wire rack. Allow to cool completely before frosting (or better yet, put it in the fridge so it's cold)


Boiled Milk Frosting

1 cup whole milk
3 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
a pinch of salt
1 c. unsalted butter
1 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Whisk flour into milk and place over medium in a small saucepan. Cook mixture until thickened (when it barely comes to a simmer); remove from heat and add salt, then set aside to cool slightly.
2. In a stand mixer, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla.
3. Add still-warm milk mixture a spoonful at a time to the creamed butter mixture while the stand mixer is running at medium speed (I switched from the leaf paddle to a whisk attachment at this point, to incorporate more air). An emulsion will slowly form. Be sure to scrape the bowl down for even mixing!
4. You should wind up with an extremely fluffy, light, and buttery frosting when completed.

HAM CAKE

So. Friend Lauren dislikes ham due to having an overabundance of it in her childhood. Upon hearing this, I immediately decided to be an ass about it and told her that I would make her a cake shaped like a ham for her birthday.

I am a man of my word. A figurative man.

Months went by and I didn't think much about how to make ham cake a reality. Then I drew up a schematic two weeks before the birthday and then didn't use the schematic at all. Just as Michelangelo saw an angel in the block of marble and used his chisel to free it, I saw a ham in the pile of cake and used a bread knife. Yeah what, I just compared myself to Renaissance master, whatcha gonna do?

The cake itself was red velvet cake, which I baked the night before assembling (so the cake would be cold and easier to work with).
Red velvet cake is a buttermilk cake that has a little cocoa powder and a ton of red food coloring in it. I used up all of Emily's red food coloring which she had bought for making fake blood for zombie movies a few years ago. We do not anticipate needing a lot of fake blood for zombie movies anytime soon.



I had originally planned on making a full-size ham cake, but then I realized that is a shit ton of cake and we don't have enough people to eat it all. So instead I made a half-size one using a half-sheet of cake (one 9x13 pan's worth).

First, I cut the rectangle of cake in half, then split the layers.



Never done that before. I like the way split-layer cakes look when cut, though, because the insides are that much more intricate.

Protip: Whenever you frost a cake, always lay down strips of wax paper or foil around the perimeter of the plate, then stack the cake on top of it. The foil will catch all that frosting you smear around and after you're done, you pull the strips out from under the cake and get a pristine presentation plate.



Boiled milk frosting(aka butter roux frosting):



The internet told me this is the traditional frosting for a red velvet cake. The process intrigued me so I gave it a shot, and now I am in love with this frosting. It's very light, silky smooth like a buttercream but not as oily, and easier to make.

I proceeded to cut the split half-rectangles into rough triangles, and stacked up a roughly triangular shape that got smaller higher up.





Then I took my really big bread knife and roughed out a ham shape.



It looks very pointy from the back.



Then came time for the crumb coat. Doing a crumb coat greatly improves the appearance of a frosted cake. Prior to doing your final coat of frosting, you smear on a thin layer that covers every square inch and seals in all the cake crumbs that would otherwise mar the outer surface if you tried frosting it in one go. You put the cake in the fridge for 30 minutes so the crumb coat sets up, then you do the real decorating.





At this point I had to go to Emily's to get my gel icing colors and run back and color the frosting. By then the crumb coat had set up, and I was ready to frost the outside for reals. I probably should have colored the frosting initially and had the whole crumb coat be colored too, because white frosting started peeking out when I spread the colored stuff too thin.

I don't have pictures of the rough job, but I do have pics of the cake after hot-knifing.

Hot knifing is when you take a metal spatula (or butter knife), dip it in hot/boiling water, wipe it on a clean towel and then use the hot knife to smooth out frosting. It gets rid of all the spatula marks that usually come from frosting a cake, and makes an uncanny smooth fondant-like finish.

Like this.





It's lucky that I used some cocoa powder to deepen the frosting color, because I'm pretty sure that's why there's so much depth to the color after hot-knifing. It really resembled the browning patterns you get from roasted meat.

I used dental floss to make the crosshatch pattern, then piped on tiny cloves with a ziploc bag with the corner snipped off.

Emily had the brilliant idea of styling the cake with some broccoli:



The inside:



Lauren almost didn't want to cut into the cake, it looked so good. But it was made of cake and it was meant to be eaten.

