Cake # 16 Applesauce Cake

What a day! It is 9:30pm and I have just finished baking my cake. I know that I had all of your buttocks at the edge of your seats waiting in anticipation for this week's cakeabration! But, as someone always said (because someone always has to say something, don't they?) good things come to those who wait. The story: When Ted and I got our rebate check this year we had a plan. First, one thousand towards our discover card. Second, one thousand in savings for Evalyn's daycare, prom dress, college, wedding, you name it fund. Third, one thousand to pay off our new bedroom furniture. Fourth, one thousand to paint my mustang purple, fix the dent, and get a new stereo (turns out we had no idea how much that would cost). Finally, one thousand for new carpet in both our bedroom and our computer room. (If you've been calculating you will have discovered that we received five thousand in tax returns this year). The discover card, Evalyn's savings, and our bedroom furniture was easy, check, check, and check. (Please tell my I'm not the only one that finds that punny.) My 'stang, well that is another story, turns out a paint job is triple the amount we want to spend, so we haven't moved forward in that purchase, but we are considering getting a new stereo and maybe fixing the dent at least. In the meantime, my scheming mind had no trouble deciding where the left over money from the foiled car plan would go. Naturally, if you get new carpet, you should paint.

So for the past three weeks Ted and I have been painting our bedroom and the computer room. Do not put a paint brush in my hands. Once I paint one room, though I hate painting, I want to paint every room. I begin to analyze every scuff and dent and chip and I decide that it too must be fixed. (I think Ted is about to blow his brains out.) And of course if you get new paint you need new light fixtures, and curtains, and well you get the picture. I am my own version of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," it is called "If You Give Laura a Paintbrush" subtitled "Watching Too Much of HGTV". Possibly what has me on this home remodel high, (as I write this the word "BATHROOM" is flashing in neon over and over in my brain) is the fact that Easter dinner is at my house next week, yikes. My sister's house is immaculate, and my mother's house is amazing, and my aunt's house is charming, (all places where Easter has been held in the past) and I would just like it if my house didn't reek of "kid out of college trying to play house".

Skip ahead to 9:00am this morning. Both rooms have been painted, though touch ups around the house are still continuing, and the carpet people are here. By 3:00pm the carpet is complete are rooms are back in order, cleaned, and dusted, and now I want to leave the house to buy a new comforter to match our new bedroom. Long story short, our two rooms look great, and now I want more! Remodeling, painting, furnishing, carpeting, it is a drug for a woman, and I'm not even a housewife! It wasn't until 8:00 that I began baking my Applesauce cake - sorry Mom C, I know you wanted to try a piece today, come over tomorrow and have some with us, we are thinking it will make an excellent breakfast.

This cake called for butter, flour, cornstarch, baking powder, sugar, eggs, vanilla, applesauce, one apple, and lemon juice. I don't eat applesauce, but the cake looked and smelled good, and my daughter's primary food group right now is applesauce, so I am happy to make something that I know she and her father will love.

Here is the book's cake:

Here is my cake:

Not too shabby! Next week in celebration of Easter I am going to make a very difficult Easter cake, entitled . . . Easter Cake! Be prepared to be stupefied by its marvelousness! Until then, eat cake and be merry.

Cake # 15 Hazelnut Crumble Bars

2:11 p.m. - I am pooped. Is it truly sad that a twenty-six year young woman wants to take a nap around three o' clock everyday? Possibly. I do know that my darling Evalyn woke up at 6:00 a.m. on the dot this morning and desperately wanted to play. So, begrudgingly, on a Saturday, Ted and I got up early and decided to make a day of it. We made Evie breakfast, we played "where is Evie?", we even let Shakespeare join in on the fun, though, by 9:00 a.m. he had fallen back asleep - jerk. Then we went food-shopping and decided to have a lunch date with our daughter. Finally, she went down for a nap, and I had some time to bake my next cake.

This cake intrigued me for a lot of reasons. First, they bars not a cake, which made me question how exactly the word cake is defined. That in turn made me realize that I have all twenty volumes of the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I have never thought to look up the word cake! Which, in turn, made me realize that I was very mad at myself for not thinking of this earlier. Secondly, I was intrigued by one of the ingredients - Nutella, which the recipe books unbrandishly (get it?) calls for a "chocolate hazelnut spread".

