Lemon Ombré Cake

Again with the patience.  This one actually required more patience than the strawberry rosette, to make something that looked like an unbroken spiral that magically changes hues to the top.  Then I had to have patience with the gelatin topping, because that doesn't set up quickly even on a frozen cake.  And patience to set the lemon wedges exactly where I wanted them using tweezers.  The only problem with choosing a cake design off a Japanese website is the care and precision they use.  Not my forte.

1 recipe lemon cake (2 layers)
1 batch whipped cream frosting
1/2 C lemon curd
1 packet unflavored gelatin
1 lemon
1/3 C sugar
yellow food coloring

1.  Place a dab of frosting on a cake circle and center the bottom layer on it.  Spread a thin layer of frosting on the first layer, then top with the lemon curd.  Center the top cake layer upside-down on the first.

2.  Crumb-coat the whole cake, making sure to fill the gap between layers.  Make the top slightly thicker than the sides, and perfectly smooth.  The gelatin top is going to show any imperfections.  Chill cake for at least 10 minutes while you prepare the colored frosting.

3.  In a bowl, tint 1/2 C of frosting the darkest shade of yellow you want.  Fill a pastry bag fitted with a 1M tip.  Go get the cake from the fridge.

4.  Starting at the base, pipe a ring around the bottom to get a base ruffle.  When you reach your starting point, angle up slightly to start the spiral.  When you get 1/4 of the way up, squeeze out remaining frosting into the tinting bowl, but don't wash out the bag.  Mix another 1/2 C of frosting into remnants to make a lighter shade.  Fill bag and continue spiral, allowing the new color to work its way through.  Repeat at the halfway point and 3/4 mark to get a shade at the top that's almost as white as the top itself.  The top of the spiral needs to come up about half an inch higher than the top of the cake, with no gaps along the top edge.  Chill the cake while you make the gelatin.

5.  Cut two thin slices out of the center of the lemon, and cut each into wedges.  Juice the rest of the lemon to get about 1/4 cup.  Soften gelatin packet in the juice while you bring 3/4 C water and the sugar to a boil.  Add lemon slices and cook at a low boil until wedges are softened, about 20 minutes.  Remove lemon pieces and stir in gelatin until dissolved.  Add a drop or two of food coloring.  Chill mixture until it starts to thicken.  Check every ten minutes or so, and it's going to take at least half an hour.

6.  Remove cake from fridge.  Spoon gelatin onto top of cake, making sure it covers evenly and all the way to the edges.  It's going to gel pretty quickly on top of cold icing.  You will not use all of it.  On a 6" cake, I used almost half.  The rest went in a bowl for a snack.  It's just lemon gelatin from scratch.  Before the stuff on the cake sets completely, set the reserved lemon wedges in a design.  If I'd thought it through, I would have made some kind of star pattern instead of a circle.  I was just trying to get the things to stick to the tweezers long enough to settle them in the top before it turned solid.

7.  Chill cake until ready to serve.  All of it is perishable or will melt at room temperature.  Try not to leave it out more than a few hours.

Makes one 8" layer cake, about 12-16 servings

Difficulty rating  :-0

Whipped Cream Frosting

So, it appears there are a few ways to make a stable whipped cream frosting that won't melt too fast.  Only one uses cornstarch, as I assumed they all did.

What are the other options then?  Butter, cream cheese, and instant white chocolate or vanilla pudding mix.  The last one surprised me, but totally makes sense.  You just reduce the amount of sugar, and make sure you finish decorating the cake before the gelatin sets up.

The jury's still out on whether I have to make these cakes gelatin-free (kosher/vegetarian), so I'm going with the way that uses something leftover in my fridge.  I had about 1/4 of a batch of pipeable cream cheese frosting left.  It was too much to fill a 6" cake, but nowhere near enough to do more than fill and a thin crumb coat.  My solution was to whip up a pint of heavy whipping cream, then use these leftovers and a bit more powdered sugar (which contains cornstarch) to stabilize it.

