Cake # 22 Rich Chocolate Rum Torte

I have officially made it into the "special" cakes as my recipe book calls them. And this Rich Chocolate Rum Torte cake I made this morning certainly fits that category because it has alcohol. Now, I never really did the college thing: drink 'till you puke, wake up at some stranger's house, or on the side of the street, and begin it all again the next night. As I have gotten older, I have been to more parties that were just excuses to drink with friends, than I ever had in college. In fact, tonight I will be going to another such party- this one an end of the year party for teachers, and I couldn't imagine a better dish to bring than a cake with rum in it. When there is cake in our faculty lounge, some teachers even let their students go to lunch early, just so they can't get in line for cake - so a cake with rum, BINGO!

Of course, as I was making this cake, which obviously calls for rum (I chose Bacardi), and butter, semisweet chocolate, milk, flour, baking powder, dark brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, and heavy cream, Ted figured the most important ingredient was the rum, and added a little more than the called for amount. I have a feeling no one will complain. However, adding the additional rum did leave for a snafu in the cake, our homemade rum icing is more like a glaze because there was too much liquid from the rum, again I think that this will be a fair trade - off. Also, I only own two round baking pans (both nine inches) and the cake actually needed three round seven inch baking pans. So our cake is short and wide compared to the taller skinner cake of the book, but I believe that short and wide is more realistic than tall and skinny anyway. :)

On to my cake:

Versus the book's:

Which do you prefer?

As a side note, Evie walked up to me this morning with a book in her hand, handed it to me and then proceeded to wiggle her little butt on my lap, it was adorable.

Evie looking adorable:

Next week Ted and I will be heading to another party and what that another cake with alcohol, the Meringue-Topped Coffee Liqueur Cake.

Cake # 21 Cherry Almond Bars

I am such a slacker! Two weeks from this blog and now when I finally write my own, I am a day late. I made our twenty-first cake Saturday morning, but it was such a beautiful day, finally after all this rain, that I had to take Evie to the park. Then we went grocery shopping, then we played tea party, bubbles, and "how many times can I chase the dog around the kitchen before he poops out?" By the time that was over, we had to feed Evie dinner and get her ready for our babysitter, because Ted and I were going out. The funny this is, we didn't even try the finished product of this cake and it is already gone. Don't get me wrong, we tried the batter (a good sign whether a cake will be good or not) and the cake we made last week was like this cake's doppelganger if you substitute marshmallows for cherries. So we had a pretty good idea how the cake would taste, and were okay with giving the whole cake away without even cutting in to it. See, our babysitter was an old student of mine, and she has just gotten married and lives with her parents (been there, done that). So when she saw the cake and her eyes lit up and we said, "Help yourself to a piece, or even more, take some home to your husband," and Ted joked, "Take the whole thing if you want! We eat a cake a week!" She was more than happy to take the cake off of our hands. In addition, Ted and I were happy to get rid of it- we both don't like cherries, we had this cake's twin last week, and let's just say that our waistlines approve.

Making the cake was easy enough, minus one little snafu. One of the ingredients was candied cherries, which is a seasonal item, so I decided to make my own. Now I realize that maraschino cherries are pretty much the same thing as candied cherries, but I like to try new baking experiments, and this would be a first for me.  The first thing I had to do was chop cherries in half. Next, combine 1 cup of sugar, 1 1/2 cups of water, and 1 cup of honey in a saucepan and boil. Once the liquid was boiling I added the cherries and cooked for about twenty-five minutes. You just had to let them cool when you were finished. These cherries were good, I am still not a fan of cherries, but they tasted like an even sweeter maraschino cherry, so I thought I did good. The rest of the cake was simple, flour, eggs, butter, sugar, almond extract, grated rind of a lemon, ground almonds, and slivered almonds.

Here is what our cake looked like:

Here is what the book's looked like:

Today, besides getting loads of laundry done at his mom's (still broken), we plan on taking Evie to a park again, that was so much, and she has so much energy that we need to get rid of! We also might have a picnic! Next week we are on the "Special" section of the cake book, which is just a really nice way of saying "more challenging." Sweet.

Cake # 20 Marshmallow Crunch Bars

If you will recall, dear reader, last week, almost to the minute, Ted Childs wrote this cake blog and boldly proclaimed that he would never do it again. He was, of course, a big fat liar, because, if you haven’t already guessed from my smarmy tone… I’m back! The course of events that have dictated my writing this blog, and my baking of this week’s cake for that matter, are complicated and could fill volumes of the largest books filled in the smallest of fonts, but to shorten the story, it will suffice to say that it is mid-May, and though a regularly simple and unobtrusive month to most in the free world, in the Casa de la Children it is nothing short of pure bedlam. For as you may know, May is the month where two of high school’s most prestigious events occur: Prom and Graduation; and as it so happens, I am the senior class advisor and therefore in charge of graduation, and Laura is the junior class advisor and therefore possesses the dubious distinction, along with our lovely coworker Jayme Burrows, of planning, coordinating, and executing the Prom. It is on this last fact that the rest of this blog will dwell.

