Baked Sunday Mornings: Speculaas

This week's assignment for Baked Sunday Mornings is a Belgian biscuit that I already know and love: speculaas. This was one of the first recipes I made from Baked Explorations, and it was love at first taste. I've even done a side-by-side comparison with Biscoffs, and the speculaas can hold their own. But since the speculaas were on the baking schedule, I thought that I would take the opportunity to run a little experiment, to see how adding a little baker's ammonia might affect the cookies.

Baker's ammonia can give cookies a very crisp, dry texture (e.g., as it does for the vanilla dreams cookies from King Arthur flour). Homemade speculaas are crisp, but they definitely do not have the same airy super-crisp texture as real a Biscoff. The problem is, you can't just substitute baker's ammonia for other types of leavening and still expect the recipe to work. The speculaas recipe in Baked Explorations calls for 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, and I decided to see what would happen if I added 1/4 teaspoon of baker's ammonia in addition to the baking soda. I also added a splash of milk (probably about 2 teaspoons), because I wanted to dissolve the ammonia in milk to ensure that it would be evenly distributed throughout the batter. To have a basis for comparison, I also made a batch of speculaas following the original recipe, with no ammonia.

The dough with the ammonia and milk was softer, stickier, and more difficult to roll and cut. I used a fluted biscuit cutter, but the cookies from the ammonia batch did not keep their shape as well. As you can see from the picture below, the fluted edges did not hold during baking.

Tasted head-to-head, the difference between the original recipe and the ammonia speculaas was subtle, but real. The ammonia version definitely had an airier, crispier texture that was closer to a real Biscoff, but still far from the same. On a whim, I asked my friend Jim to do a taste test without telling him what the difference was between the two batches of biscuits. He recruited a few others to join in, and three out of four tasters preferred the ammonia version. Strangely enough, none of the tasters detected any difference in texture between the two variations; they all thought the difference between the two cookies was the flavor. Tom also prefers the ammonia version, but I am fairly ambivalent -- they are both very tasty, and the difference with the ammonia is so slight that it is immaterial to how much I enjoy the cookies.

If I could figure out how the adjust the recipe to make the speculaas as crisp and light as a real Biscoff, I would do it in a heartbeat. But until that happens, I'm perfectly happy to keep making and eating these delicious cookies just the way the recipe is written!

Recipe: "Speculaas," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafio, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "The Biscoff Knockoff: Speculaas," November 18, 2010.
• "Belgian Biscoff Tasteoff: Biscoff v. Speculaas," June 25, 2011.

Happy Chinese New Year!: Green-Tea Fortune Cookies

Earlier this week, I saw that Shelley at Franish Nonspeaker had great results with Joanne Chang's recipe for Green-Tea Fortune Cookies. About ten years ago, I tried a recipe for fortune cookies that was a colossal disaster -- the almond cookies were not even edible, much less foldable into the distinctive fortune cookie shape. Reading about the green tea recipe got me interested in fortune cookies again, as well as giving me a sudden wave of guilt about not doing anything to observe the Chinese New Year. It dawned on me that it's a little odd that I bake for Rosh Hashanah, even though I'm not Jewish, and yet don't bake for the Chinese New Year, even though I am Asian. I didn't feel too bad about the fact that fortune cookies aren't actually a Chinese food -- after all, Asians don't exactly have a strong tradition of baked goods, so there isn't really a large repertoire of desserts to choose from.

It only takes a couple of minutes to make the batter for these cookies -- you just whisk together egg whites, sugar, melted butter, flour, and matcha powder. You chill the batter for an hour, after which it has a lovely thick texture such that it is not runny at all, but easily spreadable. I used a #30 scoop (roughly 2 tablespoons) to drop the batter on a silpat, and then used an offset spatula to spread it into 6-inch diameter circles. This was pretty easy to do freehand. However, since the circles of batter were so large, I could only fit three on a cookie sheet. I baked the cookies for 12 minutes, after which I used a large offset spatula to free the cookies from the silpat, folded them in half, and made the crease in the middle by pulling the cookies over the rim of a coffee mug. It took me about 3 or 4 tries to get the technique down, but after that, I was surprised at how easy it was to make beautiful-looking fortune cookies.