First, the definition of cake: a comparatively small flattened sort of bread, round, oval, or otherwise regularly shaped, usually baked hard on both sides. The word cake originated in our language 1230, but as you can probably guess from its sound, it is Germanic in origin. In this sense then, these bars, certainly do fit under the category of a cake, so I learned something new and I got to use a volume from my dictionary, which makes me happy.

Second, Nutella. This product scared me as a child. I saw a lady once at a Mars supermarket pick it up and put it in her cart, I had never heard of it before, but I knew it was brown. I asked my mother what it was, and she said you put it on your bread, like you do with jelly. So, I always assumed that it was a nut and a fruit mixture based off its name and my mother's remark. And, as any seven year old child would do, I imagined the most disgustingly flavored jelly (after all, it was brown) and in my mind added peanuts, and tried to determine a taste, and all I remember was it had to be bad. Twenty years later, here I am again confronted with Nutella. (I feel like you must say its name with your best William Shatner impression, pronouncing each of its three syllables, and shaking your fist in the air). However, this time, I discovered that it was a chocolate and nut mixture....wait what?! How did I possibly go twenty years without ever bothering to learn what Nutella actually was? There is a slap in my face for my myopic ways. No matter - tried a bite of it, and still not a huge fan.

But in this mysterious cake bar? Excellent. This recipe called for eggs, vanilla, light brown sugar, butter, flour, baking powder, hazelnuts, "chocolate hazelnut spread", raw brown sugar, and forty minutes of bake time in the oven at 325 degrees.

I think the reason why I like these bars so much is because of the infamous hazelnut. When I was a kid, every year at Christmas my parents would buy those variety nut packages (I know, so many jokes - fingers cannot keep up with my mind to type them) and the hazelnuts were always the hardest to crack. They barely stayed in the nut-cracker and they were harder than my husband's head. It was a lot of work, for such a little nut, but the reward was great- sweet, crunchy, nutty (bleh no adjective better than that I guess), and I loved their taste. So biting into these bars, well it reminded me of Christmas, and of my old home.

Here is what the picture in the book looks like:

And here are my bars:

Tonight, is a girl's night out, hopefully they will like my nutty bars! Stay tuned for cake number sixteen an applesauce cake- that is for you Mom C!

Cake # 14 Lemon Drizzle Loaf

What is better than a big slice of starchy goodness after an afternoon of too many shots and mixed drinks and a night of hugging the porcelain god? Two slices! And what makes this cake even better, was that this was the first cake in our challenge that Ted really took charge of! He, the sweetheart of a husband he is, (I was teaching my kids appositives yesterday, so it seemed fitting) told me to stay in bed and let him handle the cake. I ended up helping a little bit, but he took charge. And Evalyn helped daddy cook. When Ted had the fridge open to get the butter, Evie grabbed two eggs from the shelf and ran away with them. Ted chucked the butter on the table and grabbed the first egg out of her hand, by the time he had put that on the table, Evie had already grabbed another egg and the lemon juice! So here she was parading around the kitchen with two eggs and a bottle of lemon juice in her hands...too cute! Fortunately, Ted was able to recover all goods before they went bad. (Get it? I crack myself up.)

School has been more than a little bit hectic this year and we have been so busy at home painting and rearranging, that life has been more about getting things ticked off the list, versus enjoying the minutes. So needless to say, when a friend asked us to happy hour, I was in. Sure, all night yesterday I was regretting my choices, but now after two slices of cake in my belly (that is actually staying down) and some Gatorade to build up my missing electrolytes; I am feeling good. Maybe this cake was all I needed - well that two aspirin and a long sleep.

This cake called for butter, flower, baking powder, sugar, eggs, lemon juice, lemon rind, and powdered sugar for the icing.

Here is Ted's version of the cake:

Here is the book's picture:

Next week I am making a hazelnut crumble bar...does this classify as a cake? According to the book it does- so thy book's will be done. ' ill then.