Today is May 13^th and the Edgewood’s prom this year is on May 14^th at Ripken Stadium, a mere 24 hours from now; and while yours truly is sitting at the computer, staring thoughtfully into the glow of the LCD screen, thinking up rhetorically pleasing ways of describing the last six hours, Laura is off in Bel Air somewhere, with Jayme, attempting desperately to assemble this year’s prom favors. Now, why would Laura Childs, a woman who makes lists in her sleep and can recite the upcoming year’s social calendar in eight languages, wait until the last minute to get and make the favors? Well… she didn’t! Today at school she and Jayme received a call from the favor company that chilled them down to their kidneys… the favors that they ordered weeks ago, silver picture cubes that had the word “Prom” printed on it and could be written on as a personalization by prom-goers, would not be arriving in time. In fact, they would not be arriving ever, because the company, knowing full well when our Prom was occurring, neglected to inform our heroines that the picture cubes were on back order with the warehouse and had zero chance of being shipped in time for Labor Day, much less prom. Laura immediately held back a Shakespearian wordflow of expletive-laced vomit and Jayme immediately smashed her model vagina into the concrete wall on the opposite side of her classroom (don’t worry reader, she’s a health teacher… not a misogynist or a pervert!) Being the calm, cool, but slightly-panicked teachers that they are, as the 2pm end-of-school bell sounded Laura and Jayme immediately bounded to their cars and made a mad dash to the stores of Bel Air in an attempt to quickly replace the favor-snafu while staying within a public education budget.

This would probably be as good a place as any within this blog to pontificate on the wisdom of having prom favors at all; in the past I have seen schools give out wine glasses and beer steins, and then implore the well-dressed heathens to go to the after-prom lock-in where drinking isn’t allowed. Furthermore, as an adult, who even looks back on prom fondly enough to want a keepsake? The sweaty palms, awkward slow dances, spiked punch, innocent fumbling in the rumble-seat of your parents Ford while Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell plays on in the background, and even the lame excuses, like, “honest Dad, I don’t know how I got sand in my cummerbund,” and “when you said my curfew was eleven, you meant PM?”; none of this is exactly hallmark quality memory material. But yet, Laura and Jayme were determined to get their favors, and so off they went in search of the holy grail of high school chotskies, while I preceded home, baby in car and thought in mind. If Laura was going to be running around all night putting together prom stuff, how about I surprise her and bake the cake tonight.

                I started to assemble the cake ingredients together while feeding Evie, and by 6pm (around when I expected Laura to return) the Marshmallow Crunch Bars were complete. Calling for All-Purpose Flour, Baking Powder, Butter, Vanilla, Eggs, Sugar, Chopped Mixed Nuts, and Mini-Marshmallows, this was an easy and quick desert to make, with a recipe as clear and understated as to make even me look like a star baker.  The only tweak to the recipe was the subtraction of candied cherries… as neither Laura nor I enjoy cherries, it was decided when shopping for tonight’s ingredients that these would be eliminated from the recipe. The final result ended up a great copy of the cake-books precedent:

Our Picture:

The Book’s Picture:

The final results of the great prom favor debacle is still however, as of 9:20 pm, a mystery. At six, as I was pulling the cake out of the oven, the phone rang and it was Laura calling on the end of the line.  The decision had been made to get each prom attendee a beach towel and a pair of Old Navy sandals. The price was right, they gift was actually useful and hip, and all that was needed was the car space to haul the loot back to Jayme’s house. You see, I neglected to mention that there are about 350 students attending prom, and therefore the beach towels alone filled every nook and cranny of Laura and Jayme’s car. As I wandered into Old Navy, a pajama-clad Evie ready for bed in her stroller next to me, I immediately understood the gravity of the situation. Do you know how many boxes are needed to move 350 pairs of Old Navy sandals? Eight boxes (think “I’m moving to Florida”-style boxes) and five bags. By the time I finished loading the car, not a free space existed, besides the driver seat and the car seat; and as I pulled out of the Harford Mall parking lot, heading to Jayme’s house to drop off the sandals, I peeked around the boxes to see Laura and Jayme, bleary-eyed and frazzled, disappearing back into the mall to get bags for the favors… I haven’t seen nor heard from them since, but I am confident that prom will go on without a hitch and next week’s blog (the cake this time is Cherry Almond Bars) will be written by my wandering wife. Whether Old Navy will ever carry sandals again or accept anyone wearing Edgewood attire is another matter completely! Until we meet again dear readers… good night!