One problem I encountered when folding the cookies is that they cooled very quickly. So much so that if I pulled a pan of three cookies out of the oven, in the few seconds that it took me to remove the first cookie and fold it, the other two remaining cookies would have already started to harden and thus would crack at the edges by the time I got around to folding them. The workaround I developed was to take only one cookie off of the silpat at a time, and then immediately return the sheet with the remaining cookies back to the oven so that they would stay warm and pliable until I could get to them. While this ended up working out just fine, it was time consuming -- given the baking and folding time, I could only make three fortune cookies about every 14 minutes or so.

Given that you start out with a 6-inch diameter cookie, the folded fortune cookie is much larger than what you encounter in a Chinese restaurant. I placed the freshly folded cookies in a muffin tin to help hold their shape until they cooled -- and as you can see in the above picture, they are huge (that's a standard-size muffin tin). I thought that these cookies were fabulous. Sweet, crispy, delicate, with a lovely (but not overpowering) green tea flavor. Tom said that the green color made them look like "hippie" fortune cookies, and that I could make a killing selling them in Santa Cruz or Berkeley if I filled them with hippie fortunes.

I did not have time to actually compose and print out fortunes to insert into the cookies, so unfortunately, they were empty. I personally love the little thrill of cracking open a fortune cookie to read the message inside. In my life, I have received two fortunes that I think were truly perfect for me. The first was in college, when I was a coxswain for the crew team. The night before our first regatta, I went out for Chinese food with some other girls from the crew team and received the fortune, "Your place in the path of life is in the driver's seat." And the second, which is actually quite absurd in its specificity, but nonetheless my favorite of all time, is pictured below: 

Needless to say, I know that that there will be a nice cake somewhere in my near future. Happy Chinese New Year!

Recipe: "Green-Tea Fortune Cookies," by Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery, available from Food and Wine.

My Cake Has a New Set of Clothes: Grasshopper Cake

While trying to pick a cake to make for my friend Dorothy's birthday, I was browsing through Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, and I came across a recipe that looked awfully familiar. The cookbook's "Grasshopper Cake" is a chocolate layer cake with mint chocolate ganache and mint buttercream. I immediately recognized that the chocolate cake is the same cake in the "Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache" recipe from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented -- because I just made the chocolate coffee cake (a chocolate layer cake filled and frosted with coffee buttercream and topped off with a layer of dark chocolate ganache and some chocolate-covered espresso beans) a couple of weeks ago.

I thought the chocolate coffee cake was fantastic, and was eager to see how the cake would taste when paired with mint instead of coffee. At Baked Bakery, the grasshopper cake is a seasonal cake that is available only in the spring and summer -- but it seemed appropriate to enjoy the cool flavor of mint in the dead of winter (and the bakery does, after all, sell a similar "Wintermint" chocolate cake in the winter).

The chocolate cakes from the two recipes are exactly the same.  They are made with butter, shortening, sugar, dark brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cocoa powder, sour cream, and hot water. Even the buttercream recipes for the two cakes are almost identical -- a cooked base of flour, sugar, milk, and cream to which you add butter and flavoring. The only difference is that to make the coffee buttercream, you flavor the frosting with vanilla and coffee extract; to make the mint buttercream for the grasshopper cake, you use mint extract and creme de menthe instead.  I happen to have a bottle of clear creme de menthe instead of the mouthwash-green variety (I bought it to make the grasshopper bars from Baked Explorations), and while I briefly considered using artificial coloring to make the buttercream a light green color, I just left it alone.

This cake is filled not only with the mint buttercream, but also a bit of mint chocolate ganache (made from dark chocolate, cream, mint extract, and creme de menthe). To assemble the cake, you level the layers, place the first layer on a serving platter, spread on a little ganache, briefly refrigerate the cake until the ganache sets, and then spread on some buttercream before adding the next layer. You repeat the process with the second layer, and then add the final layer and frost the entire thing in buttercream.

