Homemaking Organized Blog

Posts Tagged ‘baking’

My husband had a birthday recently and a request for a specific cake. He’s not really much of a cake person and would have probably preferred pie but this is what he said.

He wanted a yellow cake with strawberry frosting. Not fakey strawberry frosting and not a cake mix (which I can’t use anyway) but real strawberry flavor frosting.

Not really finding what I wanted online or in my newer cookbooks I turned to my vintage cookbook for strawberry frosting and found a very simple worthy recipe.

For the cake I turned to America’s Test Kitchen cookbook for a good recipe that had been perfected. The cake was called simply a butter cake but since that’s what yellow cake is, with the complete egg (instead of only egg whites), I went with it.

Picture and recipe are below. Since the frosting recipe was kind of vague about how many strawberries I might have used a bit too man as the frosting didn’t stand in stiff peaks like I like. It’s still very yummy though and was deemed a success!

 

 

Strawberry Frosting

1/2 package of frozen strawberries

1/2 cup (or one stick) butter

1 pound powdered sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

I  mixed the strawberries and butter in the mixer and then add the powdered sugar half a box at a time. Drizzled in the vanilla last and whipped it up with my wire beater attachment on high until I thought it looked good. It was enough to frost a 2 layer 9 inch cake.  I left the sides free so it wasn’t overly sweet.

My baking day is generally Thursday but this past week it landed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I wish I had pictures for you but I was so involved in the baking process and now the items are mostly gone from the home (I share with neighbors) and what is left is half eaten, so not so pretty anymore.

But WHAT did I make is what is important and do I have recipes or ate least links to recipes to share?!

Of course!

Well the first thing I made was some delicious Cinnamon Bread…

Now bear with me. Although the recipe looks long it’s really straight forward. I mix everything in my bread machine and then pop it out to rise. I replaced 1 cup of the flour with 1/2 cup of graham and 1/2 cup of buckwheat flour. I also added 2 tablespoons of gluten but that probably was not necessary. I did use King Arthur Flour, cause I always do.

Dough

* 1/4-ounce packet “highly active” active dry yeast; or 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast; or 2 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast
* 7/8 to 1 1/8 cups lukewarm water*
* 3 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
* 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
* 3 tablespoons sugar
* 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
* 1/4 cup nonfat dry milk
* 1/2 cup instant mashed potato flakes
* *Use the lesser amount in summer (or in a humid environment), the greater amount in winter (or in a dry climate), and somewhere in between the rest of the year, or if your house is climate controlled.

Filling

* 1/4 cup granulated sugar
* 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
* 2 teaspoons King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
* 1 large egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water, to brush on dough

Directions

1) If you’re using “highly active” or active dry yeast, dissolve it with a pinch of sugar in 2 tablespoons of the lukewarm water. Let the yeast and water sit at room temperature for 15 minutes, until the mixture has bubbled and expanded. If you’re using instant yeast, you can skip this step.

2) Combine the dissolved yeast (or instant yeast) with the remainder of the ingredients. Mix and knead everything together—by hand, mixer or bread machine set on the dough cycle—till you’ve made a smooth dough. Adjust the dough’s consistency with additional flour or water as needed; but remember, the more flour you add while you’re kneading, the heavier and drier your final loaf will be. If you’re kneading in a stand mixer, it should take about 7 minutes at second speed, and the dough should barely clean the sides of the bowl, perhaps sticking a bit at the bottom. In a bread machine (or by hand), it should form a smooth ball.

3) Place the dough in a lightly greased bowl. Cover the bowl, and allow the dough to rise, at room temperature, until it’s nearly doubled in bulk, about 1 hour. Rising may take longer, especially if you’ve kneaded by hand. Give it enough time to become quite puffy.

4) While the dough is rising, make the filling by stirring together the sugar, cinnamon, and flour.

5) Transfer the dough to a lightly greased work surface, and pat it into a 6″ x 20″ rectangle.

6) Brush the dough with the egg/water mixture, and sprinkle it evenly with the filling.

7) Starting with a short end, roll the dough into a log.

8 ) Pinch the ends to seal, and pinch the long seam closed.

9) Transfer the log, seam-side down, to a lightly greased 8 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ loaf pan. Tent the pan loosely with lightly greased plastic wrap.

10) Allow the bread to rise till it’s crested about 1″ over the rim of the pan, about 1 hour. Again, it may rise more slowly for you; let it rise till it’s 1″ over the rim of the pan, even if that takes longer than an hour. While the dough is rising, preheat the oven to 350°F.

11) Bake the bread for 40 to 45 minutes, tenting it lightly with aluminum foil after the first 15 minutes. The bread’s crust will be golden brown, and the interior of the finished loaf should measure 190°F on an instant-read thermometer.

12) Remove the bread from the oven, and gently loosen the edges with a heatproof spatula or table knife. Turn it out of the pan, and brush the top surface with butter, if desired; this will give it a soft, satiny crust. Allow the bread to cool completely before slicing.

“Recipe courtesy of King Arthur Flour.”
Then I made some Amish Sugar Cookies. I’ve had this recipe for years but I did some altering to it this time. I swaped out 1/2 cup of the flour for graham flour, used  King Arthur’s Vanilla Bean paste and about 1/8 of a teaspoon of Fiori Di Sicilia. Then I rolled the cookie balls in sugar crystals before flattening (with a cat faced cookie presss) for baking. You can’t really see the cat face but here is the end result. Yummy!

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.