Homemaking Organized Blog

I really like cake. My whole family just loves cake…except for my husband. But that is another story. He enjoys them well enough but would rather have a pie than a cake any day.

Lately we have been into America’s Test Kitchen. You know the show where they find the best way to make a dish and test all kinds of methods, ingredients, and gadgetry. I had received their cookbook as a birthday present several years ago and true enough I turn to it for any basic recipe I’m about to embark on. I brought home some of their DVDs from season’s 3 and 6 to watch and we got hooked. We really enjoy cooking as a family and trying new things. All three of us. Peanut gets to mix spices, assemble veggies and she cracked her first solo egg a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway then we decided to take the plunge and subscribe to their annual online tv thing where you can watch all past and current shows for $20 a year.

We are having a ton of fun and my weekly menu has altered a bit as a result. I’m also finding myself spending a great deal of time in the kitchen so if you’ve noticed less updates all around blame America’s Test Kitchen.

We’ve been slowly making our way through the various cakes to see if we can improve on what we already thought was perfection (our own cake baking).

So far we have made the Classic White Cake with Almond and Raspberry filling (please note you won’t be able to see the full recipe unless you subscribe or take the plunge and sign up for the 14 day test drive WITH your credit card which they won’t charge until the 14 days are up). My husband loves this one. And I was surprised at that because as I said cake is not his thing. It’s also super easy. The key is to assemble your ingredients beforehand and weigh your flour and sugar. I have heard to weight certain ingredients but had never done it. Since I was using King Arthur’s new Organic Cake Flour which I was pretty sure is a bit denser than Queen Guinevere (sp) I thought I ought to weight it. Not possessing a regular kitchen scale… wait I think I had one before we moved. Oh well I used my old mailing scale and adjusted for the weight of the bowl.

The goal was to make cake baking a little easier. This was easy too. The egg whites were put in the milk and that easy addition to the flour/butter mix made it go very fast.

So voila!

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Our second cake to test drive was the chocolate cake. Being allergic to soy it’s only been the last several years that I found chocolate without soy. As a result I had NEVER baked a chocolate cake. Go figure! So I figured why not my first chocolate cake be one that has been tested etc.

The goal was to make a chocolatey tasting cake but not a decadence cake with a fluffy frosting not a ganache or non-chocolate tasting frosting. There were issues with cooling the melted chocolate and not ‘cooking’ the eggs by adding the sugar too fast. And whipping cream was used in the frosting which probably added a few more pounds to me.

This cake took a little more time than the raspberry one and it took us much longer to devour because the chocolate was so intense.

The end result while good was a bit too chocolatey for me (ducking the tomatoes and eggs being thrown). Not being able to eat chocolate for so long means I eat it in small doses. The cake came out wonderful though and all was perfection as you can see.

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1. Oooh the Food!

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