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!

Cake #9 Fig and Lemon Bar

It is Sunday, so I am posting late about the cake I made this week; however, I did get a chance to make the cake on Saturday, but Saturday was so hectic (and so much fun) that I did not get a chance to post until today. Yesterday, Ted and I woke up early to get ready for the Luna Carpet people to come and give us an estimate on carpet in two rooms. Of course, they said 9:00am but did not get here until 11:00. So at around 10:30 I started to make the cake, because I had to bring the cake to a girls day at Fiore vineyard in North Harford, we brought food and for five dollars we were able to get a glass to take home, six wine tastings and one full glass of wine, it was a lot of fun! It was a teacher's special, and the band that the was playing was called Chalk Dust- they were both Social Studies teachers from North Harford High. Anyway, I had decided that I would bring my cake of the week to contribute.

This Fig & Lemon bar "cake" was the first time for this project that I had to reduce fruit down to make a paste or compote. I used a cup of figs, some lemon juice, some water, and some raw brown sugar. The result was tasty! It tasted like the inside of a fig newton. Anyway, while I was making the compote Ted helped me out with this cake, because we were worried about timing with the carpet guy, and he made the batter which was flour, cinnamon, baking powder, butter, light brown sugar, eggs, and the rind of one lemon. By the time we got everything into the oven, the doorbell rang and the Luna man was here.

He was really nice and not pushy at all, we knew we wanted to spend about a thousand dollars, (yay tax rebate!) his final price was 1232. We told him that we were sorry for his time, but Arcade floors could do it for 1000. He said "let me check my numbers and see what I can do." He came up with 980, and we were sold! We didn't really know how much Arcade floors could do it for, but we used them before for a bedroom and stairs and they were about 1000 for those two areas, and they didn't include hall away, where Luna does, so it was pretty good. The first carpet in our room and it is going to be a gray- sliver carpet, and the next one is in the computer room and it is going to be a light brown -tan color. We figured that our computer room would turn into a bedroom for our daughter Evie and the nursery would stay a nursery for our next child.

Anyway, we got him out of our house at 12:15, and I sliced the the lemon and fig bars and drove to North Harford with my bestie Colleen. I know what you're thinking, Laura drove, it has been hard after the accident, but I am trying people! The wine tasting was a lot of fun, and I believe the teachers like the fig and lemon bars, but when you are comparing it to wine,it is hard to be the favorite, after all wine is...wine.

Here is what the picture from the book shows them looking like:

Here is what my bars looked like:

Next week I am making a fruit cake- hopefully it is not the traditional type of fruit cake that everyone chucks on Christmas!

Until them, keep baking!

Cake # 8 Date & Spice Loaf

On to cake number eight, the Date & Spice Loaf cake, and another adventurous weekend with "The Children". Ted had all four of his wisdom teeth surgically removed yesterday, and boy was he in pain. The Novocain wore off in the middle of the the surgery on his last tooth, and by the time I got home from work Ted's mouth looked like a chipmunk full of blood. It was nasty. So my night was busy taking care of two toothless babies. That is why I was surprised when Ted wanted to go out to the store to get the ingredients for my next cake. Apparently, Hydrocodone is a powerful pain killer. Only twenty minutes after taking his drugs (as he likes to call them), Ted was feeling F-I-N-E. He was literally chasing me around the house asking me to kiss him. Because, as he said, "it would be like kissing a new man! How it exciting, I have four less teeth!" On top of that every so often he would ask me to stick a flashlight in his mouth so he could admire his sutures. So against my better judgment, I let Ted go to the store, really it was a toss up between my sanity and his safety - and in the end I realized that Ted was not safe acting the way he was around me either, I would have probably hurt him, so to the store he went.