This isn't going to hold a piped shape nearly as long as a more solid buttercream, unless you use a pudding mix.  You can do a smooth coat and it won't run for several hours.  Any design starts to melt after about an hour at room temperature. Remember, this is all dairy and will spoil at room temperature after about four hours.  Keep the frosting refrigerated as much as possible.  It will still be very soft and usable.

1 pint heavy whipping cream
1/4 batch pipeable cream cheese frosting or 4 oz cream cheese or butter
1/2 C powdered sugar
vanilla to taste

1.  In chilled mixing bowl, whip cream to just short of firm peaks.  While that's going on, soften stabilizer on the counter and chop into chunks if it's a brick.

2.  Beat in leftover frosting or butter/cheese.  As soon as it's incorporated, add powdered sugar and vanilla.  You don't want to beat this into butter, but it should be firm.

3.  Refrigerate if not using immediately.  Frosting is best used the same day, and for a cake that will be served within two days.

Makes enough to frost and fill an 8" layer cake

Difficulty rating  π

Lemon Layer Cake

This is the last of my recipe testing for the wedding, but I still have techniques to work on and a blackberry cake to remake.  I do have an unrelated recipe or two to try.  I probably won't be ignoring real food in my posts after this set, though.  I can save the cakes for whenever I don't have any meal-related recipes to post.

I decided to give My Cake School another try.  It isn't her fault that the blackberry cake was too dense; I messed with the recipe.  Everyone really liked the cream cheese frosting recipe I got there.  She does rely on flavored extracts a lot.  I'd rather not spend that much on one-off ingredients and again searched for an alternative.  I decided on extra lemon zest and upping the lemon juice by 50%.  I did not decrease the milk by the same tablespoon, and that's probably why the cakes cracked.  I'd still rather have some mild cracking on a fluffy cake than too little moisture.

The box of cake flour ran out a couple of tablespoons short of a half-recipe.  I don't remember when I opened it, but it may have done seven half-sized cakes.  That means I can do the wedding arrangement on only two boxes.  At some point, I'm going to have to add up the butter, eggs, and sugar.

1-1/2 sticks (12 Tb) butter, softened
1-1/2 C sugar
4 eggs, room temperature
3 C cake flour
1/2 tsp salt
1-1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 C milk
1/4 C lemon juice*
1/4 C vegetable oil
zest of 2 lemons*
1 Tb lemon extract*

*If omitting the lemon extract, add 2 Tb lemon juice and the zest of one more lemon.

1.  Grease two 8" cake pans.  Line with waxed paper, then grease the paper.  Preheat oven to 350º

2.  In one bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lemon zest.  In a separate bowl, stir together milk, oil, lemon juice, and lemon extract.

3.  In stand mixer with the paddle attachment, beat butter until smooth.  Add the sugar and whip until fluffy.  Scrape the bowl at least once.

4.  Beat in eggs one at a time, waiting for the mixture to be smooth and scraping the bowl before the next addition.

5.  Starting with the flour, alternate incorporating the dry and wet ingredients in five stages (dry/wet/dry/wet/dry) on the low speed.  Wait until each one is mixed before adding the next.  Scrape the bowl and mix on low one more time to make sure everything is smooth.

6.  Pour into prepared pans and spread the tops even.  Bake for 30-35 minutes, until just starting to turn golden and a toothpick has crumbs but no stickiness.  Cool in the pan for ten minutes.  Turn out onto a cooling rack and peel off the wax paper.  Allow to cool completely before frosting or freezing.

Makes two 8" layers

Difficulty rating  :)

Strawberry Ombré Rosette Cake

This is everyone at work's favorite cake so far, and Cousin Smurf likes the rosette design.  I'm not into frou-frou cake decorating (even if I was any good at it), but a repeating pattern like a swirl is tolerable.  I wasn't going to do the top, but it finished off the SMB (Swiss Meringue Buttercream).  That stuff doesn't really keep until the next cake.  Plus, it was pink.

My goal for this cake, other than recipe testing, was to practice patience.  I keep zipping through the cake decorating part.  Yes, I can't spend forever on each one the day before the wedding, but I can take at least an hour on the final coat if I have to.  Turns out, the rosettes are so easy and forgiving that it took longer to make the frosting than to use it.

