One Cake Considered: Sweet Potato Pound Cake

Earlier this week, NPR ran a story about All Things Considered producer Melissa Gray, who just published a cookbook called All Cakes Considered: A Year's Worth of Weekly Recipes Tasted, Tested, and Approved by the Staff of All Things Considered. Gray bakes a cake and brings it into her office every Monday morning. Several people who heard the NPR story said it reminded them of me, since I bring baked goods into my office every week as well.

Gray was nice enough to provide a recipe for a sweet potato pound cake that looked scrumptious. I was glad to find the perfect occasion to give it a try, a pumpkin-carving party hosted by our friends Jim and Colleen last night. Jim and Colleen were nice enough to provide dinner and deal with the gobs of pumpkin seeds and guts that we scooped and piled all over their kitchen table.

This cake took quite a while to prepare because of the need to roast the sweet potatoes, mash them, and wait for them to cool. The batter was a pretty orange color and the cake smelled wonderful as it baked. The cake rose quite a bit in the oven and came out looking beautiful (I left a small portion it devoid of nuts for Colleen, who has a nut allergy). I had a suspicion that the cake would go well with ice cream, and since I didn't have enough time to make any (if I had, I would have made maple ice cream), Jim was nice enough to pick up some vanilla ice cream at the store.

The finished cake was very dense and heavy. The sweet potatoes definitely give this cake a distinctive flavor, although I'm guessing if you gave a slice to someone who didn't now what was in it, she wouldn't be able to identify the sweet potato and would think it was just a spice cake. The diced granny smith apple was completely undetectable, and the sweet pecan topping was a wonderful complement. With ice cream, this cake was outstanding. On its own, I think it's a little heavy. But still, it's unusual and tasty, and I will probably have to make one to bring in to my office one of these days!

Recipe: Missy G's Sweet Potato Pound Cake, from All Cakes Considered: A Year's Worth of Weekly Recipes Tasted, Tested, and Approved by the Staff of All Things Considered by Melissa Gray.

Different Strokes for Different Folks: Cranberry Cookies

A few months ago, Tom and I had the opportunity to meet up with our friends Perry and Rachel, who I met years ago when Perry was a summer intern in my office at DOJ. After graduating from law school, Perry prompted joined his wife Rachel in the foreign service. Since they have spent the last few years living overseas, we don't get the chance to see them very often. We were fortunately able to catch them on a brief stay in D.C. after they had wrapped up work in Beijing and were preparing to head to their next post in Tokyo.

I baked Perry and Rachel some buttercrunch melt-a-ways. Soonafter, Perry sent me an email asking me for the recipe. In addition, he provided me with a recipe for cranberry cookies, which he said was his and Rachel's favorite cookie. Now with fall upon us, and pumpkins and cranberries on the brain, I finally got around to trying the recipe earlier this week.

I have no idea where this recipe originated from. The ingredients are:

• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1/4 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons orange juice
• 1 egg
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 1/2 cup coarsely chopped cranberries (I used dried, Perry says he uses frozen)
  
• 1 cup chopped nuts
  

In addition, the cookies are covered with a glaze, made from:

• 1/3 cup butter, melted and cooled slightly
  
• 2 cups powdered sugar
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2-4 tablespoons hot water
  

To make the cookie batter, you cream together the butter and sugars, mix in the milk, orange juice and egg, and incorporate the dry ingredients. The cookies are baked in a 375 degree oven, cooled, and spread with a glaze which is made from a mixture of melted butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla, thinned out with hot water until it reaches spreading consistency.

Before I started making the batter, I read over the recipe and thought that the proportions looked a little strange. There seemed to be not enough butter and too much flour, fruit, and nuts. However, there is a significant amount of liquid in the batter, and the final consistency of the batter was completely manageable. But the low concentration of butter meant that the dough barely spread at all in the oven, and I had to flatten my scoops of dough before baking to get an attractive finished shape. I used a #24 scoop to portion out the dough, and I got 30 cookies per batch, which finished baking in 15 minutes.

The frosting turned out to be ecru-colored (due to the vanilla), and it set hard. I thought the finished cookie was pretty attractive. I wasn't in love with the taste. It was mostly cranberries and pecans, and the unfrosted cookie had an earthy, almost healthy taste to it. The frosting improved the flavor profile of this cookie by leaps and bounds. I wasn't all that impressed with the cookie and was trying to figure out why Perry and Rachel could like it so much (or, alternatively, how I had screwed it up and failed to achieve the tasty product that Perry and Rachel vouch for).