The mint buttercream recipe for this cake is actually 1.5 times the recipe for the coffee buttercream in the chocolate coffee cake, because you are supposed to use the extra buttercream to fill eight chocolate sandwich cookies and use them to decorate the cake. No recipe is provided for the chocolate wafer cookies -- the cookbook suggests Newman's Own, Nabisco, or homemade. I happened to have some unfilled faux-reo cookies in the freezer (I baked a batch a couple of weeks ago to make the cookie crust for a chocolate caramel cheesecake, and I froze the leftovers), so I filled them with mint buttercream. But the size of my mint faux-reos was a little large in proportion to the diameter of the cake, and I decided that putting them on the cake would look awkward. I ended up just serving the cookies on the side.

Instead, I garnished the cake with the leftover mint chocolate ganache. Because I applied the ganache with a pastry bag and star tip, from a distance, the cake looked like it was decorated with chocolate chips. I had plenty of ganache to write "Happy Birthday Dorothy" on the cake, but my cake writing skills are terrible. I decided I should not even attempt putting on a message, lest I mess up the otherwise attractive cake.

Since I left the buttercream its natural off-white color, I decided to use light green candles as an indication of the cake flavor. It's a good looking cake. It's a good tasting cake. I personally prefer the coffee buttercream version of this cake, but the mint was refreshing, and the buttercream and ganache did not taste boozy at all. However, I don't think the ganache used between the layers added much to the cake, either taste-wise, or visually (although I do think the color contrast provided by the ganache using for decorating was nice).

I wish I could say this cake was enjoyed by all, but if you look closely at the photo above, that blurry boy behind the cake is Dorothy's five-year old son Alexander, who didn't like the cake or mint faux-reos at all and was a bit nonplussed that his honorary aunt bought over desserts that he didn't want to eat. I should mention that Alexander's little brother Liam had no such hangups, and he quickly devoured his tiny piece of cake and persistently asked for more; Alexander had dried apricots for dessert instead. Ah, Alexander -- the boy who likes whitefish salad and vegetables but doesn't like cake, frosting, or chocolate. He's definitely my toughest customer, but I will continue to try to win him over!

Recipe: "Grasshopper Cake," from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

Previous Posts:

• "My New Cake Crush: Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache," January 14, 2012.
• "Baked Sunday Mornings: Grasshopper Bars," August 14, 2011.

I Liked It and I Put a Ring on It: Chocolate Bavarian Torte

My friend Jim and I have had lunch together almost every week for the last ten years. We have a pretty set routine; there are only three restaurants in our regular rotation, and our lunch orders are fairly predictable. But last week was Restaurant Week in D.C., and so we did something we almost never do at lunch -- we ordered dessert. Jim, being the chocolate cake fan that he is, ordered a double fudge cake. It was one of the worst chocolate cakes that I've ever tasted, completely lacking flavor. Since Jim and his wife Colleen were kind enough to invite us over to their house for dinner a few days later, I decided that I should make them a nice chocolate cake.

I had the perfect cake in mind. Last week as I was browsing recipes to select some cakes for a retirement party, I became interested in making the recipe for "Chocolate Bavarian Torte" from The SoNo Baking Company Cookbook. However, I was missing a critical piece of equipment -- an 8-inch cake ring. The cake ring I ordered from Amazon.com arrived too late for the retirement party, but just in time to make the torte for Jim and Colleen!

The reason I wanted to make this torte is because it's just gorgeous. There are two full-page photos in the cookbook showcasing this sophisticated three-layer chocolate cake, filled and covered with chocolate mousse, topped with a thin sheet of chocolate ganache. You need a cake ring to make this recipe because there is a layer of mousse not just between each layer of cake, but also all the way around the sides of the torte.

You bake the chocolate sponge cake recipe (flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, eggs, vanilla, melted butter, buttermilk, and brewed coffee) in two 9-inch round pans. Even though the recipe makes two 9-inch cakes, you are supposed to only need one for the torte, split into three layers. I had a problem with my cakes coming out slightly underdone, even though I baked them a little beyond the specified time range. As a result, the top portion of each cake was unusable; the top of each undercooked cake stuck and came off when I unmolded and inverted the cakes to cool. So having an extra cake came in pretty handy, as I had to cut my three layers from what remained of the two cakes.