While he was at the store getting one of the main ingredients for this recipe, dates, I suddenly realized that I wasn't exactly sure what a date was. I had seen one before, but I had never tasted one, and I was only partly sure that they were a fruit. So I did what any respectable baker would do, I Googled it. Turns out dates are a fruit that come from a date palm tree that is native to the Middle East and Northern Africa. When Ted came home with the dates, I immediately popped one in my mouth to see what it would taste like, because after all, as Top Chef Tom Colicchio would say, "You have to know your ingredients!" It was amazing! A sticky, juicy mixture of raisin and grape flavor with a hint of some sort of nuttiness. I don't know why I haven't eaten these  before, but that is going to change. Eating dates was one thing, but chopping them into coarse, tiny pieces, was something completely different. They were so sticky, that the chopping process took longer than the whole baking process. Besides dates this cake also called for: butter, whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, apple pie spice, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.

While the loaf "cake" was baking my house smelled like Christmas. Although it has been unseasonably warm, and it is almost March, all I could think of this morning was Christmas cookies. The apple pie spice mixture made my house smell like cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. The smell wasn't the only pleasantry about this cake, visually it looked beautiful, and very hearty.

The book's verison:

My version pre-slice:

Fortunately, this cake tasted as great as it looked. Although Ted had to eat around the dates, sticky dates do not make for good food after the removal of four teeth, he still said, "This was your best cake so far!" Now, Ted is a bit bias, he loves me too much and says that about all of the cakes I make, plus he loves food even more. However, I can attest that this cake is good. It tastes almost like a oatmeal wheat cookie with nuts. I can't explain it, but it tastes amazing.

Here is the loaf sliced:

Next week we are baking a lemon and fig bar, I am super excited about this cake because I love lemon, the sour the better!

Happy Baking.

Cake #7 Sponge Roll

After a craptastic night with Evie, who was up at 3am and did not go back down until 4:30, after Ted drove her around Bel Air, I continued the vibe and made a craptastic cake. Let me first start off by saying that I have never made a Sponge Roll before. I have made Sponge cakes, sure, but not a roll. I have made tons of home-made bread, but never a Sponge Roll.

Maybe I was just delirious from a lack of sleep, but my first attempt at this cake this morning was, as my students would say, "an epic-fail". Just take a look at the picture below and you can understand why. It looks like some zombie BRAAAaains.

In the middle of mixing the cake batter, making breakfast for Ted and myself, making breakfast for Evie and feeding Evie, and giving the dog treats so he didn't feel left out, I missed an ingredient. The sugar. Ever try to make a cake without sugar? Just don't. Not only does it taste like you are eating a spongy loaf of butter, it falls apart into clumps, as the picture perfectly portrays (some alliteration for my English teachers out there). Then, came the rolling, did you know a cake won't "roll" if it doesn't have sugar to bind all that buttery dough together? Now you do. Besides the freakin' sugar, this cake called for butter, flour, baking powder, vanilla, eggs, milk, and raspberry jelly.

Here is the book's picture:

This is the first cake that I had to make twice, and I am pretty miffed about it. I wanted to go through all 100 cakes without any big screw-ups. Anyway, round two went much better. For starters, I added the sugar, secondly, by the time my husband got home from an appointment he had brought back an early Valentine's day present- some flowers. He said that he knew we had a bad night and that my morning wasn't looking too hot either, so he thought this would cheer me up. Ted may have the biggest ego out of anyone I know, (just get him to walk by a mirror without checking himself out and making eyes at himself) but he always manages to find room in there for me. Definitely a sweet guy. So, with my new flowers on the table and a new, improved sponge cake out of the oven, and a daughter FINALLY in a nap, today is looking up.

Ted, not a fan of raspberry jelly still ate a piece of my cake, he loved it, but still thinks that it would have been better if I did strawberry jelly instead. I love raspberries so of course, I had no problems with it.


Here is my cake, and my attempt to make my plate look nice (ha):

Next week we are making a Date and Spice Loaf, which I am looking forward to because I love the taste of whole-wheat flour, and this is the first "cake" that has called for it.

Until next post, don't forget to add sweetness to your life!