When I took the cookies into the office the next day, I was pleasantly surprised by how enthusiastically they was received. Several people asked me for the recipe, and one of my co-workers -- whose baked goods opinion I completely trust -- declared the cookie "one of your all time best!" I have been baking for my office every week for just shy of six years, and my co-workers have sampled hundreds of my creations -- so labeling something as an all time best is a pretty strong statement.

But I suppose the fact the other people might love something that I find to be merely average is one of the fun and sometimes frustrating aspects of baking; even though certain aspects of taste are objective (I mean really, does anyone like dry cake?), everyone's likes and dislikes are intensely personal. There are actually people out there who don't like chocolate! But it takes different strokes for different folks to move the world, right? And one of the reasons I'm always looking for and trying out new recipes is that every once in a while, I'm able to achieve that magical moment of total fulfillment -- when someone takes a bite of something I've made and finds a new favorite!

Baked Goods on Parade: Sour Cream Bundt Cake

Tom and I have a Sunday-only subscription to the Washington Post. To be honest, most of the newspaper goes straight into the recycling bin, because I find it a lot easier to read the paper on-line -- and that's exactly why we don't subscribe during the rest of the week. But the reason we get home delivery on Sunday is because of the plastic bag that comes bundled along with the newspaper, filled with the Washington Post Magazine, Parade Magazine, and all of the coupons and ads. I like to do the Post Magazine crossword and read Post critic Tom Sietsema's restaurant reviews. Usually I read Parade just for the ads. As my job involves advertising regulation, I happen to be the kind of person who flips through Parade each week, looks at the entire SkyMall catalog whenever I fly, and watches infomercials for fun.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a recurring recipe column in Parade by Dorie Greenspan called 1-2-3 Bake. The recipes are very simple, only require a few ingredients, and take up just one tiny column in the magazine, so they're easy to miss! Normally I wouldn't clip recipes from a general interest magazine (yes, maybe I am a bit of a food snob, but I also already have more cookbooks and cooking magazines than I can shake a stick at, so why bother?), but Dorie Greenspan is no hack. I own a couple of her cookbooks and have a tremendous amount of respect for her as a baker. I figured that she wouldn't be contributing recipes to Parade unless they're worthwhile.

So I clipped her column from the October 11 magazine, which included a recipe for Sour Cream Bundt Cake. I can summarize the recipe in one sentence: cream together butter and sugar, beat in eggs, vanilla, and sour cream, mix in flour, baking powder and salt, and bake. The recipe also gave the option of adding some jam, but I decided to leave the batter plain.

This was a pretty little cake, moist and dense with a fine crumb. It was lightly sweet and slightly tangy, with a mild overall flavor. It's a nice little cake, although a bit on the boring side. As I ate a slice, I kept picturing in my mind how perfect this cake would be as a base for fruit sauce, ice cream, and/or whipped cream. Nothing fancy, but a solid performer.

I'm glad I discovered the 1-2-3 Bake recipe column -- one more thing to look forward to on Sunday mornings!

Recipe: Sour Cream Bundt Cake from Dorie Greenspan's 1-2-3 Bake Column in Parade Magazine, October 11, 2009.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photos: It's Fall!

I am really digging the lovely cool and dry weather we are having here in D.C. And as one of my co-workers said when I brought this pumpkin cake into the office a few weeks ago, it's the official start of fall!

Recipes:

• Pumpkin-Raisin Bars from epicurious.com.
• Peanut Butter and Fudge Brownies with Salted Peanuts from epicurious.com.

Previous Posts:

• "An Early Autumnal Treat," June 24, 2008.
  
• "Going Nuts for Brownies," April 29, 2009.
  

You Can Tell Yourself That It's Healthy: Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Last week I was looking for a quick recipe to use up some buttermilk, and I came across a Chocolate Zucchini Cake recipe on epicurious.com. (I think the recipe initially caught my eye because I immediately associate the phrase "chocolate and zucchini" with the terrific food blog of the same name run by Frenchwoman Clotilde Dusoulier.) I love zucchini and I love chocolate, so I was curious to see how the two would go together.

I was not altogether happy with how the cake turned out. It was moist and the flavor was fine. Pure chocolate and not too sweet, without even the slightest hint of zucchini (if you click on the picture above to enlarge it, you can just barely make out some shreds of zucchini in the cake). But the topping was a mess. The recipe instructs you to sprinkle a significant amount of walnuts and chocolate chips over the top of the cake before you put it in the oven. The top surface ended up completely covered with nuts and chips, which posed quite a challenge when it came time to slice the cake. I tried to neatly saw through the chocolate chips and nuts, but a lot of them came loose and took hunks of cake corners and edges with them. This made for a very unattractive presentation, and if I ever make this cake again, I would probably either firmly press the topping into the cake batter before baking, or I would just mix the nuts and chips into the batter.