You use the 8-inch cake ring like a big cookie cutter to stamp out a circle of cake from one of the 9-inch diameter layers. You cut the other two cake layers into 7-inch circles (easy if you happen to have a 7-inch cake ring as well). After you cut the rounds of cake and make a chocolate mousse (from water, gelatin, egg yolks, sugar, milk, vanilla bean, chocolate, cocoa, salt, and heavy cream), you are ready to assemble the torte.

To put the torte together, you put an 8-inch cardboard cake circle into the bottom of the cake ring and then put the 8-inch round layer of cake on top of it. You pour a layer of chocolate mousse over the cake. Then you center a 7-inch layer of cake on top of the mousse, and pour more mousse on top of and around the layer. You follow with the final 7-inch cake layer and more mousse, and then freeze the torte overnight. Once it's frozen, you spread on a thin layer of chocolate ganache (chocolate, heavy cream, honey, salt, and vanilla), which sets immediately on the frozen layer of mousse underneath. You remove the torte from the cake ring by wetting a kitchen towel with hot water, wringing it out, and wrapping it around the cake ring to warm up the mousse... and voila! You get a torte with a layer of chocolate cake on the bottom, only smooth chocolate mousse visible all around the sides, and chocolate ganache on top.

The torte pictured in the cookbook has some additional ganache piped onto the top using a pastry bag and a star tip, but I didn't have a lot of ganache left over, and this step just seemed unnecessary -- it still looks quite professional even without any additional decoration. When it came time to transport the torte to Jim and Colleen's house, I wasn't quite sure how I could do this without having the sides of the torte smash into a cake carrier or cake box. I eventually figured out that I could drop the torte into the bottom of a 10-inch diameter pie pan (the flat portion of the pie pan was the perfect size to fit the 8-inch torte), so that the sloped sides of the pan acted like a spacer that would keep the sides of the torte from touching the sides of the cake carrier.

The torte sliced cleanly, and the cut slices were even more beautiful than I had envisioned. The layers of cake and mousse were even and level, and the ganache was flawless. This torte was quite tasty. I used only 72% chocolate for the mousse and ganache, because that's all I had on hand, and the torte overall was not very sweet. The cake itself was very chocolatey and moist, although it was quite dense. I think that I prefer the lighter texture of the cake from the Baked Explorations Chocolate Coffee Cake -- although I appreciate that this torte is likely more manageable (in terms of assembly) if you have a firmer cake, since the layers are so thin. While the cake and mousse are quite satisfying, I think the real reason to make this torte is to admire its good looks! This is definitely a dessert that will impress.

Recipe: "Chocolate Bavarian Torte," from The SoNo Baking Company Cookbook: The Best Sweet and Savory Recipes for Every Occasion, by John Barricelli.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Pecan Tassies

This week's assignment for Baked Sunday Mornings is Pecan Tassies. Let me say up front that I am not the right person to evaluate this recipe. As I have noted before, pecan pie happens to be my absolute least favorite kind of pie. I like pecans, but I just can't stand the gooey filling in pecan pie. The flavor, the texture, the cloying sweetness... I don't find any part of it appealing. Needless to say, I didn't have high hopes for this recipe, since a pecan tassie is just a tiny pecan pie.

At least the recipe was very simple, especially for one from Baked Explorations. The crust is simply a mixture of butter, cream cheese, sugar, and flour. The filling is a mixture of eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, salt and pecans. You just press the crust into miniature muffin tins, sprinkle in a few pecans, pour in the pie filling, and bake.

Not surprisingly, I did not enjoy these at all. The crust was fine, but I did not care for the filling. I also was not a fan of the messy crust that resulted from pressing the dough into the muffin tins -- the tassies did not have a uniform or neat appearance, and that is the kind of thing that bothers a Type A person like me.

But as I said before, I cannot fairly judge a pecan tassie. Someone who is a fan of pecan pie might really enjoy these -- and they certainly are quick and easy to make. So I wouldn't try to discourage anyone else from giving the recipe a try!