I realized on the blackberry cake that I pipe really awkwardly.  I use the left for pressure and the right to guide the tip.  I'm ambidextrous in sports, but mostly left-handed when it comes to art.  Apparently, I hold a pastry bag like a baseball bat.  This is important because it determines whether your rosettes are clockwise or counter-clockwise, and which way to rotate the turntable.  Fine, clockwise.  There's no wrong way to orient or swirl the rosettes, as long as you're consistent.

I bought a 1M open-star tip for this, and have since found plenty of other uses for it.  It allows you to do three rows of rosettes on a 4" high cake.  Mine wasn't quite that high, so I made the filling thicker by cutting the remaining defrosted strawberries in half instead of slices.  The swirls still kind of got smushed against each other, but only a pastry chef would care.  They were all the same size, which is the important part.

2 or 3 layers Strawberry Cake
1 batch Swiss Meringue Buttercream
1/4 lb approx strawberries (fresh or frozen)
12" pastry bag with a 1M tip
Pink gel food coloring

1.  Trim cake layers flat.  Place a dab of frosting on a cake circle and center the bottom cake layer on it.  Pipe or spread a thin layer of frosting on the top, then cover with sliced strawberries.

2.  Place the next layer upside-down on top of the first, so you get a flatter top.  Crumb-coat the cake with a thin layer of frosting, making sure to get inside the break in the layers.

3.  Color 3/4 C of frosting the darkest shade you want.  Fill the piping bag fitted with a 1M tip.  Starting at the bottom of the cake, pipe a swirl that comes up about 1/3 of the height of the cake.  Continue around, going the same direction and finishing at the same point in the swirl.

4.  This is where the Swiss Meringue instructions diverge from the Cream Cheese frosting ones.  Squeeze any remaining frosting back into the tinting bowl and add another 3/4 C of uncolored frosting.  This got me the shade I wanted, or you can add another drop of color if it's too light.  Refill the same bag and squeeze out a bit until the new color appears.  By not changing the bag, you'll get a neat watercolor effect as the old frosting is worked through.  Use this on the next ring of rosettes.

5.  Squeeze out the bag into the coloring bowl.  Add remaining frosting for the lightest shade, fill bag, and squeeze out the old color.  If you're not covering the top with rosettes, add some frosting to the crumb coat and smooth before doing the next round.  Pipe a top ring, extending the rosettes slightly above the edge of the cake.

6.  You can either stop frosting now or do rosettes over the top.  My original plan was to make a design with fresh strawberries.  Now I have a pound of strawberries in the fridge that are probably going to become jam before they spoil.  Anyway, I had almost a cup of slightly pink frosting left and just went for it.  The cake was gorgeous, and looked just like my YouTube research.

7.  Chill cake until one hour before serving.

Makes one 8" layer cake

Difficulty rating  :-0

Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Be prepared to have leftover egg yolks.  Fortunately, I was going to make some lemon curd anyway.  If I make this again, there will be a new ice cream flavor.

This is that frosting that feels like it's made with whipped cream.  Soft and silky, ridiculously pipeable, and not quite as sweet as a regular buttercream.

Older cookbooks and your grandma's recipe box call this seven-minute frosting, because it takes about seven minutes of whipping the meringue for it to cool to room temperature.  You start by heating the egg whites and sugar to about 160º over a double boiler.  This melts the sugar and semi-pasteurizes the egg whites.  If they were completely pasteurized, they wouldn't whip.  Then you let them cool down as they're being whipped into meringue (over a bowl of ice water if it's a very hot day) before beating in the butter and extract.

And that's it.  Not as temperamental as an Italian buttercream (boiled frosting), you just have to keep stirring over the water bath so you don't make an egg white omelet in step 1.  Any lumpy breakage after the butter is incorporated can be fixed by continued whipping.  And whipping, and beating, and more beating.  Seven minutes, my butt.