St. Patrick's Day Part II

True to my/our word, I made Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes tonight so I could try getting buzzed off of cake.
In the course of gathering ingredients and such, I discovered I am a squirrel yet again:


On the left: the existing cupcake liners in my pantry. 

On the right: the package of cupcake liners I bought today because I couldn't remember if I had any.

My cupcake pan is AWOL so I just put the foil liners on a baking sheet:


Right. On to assembly!

The first thing you do is stir a cup of Guinness and a cup of butter together in a pan which is kind of weird but okay.

Looks scary.

Then you measure out cocoa powder

And add it to the simmering fatty-Guinness:

And you whisk it until it looks like pudding, which it almost is:

I have no pictures of the rest of the batter assembly but you basically beat eggs and sour cream, add the fatty-chocolate-Guinness mixture to make what is essentially Guinness chocolate pudding (minus the sugar), then add flour and sugar and baking soda and suddenly it's not scary chocolate beer pudding anymore, it's cake batter.  

The one thing I did differently from the smitten kitchen recipe was to decrease the sugar from 2 cups to 1 2/3 cups, because seeing "2 cups flour" and "2 cups sugar" together in a cake recipe is terrifying.

Anyway this is what the cupcakes looked like naked:

I used a clean cheapass vegetable peeler to core the cupcakes:

You can see clear down to the bottom!

There were 24 cupcakes, but only 23 made it to this stage. One got kind of smushed during the transfer to cooling racks. Sad.

Here are all their guts.  I ate them, as it was my perogative.

I was expecting the cupcakes to be quite dense and rich due to the heaviness of the beer and all, but the texture turned out to be light and fluffy, and they all had perfect lightly crisp tops. They were quite chocolatey without being too rich, because the Guinness added body and flavor.  I didn't miss the 1/3 cup of sugar I left out (but then again, I like semi-sweet chocolate so your mileage may vary).  I would totally make these again any day of the year (except maybe tomorrow).

But enough about the cupcakes themselves, let's keep violating them!
In order to do it properly, I needed whiskey and dark chocolate ganache. Here is a picture of Nick's bottle of whiskey that I borrowed:

Here is a picture of a lovely tempered chocolate ganache with cream and butter and Jameson in it. It's about half Valrhona, half Toll House, because I was too lazy/cheap to run out to a fancy food store to make up the difference in nice chocolate.

Nick thinks "ganache" sounds like an STD.  Say it out loud.

The resulting pile of reamed cupcakes, filled with ganache.  Ewww.

Foreground: the large freezer bag I sacrificed in the name of ghetto piping technique.

Alas, I have no pictures of the finished cupcakes, since final assembly was done at Emily's. It's easier to transport a bowl of frosting + tray of unfrosted cupcakes than it is to wrangle 2 dozen frosted cupcakes into a car without making a mess.  

I am hoping Emily took a photo, but for now, just imagine the cupcakes topped with a thin layer of white buttercream with a shot of Irish Cream in it, because that's exactly what they looked like before we ate them.

The ganache was quite alcoholic and I think I got buzzed from eating two.

TAKE HOME LESSON: Pastries are a prime vector for alcohol delivery, if you are a wimp like me who can't metabolize alcohol.

Clementine Cake

Apparently we all have a crush on Smitten Kitchen's clementine cake, because it's been making the rounds on the blogs.

Being as susceptible to suggestion as we are (when it comes to food), we went and bought a bag of clementines one Saturday and totally forgot about them for a whole week.

Then we boiled the clementines, as per the first step in the recipe. The weirdest thing was they smelled like cake while they were boiling. So anyway, the boiled clementines went into the fridge for four days because nobody had time to make this goddamn cake (but we all wanted to eat it). Then I made it, or something like it.


The Beater+ paddle makes a sort of squeaky noise when it scrapes.

Due to dietary considerations, I wanted to adapt the recipe to be nut-free, which is kind of a tall order when the entire body of the cake consists of ground almonds. I still wanted to have a dense cake, with a similar nutty flavor, so here's what I came up with.


Top to bottom: brown rice flour, ground flaxseed, all-purpose flour

A note on grinding flaxseed: If you screw an empty pasta sauce jar into the base of your blender, you get an awesome way to grind stuff up without having to clean a giant pitcher! I am so going to make pesto this way from now on.


Looks kind of like ground-up almonds.

I added butter just because, you know. Butter.




Blarf.