Recipe: "Pecan Tassies," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

My New Cake Crush: Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache

Earlier this week I made a few cakes for a retirement party, and out of the three new cake recipes I tried, one truly blew me away -- the three-tiered beauty of a chocolate cake with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache from Baked Explorations. One of the the party organizers had asked me to make a sheet cake, but I decided to go the layer cake route, since I always think that layer cakes are more festive. Maybe it's just me, but when I see a sheet cake, I think "grocery store bakery," but when I see a layer cake, I think "special occasion."

The "classic chocolate cake" for the recipe is made with butter, shortening, sugar, dark brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cocoa powder, sour cream, and water. You divide the batter into three 8-inch pans for baking. When the cake is cooled, you level the layers and then fill and frost the cake with a coffee buttercream. This buttercream is typical of those from Baked; the base is made from flour, sugar, cream, and milk that you heat on the stove until the mixture boils and thickens. You beat the resulting mixture until it's cooled, and then incorporate softened butter and flavoring (in this case, vanilla extract and coffee extract). The buttercream ended up the light brown color of a latte, due to the large amount (3 tablespoons) of coffee extract.

After you frost the cake, you top it off with a layer of chocolate ganache, made from dark chocolate, butter, and corn syrup. The recipe makes a lot of ganache, such that even though I poured on several coats, letting drips fall over the sides (the method specified in the recipe), I had more than I could possibly have used. The final touches were a ring of chocolate-covered espresso beans on top and some chocolate sprinkles around the bottom outer edge.

Even though it's only eight inches in diameter, this cake is huge. Like the Baked Explorations Caramel Apple Cake, the fact that it's three layers makes it very tall -- about 5 and 1/4 inches with the espresso beans, which means it won't quite fit into one of my standard cake boxes, which are only 5-inches tall. The cake was also quite heavy. Out of curiosity, I put the finished cake on a scale, and it came in at 5 lbs., 14.75 ounces.

I really wish I had a picture of the sliced cake; it was just gorgeous. And this cake tastes every bit as good as it looks. The chocolate cake is insanely good -- very moist, tender, and light, yet deeply chocolatey. Since the cake has a lot of cocoa powder in it (3/4 cup) and I used a mix of dutch and black cocoa that has a very dark color, the cake was also very dark, essentially the same color as the chocolate ganache on top. And the buttercream? Awesome. I was surprised at how the coffee flavor was so lovely and didn't overwhelm the cake at all. The cooked Baked buttercreams have a lusciously rich, yet perfectly smooth and non-greasy texture that is absolute perfection. And the flavor combination of the chocolate cake with the coffee buttercream was heavenly. The chocolate ganache on top was not necessary, but a nice bonus.

As one of the party guests so aptly put it, the cake is "killer."  It's also on the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule for March 25, 2012 -- but I don't think I'm going to wait that long before making this glorious cake again!

Recipe: "Chocolate Coffee Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

Blunt Force Chocolate: Mocha Cookies

After taking a couple of weeks off from baking after our holiday party, I decided to kick off my 2012 baking with a recipe for Mocha Cookies from Euro Pane Bakery that was featured in the Los Angeles Times' last Culinary SOS column of 2011.

I could tell just from reading the recipe that these cookies would be over-the-top chocolate. I made a double batch, which required almost four pounds (!) of chocolate, and only one cup of flour. The recipe ratios and method reminded me quite a bit of a Bon Appetit recipe for Giant Chocolate-Toffee Cookies that is a favorite of mine, since it produces marvelously chewy cookies.

Anyway, back to the mocha cookies. These are actually quite easy to make. You start by melting together butter and chocolate, and then setting the mixture aside to cool a bit. Meanwhile, you beat eggs, add sugar, add the melted chocolate and some brewed espresso, incorporate the dry ingredients (pastry flour, baking soda, salt), and then fold in dark chocolate chunks. I melted 72% chocolate for the batter, and chopped 54% chocolate for the chunks. I don't keep pastry flour on hand, so I used a 50-50 mixture of cake flour and White Lily all purpose flour. You chill the batter until it's firm enough to scoop. I used a #24 scoop and got exactly 72 cookies from the double batch of dough. The cookies puffed and cracked during baking, and some of the cookies ended up with a hollow space inside.