This version is from The Pioneer Woman because it was the smallest yield I could find and I only made a 2-layer, 6" cake, plus this wasn't the filling.  There are larger recipes out there, including the 7 egg-white recipe that I nixed because it used a prime number of eggs.  This one has round numbers that can be doubled or halved with minimal baking math.  The yield was enough for a crumb coat and a really thick layer of decorating.  And I probably had enough scrapings left that I could have filled the cake with it after all.  If you're making a less ornamental cake, it will likely do an 8", 2-layer.

You may notice the Passover label on this recipe.  Unlike other frostings I've used, this one does not rely on powdered sugar.  You do need to check the vanilla extract for a KLP designation, or make vanilla sugar ahead of time with a whole vanilla bean.  Next up, finding a Passover cake recipe that doesn't suck.  My birthday falls during the holiday about a quarter of the time, so this is a lifelong struggle for me.

4 egg whites
1-1/2 C granulated sugar
1-1/2 C (3 sticks) unsalted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract, or more to taste
pinch of kosher salt

1.  Set up a saucepan with 2" of water in it over medium-low heat to a light simmer.  NOT a full boil. Over it, set the bowl of the stand mixer and make sure the water does not touch the bottom of the bowl.

2.  Whisk together the egg whites and sugar to combine.  They're going to be very thick and grainy.  Whisk the mixture lightly but constantly as it heats to 160º.  Scrape the sides of the bowl often.  This is going to take a minimum of 15 minutes.  When ready, you won't be able to feel any sugar grains when you rub some between your fingers.

3.  Attach the bowl to the mixer and whip with the whisk on medium-high until room temperature.  It was a warm day, so this took more like 20 minutes and was aided by a bowl of ice water under the mixer.  In the winter, you can do it in seven.  While that's going, start softening the butter to room temperature as well.  Do some dishes, stretch out the shoulder you got sore by all that whisking, etc.

4.  When meringue is ready, switch to the paddle and start dropping in the butter one tablespoon at a time.  If the butter and meringue are the same temperature, it will mix in fairly quickly.  When one is warmer than the other, it may get clumpy.  Just keep beating it if that happens, and it will eventually mix in properly.  Beat in vanilla and salt to finish.  If it gets soupy, put it in the fridge for two minutes to firm up the butter, then paddle it again.

5.  The finished frosting can be used immediately, or refrigerated for later.  If refrigerated, it should be left at room temperature for an hour and then beaten back into softness.  Once on a refrigerated cake, let it come back up to room temperature for a minimum of an hour before serving.

Makes enough to frost and fill one 8" layer cake

Difficulty rating  :)

Strawberry Cake (frozen fruit)

Comparing this recipe from NPR to the one I used for the blackberry cake, I immediately saw the difference in the amount of moisture.  It doesn't reduce the purée, and there's quite a bit of it in there.  What I did was thaw the whole bag, but only run the juice and enough berries to make the 5 ounces by volume.  That saved the rest of the bag for filling.  Plus, it uses extra oil and an egg yolk to replace butter.  I've been spending so much on butter.  Surprisingly, not on cake flour.  One box has gotten me through all these projects so far, and I may have enough for the last cake.  Yes, I'm making small cakes, but I really thought I would need more by now.

(Oh shoot, I'm going to have to make a grocery list before I travel to Virginia.  Adding together all the amounts for all the cakes, their fillings, and frostings.  That's going to take at least an hour.)

The published version was already a half-recipe.  It was intended to be 12 cupcakes, which is half a standard layer cake recipe.  Happy me, I didn't have to do any math!  If you're doing two 8" layers (or 3 thinner layers), just double this.

This is still the reverse creaming method, only with just oil.  It must be a thing for fruity cakes.  And I just realized this cake is dairy-free.  The frosting won't be, but you can't win them all.

10 oz bag frozen strawberries, thawed (put in fridge the night before)
2 eggs plus 1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla
pink food coloring (optional)
1-1/4 C cake flour
1 C sugar
1-1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 C vegetable oil

1.  Run enough of the thawed strawberries and their juice through the blender to get 1/2 C plus 2 Tb of purée.  If you have a use for more, go ahead and whir up all of it.  A double recipe is a full bag.  Grease two 6" cake pans, a square 8" pan, or one deep 8" round pan.  Line with wax paper, then grease again.  Preheat the oven to 350º.