Cake # 13 Honey and Poppy Seed Ring

As I am typing this I am watching my daughter get into everything in my computer room, the books, papers, her nose; meanwhile, I am singing "Old McDonald" to her, and I find myself wondering was there really an "Old McDonald" who had a farm? Because I cannot sing that song without replacing a old man with a beard and overalls with a younger one, who has flaming red hair, is wearing a yellow jumpsuit, and looks sort of like a clown. Somehow inbetween chasing her around the house and stopping her from all sorts of impending doom a house contains, I manage to make cake number thirteen.

Now I have never been the superstitious type, I love the number thirteen because it has the number three in it, so it is automatically good in my book. Plus, Friday the thirteenth is one of my all-time favorite cheesy horror movies, so I had no qualms with baking cake number thirteen, the Honey and Poppy Seed Ring cake. Speaking of rings, there was a lot of cake and a lot of rings to be had this weekend. On Friday, my twin brother got married to his beautiful fiance. They looked amazing and the ceremony was a lot of fun - my mom actually made their wedding cake:

She did an excellent job- maybe there is where I get my cake baking from. Anyway, the cake I baked for today was much different from this wedding cake - no icing, no flowers, and definitely not fancy, in fact this cake was much more akin to a sweet bread, especially because of the poppy seeds! I was thrilled to use poppy seeds, it is one of the few McCormick "spices" I have on my spice rack that had never been opened before, so it was nice to actually use it. Besides poppy seeds, this cake called for flour, sugar, eggs, butter, lemon juice, honey, vanilla, and baking powder. It was an exceptionally easy cake to make- I was able to hold Evie and make most of the cake, she had fun licking the spatula when I was finished. At 3:13 I happened to finish the cake, and somewhere in the back of my mind a signal was going off that this was my thirteenth cake and that I finished it at 3:13, but the alarm wasn't loud enough for me to pay attention to. I should have listened...

Here is what the Poppy Seed Ring looks like in my cake book:

Here is what my cake looked like before I cut it:

Here is what the cake looked like when I cut it:

And here is what the cake looked like all over my daughter's face and hair when she grabbed a piece behind my back when I wasn't looking:

Not a terrible, typical, "thirteen", tragedy. Actually very cute, and I wish I captured the devilish grin that my child gave me when she was found caught with cake in her face.

Next week, on to the Lemon Drizzle Loaf.

Cake # 12 Carrot Cake with Orange Frosting

So carrot cake is a first for me. I have never tried it before, and I never thought I would try it. I guess it is the idea of putting a vegetable into something sweet that confuses me. But after tasting the batter, I understood why people love carrot cake. To me, it tastes very similar to a spice cake, which is a flavor I can get down with. I think that I have mentioned once or twice before on this blog that I actually don't like cake. I know it seems stupid to make something every week for 2 years that you don't like. I feel like I have to explain myself. I love to bake,Ted loves cake,Ted bought me this recipe book for Christmas, challenge started. (There is some asyndeton for all you rhetoric lovers out there). It is not that I hate cake, I don't. I simply would prefer candy or a brownie or a cookie, or ice-cream cake to a regular cake. Anyway, I tried a bite of this cake (as I do with all of the cakes I make) and it tasted so good that I ended up eating a whole piece! A first for me in this baking adventure. I guess even Bugs Bunny would be proud.

Ted actually shredded all of the carrots for me, which was so helpful because by the time he finished that I had prepared the rest of the batter and the icing! Evie wanted to help too- she helped me mix the batter with this cake- well sort of - she really took the spatula out of my hand and waved it up into the air, flinging bits of carrot cake batter with it. I love the weekends for that reason. Getting out of the chaos that is work and spending time with someone who delights in everything. I know that she will lose that curiosity and awe of the world and its things as she ages, but it is a beautiful thing to be a part of now.

I made my own frosting again with this cake. It is an orange flavored frosting with a cream cheese base. It also contained orange juice, orange rind, and powdered sugar. The cake itself, besides calling for a cup and a half of shredded carrots, contained: butter, brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, ginger, eggs, orange juice, and pecans.

My husband loves carrot cake and I know there is at least one or two members of his department that enjoy it too- we have to get all of this cake out of my house! We still have cake left over from Evalyn's first Birthday. So plan on cake at work on Monday friends. 

Here is the book's picture of the cake:

 Here is my cake whole -and then without the piece I ate!

