Cake

I love cake. I love the way cake looks and I love the way it tastes---when it is good, and made with real ingredients and done right. I am not a cake expert but I am trying. I've given up bread baking for the time being, due to horrible tendonitis in my arms, but I can make cake because I have a wonderful Kitchen Aid mixer that my husband gave me for, oddly, bread making.

So cake. I would love to be better at cake baking. I had a couple of pushes recently. One: my addiction to the show Master Chef which we watched over the summer. One episode had the competitors all making six-layer iced cakes in under two hours. It was inspirational (I've found the show has really lit a fire under my cooking. Ha.). Then, last August, a friend baked a chocolate cake with a ganache for the frosting. I have not yet tried a ganache, but plan to someday (hers was delicious).

And so, here, for Maya W. celebrating her tenth birthday, I baked a cake, all chocolate, since she is a chocolate fanatic. A simple chocolate buttercream for frosting. It was delicious.

The recipe for both the cake and the frosting came from The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook.

Chocolate cake
3/4 cup cocoa
2 Cups cake flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups milk
3/4 cup shortening (read: butter)
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
*about 1/4 cup good quality baking chocolate, melted. Add to batter when it has cooled. This isn't in the recipe, but it worked well.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees; butter and flour (with cocoa powder) two 9" cake pans.
Measure dry ingredients and mix, then add wet and best with miser at low speed until combined. Increase mixer speed to high and beat for 2 minutes, until batter is smooth and
glossy.
Pour into pans and bake for 30-35 minutes. Cool cakes in pans for 10 minutes on rack, then remove from pans and cool completely on racks before frosting. This can be made as cupcakes as well; baking time is then reduced to about 25 minutes.

Coffee Cake

Alex and Madhuparna's Coffee cake

Alex and Madhuparna are friends of ours who used to live here in Winston and used to make this coffee cake for us a lot. They adapted from The Joy of Cooking and reduced the fat a bit, out of deference to Alex's cholesterol. It was delicious. My cholesterol is fine, however, so I add fat to make it more delicious. Lots of fat. I doubled the butter and added more topping (with butter) because this is a coffee cake and I believe coffee cake needs lots of butter. The wonderful thing is that all that butter makes the topping carmelize a bit, creating dips and valleys of brown sugar and cinnamon goodness. Since I am a believer in adapting recipes, wouldn't it be possible to do this with less butter or even use a butter substitute (margarine, canola oil, or one of those mysterious, non-food bread spread products)? NO. Nyet. Absolutely not. Butter or nothing!

While the ingredients and assembly are quite simple, the result is more than the sum of its parts. I often make this for breakfast guests and houseguests. Works fine to bake it the night before. In cold weather, you can leave it out all night, but in warmer weather, refrigerate (did I mention that there is a lot of butter in this?) and just gently warm up in the morning. Needless to say--though I seem to be saying it anyway--it is great with coffee. Green tea, not so much. Fresh fruit, not really. I just cannot say that this is part of a healthy breakfast. Enjoy it anyway.

A&M Coffee Cake

2 cups brown sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 butter
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla

Topping (combine separately)
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
1/3 cup brown sugar (approx)
more cinnamon--you decide how much

Mix dry ingredients for cake; combine butter, softened, with egg and vanilla. Combine with dry ingredients and pour into 9"x13" pan. Combine topping ingredients and cover the batter with topping.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Pour the coffee.

Crumbs

My eleventh grade English teacher was a woman named Doc Elliot, a self-professed Emily Dickinson fanatic. To commemorate Dickinson's birthday every December 10th, she covered the chalkboard with Dickinson's poems and brought in boxes of glazed doughnuts. Dickinson was not only one of the greatest American poets, Doc told us, but an outstanding baker who specialized in doughnuts. So we celebrated her birthday with both, reading and eating in nearly equal parts. I imagine (though I cannot recall with any certainty) that the following poem was up on the board:

God Gave a Loaf to Every Bird

God gave a loaf to every bird.

But just a crumb to me;
I dare not eat it, though I starve,--

My poignant luxury

To own it, touch it, prove the feat

That made the pellet mine,--

Too happy in my sparrow chance

For ampler coveting.

It might be famine all around,

I could not miss an ear,

Such plenty smiles upon my board,
My garner shows so fair.
I wonder how the rich may feel,--

An Indiaman,-- an Earl?

I deem that I with but a crumb,

Am sovereign of them all.

Though Dickinson is clearly not speaking literally of crumbs and loaves here (though one is never quite sure, as Dickinson enjoys the layering of the metaphoric and the material) I use this to consider a moment just this week, when a particular "crumb" made me ponder my own plenty.

My youngest, Gabriel, undertook doughnut making for his school science project, along with his dad. I am only now getting in on the action after sampling some plain old glazed doughnuts (not bad), Turkish doughnuts (lightly spicy and wonderful, but really, really oily) and the absolutely out-of-this world baking powder doughnuts. I thought about these doughnuts all the time when they were in the house and we decided to make them all over again because...well, I had a craving. It was a craving like I haven't had in years, and certainly not for doughnuts, which have long been out of favor with me, despite an obsession with Winchell's in my teenage years. Well, these baking powder doughnuts are divine, cakey, with a gorgeous crumb and the slightest hint of citrus, and may be the best I have ever eaten. Saturday morning my husband brought me a cup of hot, strong coffee and one of these doughnuts; I enjoyed my repast in bed, while reading poetry. I felt like royalty. I think Emily--and good old Doc Elliott--would approve.

The recipe is found on cooks.com but I will reproduce here, with some small changes.

Baking Powder Doughnuts

2 egg yolks

1/2 cup sugar
3 T melted butter

2 T lemon juice

3 1/2 cups flour (all-purpose, unbleached)
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
2 tsp grated orange peel (no pith, please!)
2 egg whites, beaten until stiff


Combine flour, baking powder and salt together. In a separate, large bowl, beat egg yolks until thick and lemon-colored. Add sugar gradually and continue beating until light in color. Conintue beating while adding lemon juice, orange peel and melted butter. Add the dry ingredients to the egg yolk mixture one cup at a time, until completely integrated. Stir in the milk. Fold in the egg whites.
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured board and knead until smooth. Roll out to 1/4 " thickness. Cut with a floured doughnut cutter; drop doughnuts into hot oil (350 degrees) deep enough so that doughnuts don't touch the bottom of the pan. Fry, turning once until entire doughnut is golden brown. Drain on towels briefly. Glaze these or sprinkle with sugar. Enjoy while warm (though they are great the next day).

Sugar on its own works well, but we made a glaze of sugar, water and vanilla. Powdered sugar works well for a glaze, but don't use a brand with cornstarch, as this can make a bitter glaze. I made my own by grinding sugar in the coffee grinder and then combining about 2 parts sugar to 1 part water and 1 tsp vanilla. We also made one batch of glaze with bourbon in place of the vanilla. All scrumptious.