2.  Mix together the eggs, vanilla, and the 5 oz purée in a small bowl.  For a richer color, add a few drops of pink gel food coloring.  Natural strawberries won't have that super-pink-ness you get when you use Jell-O.  I was unimpressed with my mixture until I realized I'd forgotten the coloring.  It makes a difference.

3.  In a mixer with the paddle, stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.

4.  Add the oil to the dry mix and beat on medium for 2 minutes.  It's going to look like sugar-cookie dough.  Don't panic.  Scrape the bowl and add 1/3 of the strawberry mixture.  Beat for 20 seconds.  Repeat until all of the strawberry is incorporated.  Now it will look like a regular cake batter.

5.  Pour batter into cake pans.  (Or you can make the original 12 cupcakes.)  Bake for 30 minutes, until they pass the toothpick test.

6.  Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out, peel off paper, and cool completely before frosting.  I may not have mentioned this, but I cool my cakes upside-down because I'm going to trim off the top when I level them anyway, so it doesn't matter if they get rack impressions, and the top crust is stronger than the crumbly bottoms.  If you're serving an untrimmed cake or they domed excessively, cool them right-side up.  If not frosting that day, wrap in plastic, then foil, and freeze.

Makes 12 cupcakes, 2 6" layers, or one thick 8" layer

Difficulty rating  :)

Cherry Oven Pancake

This has been a good year for cherries.  I bought too many because they were cheap and looked good, and I'm still resisting the urge to make jams until I finish last year's.  So, pancakes.

I could have made a clafoutis, but this has fewer steps.  It's just the Oven Apple Pancake with cherries instead, and scaled down to two servings.  I had it for breakfast, but it would be great with a scoop of vanilla ice cream for dessert.  In that case, you would serve four.

*1 C pitted cherries
1 Tb butter
1 Tb brown sugar
2 eggs
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/3 C milk
dash salt
dash nutmeg
2 tsp sugar
1/3 C flour

1.  Melt the butter in a 6" oven-proof skillet and start preheating the oven to 400º.  Cook the cherries in the butter over medium heat until they soften, about 5 minutes.  Stir in brown sugar and reduce heat to a simmer while you make the pancake batter

2.  Beat together eggs, vanilla, and milk until combined.  In a separate bowl, stir together flour, salt, nutmeg, and granulated sugar.  Pour the wet mixture into the dry and stir until no large lumps remain. Let it sit five minutes, then get out the rest of the lumps.

3.  Pour the batter over the cherries and put the pan in the oven.  Bake for 20 minutes, until the edges are crispy and the center is set.  Serve hot, dusted with powdered sugar or a scoop of ice cream.

Serves 2 as breakfast, 4 as dessert

Difficulty rating  :)

Blackberry Ombré Cake

This is more my style of decorating.  I like clean, classic lines.  That's why I find fondant so attractive, despite its taste.  Then I started practicing with pastry tips and ruined my original design.

Ombré is a decorating technique where you use multiple colors, but there is no sharp line between them.  They're blurred together.  They can be horizontal, vertical, spots, etc.  For cakes, the easiest gradient is horizontal.  I chose to to depth of a single color, but you can do any colors you want.  A rainbow can be ombré.  In fact, real rainbows don't have distinct separations of the colors, so that's a good example.

In addition to being in real contention for the wedding cake design, this one marks my move into piping the decorations.  I picked up a #1A tip, which is just a half-inch round, to make laying the rings easier.  In videos, it gets a lot of use piping in fillings and the top.  For the pearl border, I switched to a #7.  You press, release, and pull back into a teardrop.  Set the tip near that tail and repeat until you've gone around.  There are more intricate borders that use similar techniques, but this cake was supposed to be about elegant simplicity.

I learned a lot with this cake.  So far, most of what I've been doing has been a success on the first try.  That's not how you learn.  There were supposed to be three colors of icing, but adding more frosting to the darkest color didn't work with purée in cream cheese frosting.  Now I know to start with a larger batch of the lighter shade and break it down into darker ones as I go.  I wasn't happy at all with the texture of the cake, and cut my thumb trying to even the top because it was so tough.  And I played with enough pastry tips to know that too much embellishment really does look tacky.  But what else am I going to do with 1/4 cup of blackberry-flavored cream cheese frosting?