Next week I am making a Honey & Poppy seed Ring cake- sounds like my kind of cake....because it is not too cakey! See you then.

Cake # 11 Vanilla Sponge Layer Cake

Greetings cake lovers! I am posting so very late today because I just got finished cleaning up my daughter's toys from her very FIRST Birthday Party! I know what you all are thinking - Did I make the birthday cake? No I did not. See my mother actually is an amazing baker and does designer birthday cakes really well. Her cakes were what inspired me to learn how to bake myself. It has always been the tradition in our family that the grandmother makes the first birthday cake. So my mom made it. She made Evie a giraffe face cake - just for Evie to eat, then she made a jungled-theme sheet cake for the rest of the party, and finally she made cupcakes with different fillings. Super awesome!

Evie thought it tasted great too!

Anyway, because the big birthday girl bonanza party was today, I made my 11th cake, the Vanilla Sponge Layer Cake on Friday and brought it to school for the Social Studies Department to devour. I will admit, I tasted a bit of it myself before I sent it to school. It was very tasty, it tasted like it should be a breakfast cake - are there such things as breakfast cakes? If not, there should be a cake group designed for breakfast - and I am not simply talking about the "I am hungover and there is left over cake in the fridge" breakfast cake, I mean a cake that is specifically made to be eaten in the morning- maybe an icing free cake? Who knows. What I do know is that I think my cake would fit into this fictitious category quite well. That is because it contains strawberry jam- and if you eat it right out of the oven, the sponge is super moist and flaky all at the same time.

Besides strawberry jam, this cake called for butter, flour, baking powder, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and milk. The icing was super simple to make, it called for butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. I like that I know that I can whip up an icing for a cake that is going to be sweet- but not birthday- store- bought- cake- sweet, in just a few minutes and put it on anything. For example, that icing would go great on cinnamon buns too.

Here is what the cake looked like in the book:

Here is what my cake looked like:

I got a lot of compliments about this cake- none of if made it back home after I brought it to school. Next Saturday I am making a Carrot Cake with Orange Frosting- until then, I am going to bed, what a day!

Cake # 10 Country Fruit Cake

I'm not going to lie, when I first read "Fruit Cake" I was pretty disappointed. When I think of fruit cake, I think of all the stigma of the Christmas Fruit Cake and how this just might be the one food that even the starving children in Ethiopia might not eat. Maybe the fruit cake's bad image is all Johnny Carson's fault - at least I can say for sure that there is not only one fruit cake in the world being passed along from family to family.  Don't get me wrong, the Christmas Fruit Cake certainly has its purposes. For instance, I could use it as a pencil holder or a paper weight in my classroom, Ted could use it as a doorstop for our basement door,and both of us will need a good work out after all of these cakes, and the fruit cake would surely replace the average free weights. So when I read "Country Fruit Cake" I was hoping the different 'C' adjective before the word Fruit, would make all of the difference. The first difference I noticed right away when I was mixing the batter, that it would not have the consistency of jellified crust that canned fruit cake does. Furthermore, my fruit cake batter did not have nuts as traditional American fruit cakes do, nor did it have alcohol to preserve it in anyway (really why would someone want to preserve a fruit cake?)

The Country Fruit Cake consisted of butter, flour (whole - wheat and all - purpose), baking powder, nutmeg, light brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, milk, mixed dried fruit, and raw brown sugar. For the dried fruit, I thought change it up a bit and not use raisins at all, instead I choose dried coconuts, bananas, pineapples, cantaloupes, and papayas. Maybe I was trying to get as far away as possible from this idea of the Christmas Fruit Cake with more tropical fruit flavors.

However cruel Ted and I may be towards the troubled fruit cake, I can honestly say I have never eaten a full slice of one in my life. So, come what may, today I vowed I would eat my first slice of fruit cake without judgment! Imagine - some sappy, cliched, inspirational music, maybe coming right to a crescendo as I take my first bite, then the vibrations of the cymbals, then silence.   

Here is what the Country Fruit Cake looks like:

Here is what my more Tropical Country Fruit Cake looks like:

Note to anyone who would like to make this cake- skip the banana chips...they are hard to bite into!

Happy Baking!