I was fairly unimpressed with this cake, although I suppose it's a neat trick to make a chocolate cake that has a few cups of vegetables hidden in it. But the flavor was nothing special and I think this cake would have been tastier (and more aesthetically pleasing) topped with a layer of chocolate frosting instead of a sprinkling of nuts and chocolate chips.

Recipe: Chocolate Zucchini Cake from epicurious.com.

My Co-Worker Went to Paris and All I Got Was a Cake She Baked Herself!

I had every intention of picking up a little edible gift to bring back to the folks at my office before I left Paris. I saved my shopping until the last day of our honeymoon, but I knew that I had plenty of time because our return flight didn't leave until mid-afternoon. Plus, I didn't have far to go to shop. Our hotel in Paris had a chocolate bar in the lobby (a very dangerous thing -- the bar offered a very large selection of macarons that you could pick out and have charged to your room!) and was directly next door to a L'Epicerie Fine, a well-stocked gourmet food store. The night before we were leaving -- a Monday -- I happened to look at our flight schedule and realized that we actually had a mid-morning flight, which meant we would have to leave for the airport before any of the shops opened the next day. Most stores in Paris are closed on Mondays, so I wasn't able to purchase anything that evening. The duty free shopping selections at the airport were pretty pathetic, so I arrived home empty handed.

I decided it was a good opportunity to try the Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) cake that was featured in the August 2009 issue of Bon Appetit, in an article featuring a menu of recipes from the Julia Child classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume One. It's amazing how trendy Julia Child has become of late, since the release of the movie Julie & Julia. Coincidentally, even the Smithsonian Museum of American History as been blogging about Julia Child and her recipes (including this entry on the Reine de Saba cake), although they are celebrating the addition of Julia Child's copper pots to her kitchen at the Smithsonian.

The cake batter is not difficult to assemble. The ingredients include semisweet chocolate, coffee or rum, unsalted butter, sugar, eggs, ground almonds, almond extract, and cake flour. The frosting is made from semisweet chocolate, coffee or rum, and unsalted butter.

I used extra bitter chocolate instead of semisweet because it's what I had on hand. Also, I made the cake and frosting with espresso instead of coffee because it only takes a minute and a press of a button to brew espresso with Tom's Nespresso Cube. As a result, the finished product was not very sweet and the coffee flavor was very strong. The almond component was barely detectable. The cake was dense and moist, almost brownie-like. This wasn't a bad cake by any means, but it also wasn't all that interesting. I love Julia Child as much as the next person, but I'm not such a huge fan of this recipe.

Recipe: "Reine de Saba cake" from Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume One, by Julia Child. [For some reason I could not find this recipe on the epicurious.com or bonappetit.com websites.]

Virtual Food and Wine Favors

Tom and I just got back from our honeymoon, a really lovely trip to Barcelona, San Sebastián and Paris. As nice as the trip was, I'm quite happy to be home. The seasons changed while we were away, and fall is my favorite time of the year. I love the crisp air, the falling leaves, and the perfect weather for baking!

But one more wedding-related post before I get back to baking. Months ago, I was struck with some Martha Stewart-type inspiration and I decided to make my own wedding favors. Since I started this blog a little over a year ago, I've taken a photo of almost everything that I've baked. Tom blogs about wine and photographs the labels of a lot of the bottles that he drinks. Since we have a boatload of photos of baked goods and wine labels, I decided to make them into magnets that we could give to our wedding guests.

I bought some clear 7/8-inch square tiles, reprinted small photos of baked goods and wine labels, glued the photos onto the tiles, and affixed rare earth magnets onto the back. We packaged the magnets in sets of six, in small boxes that were stamped with a logo that my cousin Cindy custom-designed for us. I used over 50 different photos of baked goods, so no one got the same set of magnets.

One of the more entertaining aspects of this project was seeing guests open their boxes at the wedding and realizing that some of them happened to receive magnets with pictures of the exact baked goods that they been served in the past. I don't just mean that someone who has tasted my snickerdoodles received a magnet with a picture of a snickerdoodle. I mean that several people who had been guests at small dinners or parties at our house received magnets with photos of the precise cake, souffle, brownies, or cupcakes that have been served at the event they attended.

I hope our guests enjoy the magnets. Making them was a fun little project!