1 Blackberry cake
1 batch pipeable cream cheese frosting
1 C fresh or defrosted blackberries
additional blackberry purée and/or food coloring

1.  Trim cake layers even.  Place a small dollop of cream cheese in the center of a cake circle to secure the bottom layer.  Center one on it right-side up.

I was trying a swirl thing with the filling that didn't work.

2.  Pipe on a layer of plain cream cheese frosting, then dot with reserved blackberries.  Save a few to decorate the top if you'd like.  Place the top layer of cake upside-down, so the bottom is your even top of the cake.  Crumb-coat the cake with uncolored frosting.  Chill to set the icing for at least 20 minutes.

3.  Color 1/2 C of frosting in your darkest shade, then another 1/2 C in a lighter shade.  The remainder will stay the original color.

4.  Fill a pastry bag fitted with a plain round tip with the darkest shade of frosting.  Pipe a round or two around the bottom third of the cake.  It doesn't have to be even, and it's ok if there are small gaps.  Fill the bag with the middle color and continue.  You don't have to wash out the bag for this transition.

5.  Switch to a clean bag and fill with the uncolored frosting.  Pipe the top third and the top of the cake.

6.  With an offset spatula, even out the top of the cake to make sure you used enough frosting.  Then get out a bench scraper and hold lightly against the vertical it while you turn the cake turntable.  The piping lines will start to disappear.  Wipe off the scraper and continue until the sides of the cake are smooth and the piping lines are blurred.  Use the offset spatula to clean up the top edges.

7.  You can stop there, or use some of the icing you've scraped off to decorate.  I should have stopped with the pearl border at the bottom and a berry on top.  It's up to your personal style.

8.  Since this is cream cheese frosting, keep cake refrigerated.  You can get it out an hour before serving to soften.

Makes one 8" layer cake

Difficulty rating  :)

Pipeable Cream Cheese Frosting

A lot of berry cakes (and red velvet) call for cream cheese frosting.  Decorating with it can be difficult because of its consistency.  Half the time, you're lucky it doesn't slide off the cake.

My Cake School came up with a sturdier version that's still creamy.  It isn't so dry that it crusts over, but it won't melt too quickly in warm weather.  It also isn't overly sweet.  And it whips up in minutes.

It's tempting to use margarine or shortening with this, but then you'll get crusting and it won't firm up in the fridge.  It's also tempting to get reduced fat or whipped cream cheese.  This recipe is only going to work if you buy bricks.  If you want to pipe this onto the cake, you're going to have to do it as written.

1 C (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3 8oz packages cream cheese, cut into 1/2" slices
3 C powdered sugar
2 tsp vanilla

1.  Beat butter until smooth.  Beat in cream cheese until everything is smooth and lump-free.

2.  Slowly beat in powdered sugar and vanilla.  Once partially incorporated, whip until fluffy.  Color as needed with gel or powder coloring.

3.  Fill piping bag halfway and decorate cake.  If frosting starts to get too soft from the heat of your hand, pop it in the fridge for a few minutes.  Every time I got near the bottom of the bag, it started to get a little runny.  This frosting is also spreadable, and will not soften as quickly when you use a spreader.

Makes about 6 cups, enough to fill and frost an 8" layer cake.

Difficulty rating  π

Blackberry Cake (frozen fruit)

Now we're starting on the cake recipes I plan to use.  Up first is a blackberry cake.  Being a chocolate-cake person, I didn't realize these existed until Cousin Smurf's fiancé wanted one.  Unsure of the availability of fresh blackberries in late October in Virginia, I asked them to make sure the grocery store carried frozen and planned the cake recipe around that.