Not surprisingly, these cookies are chocolatey. Very chocolatey. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I thought they were too chocolatey. I wish I hadn't used 72% chocolate for the batter; I think I should have used something around 60% instead. Eating this cookie is a bit like getting clubbed over the head with chocolate. Apparently, a lot of people enjoy this sensation, as these cookies were very well received. However, I just thought that the flavor was disappointingly flat, even with the espresso flavor in the background. Also, while the cookies were crisp on the outside and moist on the inside, they did not have the uber-chewy texture of the giant chocolate-toffee cookie that I love so much. (As a side note, the flaky quality of the cookie's outer crust creates lots and lots of crumbs. You definitely need a plate to eat one of these.) Especially given how much chocolate this recipe requires, I don't imagine that I'll be making these cookies again.

Recipe: "Mocha cookies" from Euro Pane Bakery, recipe featured in the December 29, 2011, Los Angeles Times.

Previous Post: "A Cookie For the Road," June 22, 2008.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Stump de Noël

I am a bit embarrassed to say that I have never made a bûche de noël before, so I was a little nervous about trying the Stump de Noël recipe from Baked Explorations. The recipe looked a bit involved, and I decided to make the cake for our holiday party. I take a couple days off from work to do all of the party prep work, so that provided me with some extra time to devote to the project.

First, I made the buttercream frostings, since they must be chilled before the cake is assembled. To make the base buttercream, you whisk egg whites and sugar in a bowl set over simmering water until the sugar dissolves. Then you whip the mixture along with vanilla until glossy, and slowly incorporate room temperature butter. You mix a portion of the buttercream with some melted chocolate to make chocolate buttercream, and incorporate malt powder and crushed malt balls into the remainder to make malt buttercream.

The chocolate cake is made from egg yolks, sugar, melted chocolate, espresso powder dissolved in hot water, vanilla, egg whites beaten with cream of tartar, melted butter, flour, cocoa, and salt. You divide the cake batter between two large jelly roll pans and bake. Once the cakes are baked and cooled, you turn them out of the pans, frost each cake with malt buttercream, and then cut each cake in half lengthwise. You take one of the long strips of cake and roll it up, and continue adding on the additional strips of cake and rolling until you have a quite sizable 6-inch-tall roll (if you use the prescribed 12-inch by 17-inch cake pans, you will have 68 total inches of cake wrapped up in your finished cake roll!). I wish that I had trimmed the edges off of the cake, as they were a bit dry and cracked during rolling. During the rolling process, long vertical cracks appeared on the cake's surface, such that the outside of the cake roll bore a striking resemblance to the rough and furrowed texture of tree bark even before I frosted it. I frosted around the outside of the entire roll with the chocolate buttercream (but not the top, so the spiral would still be visible); there was just enough frosting to get the job done.

I meant to make the meringue mushrooms to go along with my stump, I really did... But I just got bogged down with all the other baking and cooking I had to do in advance of our holiday party and I ran out of time. I thought that the stump looked a little naked on the cake stand without any sort of adornment, so I sprinkled some extra walnut toffee crunch I had on hand around the base of the stump (I made the crunch for this frozen pumpkin mousse recipe). I thought it would more or less resemble dirt, and I was happy with the way the stump looked when I served it.

Party guests oohed and aahed over how pretty the cake was. I love the fact that the stump continues to look like a tree after it is sliced (the vertical stripes of frosting between the layers look like tree rings), and the slices of cake are absolutely beautiful -- neat layers of chocolate cake interspersed by thin lines of the malt buttercream frosting. (Okay, the picture above is not particularly neat, but I let my party guests serve themselves and they were not as concerned with cutting perfect slices to produce the ideal photo for my blog.) The best part is that the cake tasted as good as it looked! The chocolate cake was very moist and tender, with a rich chocolate flavor strongly accented with espresso. I thought that the chocolate and malt buttercreams were also very good, although I was a little surprised that it was difficult to detect the malt flavor -- perhaps this was because the layer of malt buttercream was so thin.

I liked this cake so much that I am planning to make it throughout the year, and not just at Christmastime. The stump is something truly special, and people who tasted it (or even just saw it) at our holiday party were still talking to me about it days afterwards. If you're looking for a showstopper holiday dessert, look no further!

Recipe: "Stump de Noël" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.