I buttered and floured a springform pan, then poured in the batter and hoped for the best:





This here is a photo testimony to why you should butter and flour everything before you bake in it. Look at that beautiful clean release. Even plain nonstick doesn't do it this well unless it's brand-spanking-new.



It's done! Looks a little naked, though.
Oh hey I sure do have a Meyer lemon in my fridge that needs using up, and a lot of eggs, and some butter and sugar...


LEMON CURD-ed!

It was delicious. Mellow, sweet, and a little orangey. Texturally, it resembled a dense banana-nut bread, and I am happy to say that there was a bit of nutty flavor from the flaxseed. The lemon curd provided just enough acidity to cut the sweet richness of the cake.

It's even better on the second day.


Clementine Cake
adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Nigella Lawson, who is totally cute.

4 to 5 clementines (about 375grams/slightly less than 1 pound total weight)
6 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons room temperature butter
3/4 cup ground flaxseed
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup brown rice flour
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder

1. Put the clementines in a pot with enough cold water to cover; bring to a boil and cook for 2 hours. Drain and let cool, then cut them in half and remove any seeds. Chop the whole fruit finely in a food processor/blender/by hand.

2. Preheat oven to 375 F. Butter and flour an 8" round springform pan.

3. Beat the eggs, then add sugar and dry ingredients and butter. Add chopped clementines and mix well.

4. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake at 375 F for about 35-40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.


Meyer Lemon Curd
something I half-assed, with help from the Internet.

2 egg yolks
1 whole egg
1/4-1/3 cup lemon juice (How tart do you want it? Meyer lemons are sweeter, so if you use regular lemons then I'd say do 1/4 cup juice.)
1 Tablespoon freshly grated lemon zest
1/2 cup sugar
4 Tablespoons room temperature butter, cut into pieces

1. In a stainless steel bowl set over a pot of simmering water, whisk the eggs, sugar, and lemon juice. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture becomes thick like sour cream or mayonnaise (about 10 minutes). You can also use a Pyrex bowl if you don't have stainless, but it will take a lot longer to get everything up to the right temperature.

2. Remove from heat immediately and stir in zest, then whisk in pieces of butter gradually until they have been incorporated.

3. Try to let it cool down a bit before you eat it all.

Rainbow Cake!

So here's how you make rainbow cake.

You start with a really good recipe for delicious cake, sink some dollars into some good quality gel food coloring (found in the cake decorating aisle of your local craft store, not the supermarket), and use all the bowls and stirring implements in the kitchen.

We had cheap aluminum 9" round pans so I buttered and floured them beforehand. (the flouring makes all the difference in de-panning, trust me).  

I've started saving discarded butter wrappers in the fridge for expressly this purpose.

Then I made a batch of buttermilk cake batter and split it into 6 roughly equal parts:

Here are the colors.  I just dipped the tip of a butter knife into the gel color and mixed that into the batter really well.  Purple was kind of hard to get right because the batter was yellowish.

Once you have all the colors, start pouring them into the pans in rainbow sequence like so:  Use a bunch of the red, like nearly all of it except for a tablespoon or two, for the first layer of the first cake.  Then follow with almost as much of the orange (but reserve a bit more), and so on with the rest of the colors.  When you reach purple, you should only be putting a dollop of batter in the center and reserving the rest.

For the second cake, repeat the pouring process but in reverse order (all the purple first, etc.)

You will wind up with one bulls-eye rainbow with red on the outside,  and one bulls-eye rainbow with purple on the outside.

Bake the cakes as per the usual and layer and frost with delicious whipped cream cheese frosting.

Then eat it.

Buttermilk cake recipe:

2 1/2 cups flour 
1 cup granulated sugar 
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup butter, softened
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla 

Cream butter and sugars together, then beat in eggs one at a time and add vanilla.  Sift in the rest of the dry ingredients, alternating with the buttermilk, and beat well until batter is smooth.  Bake at 350F for 35-40 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center comes out dry.

Whipped cream cheese frosting

1 8-oz. package cream cheese, room temperature

1 1/2 c. heavy cream

1 c. sugar

Whip the cream and half the sugar together until they form soft peaks, then transfer to another bowl for temporary storage.  Whip the cream cheese and the rest of the sugar together until the sugar has completely dissolved and the mixture is no longer grainy.  Gently fold in whipped cream and mix to combine (the paddle attachment at low speed works fine).