Cake # 19 Coconut Lamingtons

So this week, as a special treat to the greatest mother on this side of the Milky Way, this week’s cake was made by none other than yours truly, Theodore William Patrick Childs, and though I am no expert in the art of verboseness, nor do I possess the gift of rhetorical flair and eloquence, as part of the deal I agreed to write the week’s blog as well. I wish only that this post lives up in reputation to those that have preceded it. I also wish that I never have to make a cake solo again, because baking is far more work than the cookbook suggests, and the shadow cast by Laura’s baking excellence adds just that much more pressure.

Anyway, the cake this week was not really a cake at all, but instead a set of coconut lamingtons, which are really little mini-cakes, covered in chocolate icing and coconut. Well… at least that is what they are supposed to be, but as you read on you will find that despite following the directions perfectly (a feat on its own and verified by not only Laura, but my mother and grandfather as well) the process of covering the lamingtons became so nightmarishly difficult, that I gave up after one lamington and only covered the tops of the rest with icing and coconut, resulting in a cupcake-like end product. Of course this little bit of baking shenanigans came on the heels of a week that had already served to frazzle the nerves of all those living in the casa de la children: on Monday, with no warning or reason, a kitchen cabinet fell from the wall destroying the bottle of Jameson on top (tear) and sending shards of glass and alcohol across the kitchen floor; on Wednesday, I realized while doing laundry that our washing machine had stopped agitating and spinning and therefore left me with a huge pile of soaked clothes; and finally, on Friday out computer contracted a virus that rendered our internet useless until this morning when Laura’s brother Paul fixed it. Needless to say this has been an interesting week. But anyway… back to the cake!

The cake and the icing themselves were actually quite simple to make. The cake called for flour, baking powder, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, milk, and just a bit (2 tbsp) of dry coconut to add a bit of variety. My only mistake in baking the cake was pulling it out of the oven a few minutes to early; after letting it cool for ten minutes and transferring it to a wire rack, Laura breezed into the kitchen, and with barely a glance, informed me that the center was still a bit undone. So back into the oven it went, and a few minutes the cake was complete (for real) and out of the oven to cool. The icing too was fairly simple to make, and this being the second icing I personally have made from scratch, I am starting to get a big ego about it. The icing called for unsweetened cocoa, boiling water, butter, and 4 ½ cups of powdered sugar. That’s right… 4 ½ CUPS. Somewhere in Bel Air, as we speak, my dentist is seeing little dollar sign-shaped fireworks going off before his eyes.

It was at this point in the lamington-making process that the wheels really fell off the car, because according to the directions, and I quote, I had to “Dip each piece of sponge cake into the icing, holding with 2 forks to coat evenly, then toss in coconut to cover.” Now let me quite clear dear reader, because I want to reiterate something in an effort to stave off any accusations of grievance on my part… I FOLLOWED THE DIRECTIONS! And yet, the product was not a sponge cake; it was instead a normal, run-of-the-mill, birthday style cake.  Apparently the editors of this cookbook are either quite dense (unlike their cake) or on the pipe, because the cake that I made, although deliciously tasty, was also far too moist and crumbly to be dipped in chocolate icing and then coated with coconut. The result fell apart and became a big mess. Even adding more hot water, as suggested by my mother (Hi Mom!) couldn’t thin the icing to a consistency that would destroy the cake pieces. Ultimately, with Laura’s help, we salvaged one piece that looked something like the picture in the book:

 Our Picture:

For the rest, I simply coated the tops with frosting and dusted with coconut, damn the consequences. I know what you’re thinking… how could “follow-the-directions Laura” allow such an iconoclast into her kitchen. Well, she handled it like a pro. Then she promptly asked me to never bake one of her cakes again! Ah well… it will be back to assisting for next week’s cake, Marshmallow Crunch Bars. Until then, happy Mother’s Day to all of the mamas out there!

Cake # 18 Prune and Walnut Swirl Cake

What a busy weekend! We went camping and Evie had her first Birthday party at a bounce house. She had so much fun this weekend. And because she had so many people wanted to hang with her, we were a little late on the cake baking - but it still happened, and here is the blog:


This is the second cake we have made that called for prunes, seriously? Am I eighty-five? I am just not a fan of the taste, they are bitter and too sweet all at the same time, like a fake sweetness (I think we all know too many people like this.) Anyway, I could never (and still don't) fathom how this could be a dried plum. Plums are juicy and tart and sweet (but not too sweet) and perfect, and then you dry it out, and well you get something that looks like a raisin on steroids. Besides prunes, this cake called for butter, apple juice, flour, baking powder, eggs, sugar, vanilla extract, and walnuts.

Here is the book's cake:

Here is mine:

I will be excited to bake next week's cake and be out of the dried fruit and nuts phase of the cake book. I was tired of making desserts that look like they were to be served in a nursing home or made for the holidays. Next week cake is a Coconut Lamington, which is traditionally two layers of sponge cake, with some sort of cocoa filling and icing and covered in coconuts. YUM. This is a dessert for me.