The recipe I tested is actually a variation on the strawberry cake recipe from My Cake School. I've been watching Preppy Kitchen on YouTube, and his strawberry cake used jam.  I found this to be a way out of buying extracts I'll never use again.  Plus, I couldn't find blackberry.  What I'm basically doing here is making an unstrained, lightly sweetened syrup to concentrate the flavor.  I suppose I could have bought jam, but since the purée here takes the place of milk, I didn't want to mess up the moisture content of the cake and have to develop a whole recipe on my own.

This also means you have to start the cake an extra day ahead, or at least four hours.  The purée has to cool to at least room temperature.  The mixture will also keep up to a week in the fridge, so you can make it whenever you have half an hour and deal with the cake another day.

If you do want to use fresh berries, I'm going to assume you can use the same weight as what I used frozen.  The moisture content may vary a bit, but you can fix that with water or further reduction.

I had never heard of a reverse creaming method.  It's pretty much the same as a biscuit method with more moisture.  The fats go in first to keep the glutens short, then you get everything wet and whip it light.  Considering some of the recipes I've read lately, I shouldn't be surprised that there's yet another way to make a cake.

All this said, the cake came out very dense, like a torte.  I'm pretty sure it's because of the reduced moisture content.  If I don't like the next recipe I try, I'll come back to this one and tweak it.  The taste was exactly what I was going for.  My guess is it needs a bit of milk and to swap in margarine for the butter.  There's a ton of baking powder, so that's not the problem.  Everyone at work liked it, so I guess I'm the only one with a hangup.

4 eggs, room temperature
2 10 oz bags frozen blackberries
1 tsp vanilla
violet food color, if desired
3 C cake flour
1-3/4 C sugar, divided
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 C vegetable oil
1/2 C (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into chunks

1.  Defrost blackberries and purée in a blender.  If desired, strain out the seeds.  Pour into a saucepan and add 1/4 C sugar.  Bring to a boil and reduce to 1-1/2 C of purée.  Set aside to cool to at least room temperature.  Grease and line three 8" cake pans.

2.  Start preheating the oven to 350º.  With a fork, beat together eggs, vanilla, the blackberry syrup, and any food coloring you may want to heighten the color.

3.  In the stand mixer with the paddle, combine flour, remaining 1-1/2 C sugar, baking powder, and salt.  Stir for 30 seconds on low to combine.  Paddle in the butter and oil to make crumbs, scraping the bowl once.

4.  On low, add 1/2 of the wet mixture.  Increase speed to medium and beat for 1-1/2 minutes, into a thick batter.  Scrape bowl, add another 1/4 of the wet and beat for 20 seconds, add the rest and beat for 20 seconds.

5.  Divide batter between the pans.  Bake for 30-35 minutes, until they pass the toothpick test.  Cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a cooling rack and remove the wax paper.  Cool completely before frosting or freezing.

Makes one 3-layer 8" cake

Difficulty rating  :)

Shakshuka

I have been eating things other than cake.  Actually, I'm kind of getting sick of cake.  It's rarely my first choice for dessert to start with.

Shakshuka is simply an Israeli vegetable stew topped with a poached egg.  I sort of did this with the quinoa paella.

My version is slightly different than the traditional because of the pepper issue.  If you're sensitive to the whole nightshade family, just skip this.  Or sub in something you can have, use pesto for the sauce, and make it your own!

One thing I did here, because I knew there would be leftovers, is make the stew in a large skillet first. Then I put some in a 6" and cracked a single egg on it.  Repeat each day until the stew is gone.  If you're making this for the family, go ahead and crack all the eggs to serve immediately.

1 14oz can diced tomatoes
*1/2 C diced onion
2 Tb olive oil
*2 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium eggplant, diced
*1 C celery, diced
*1 8oz can tomato sauce
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
*4 C fresh spinach
1 14 oz can black beans, rinsed
6 eggs
cilantro for garnish

1.  Sauté onion and celery in the oil in a deep 10" skillet with a lid.  When soft, add garlic and spices and cook until fragrant.

2.  Stir in tomatoes and their juice, tomato sauce, and diced eggplant.  Cover and simmer until eggplant is soft, about 30 minutes.

3.  Stir in beans and spinach and cook until the greens are wilted, about 3 minutes.

4.  Make six wells with the back of a spoon or ladle in the stew.  Crack an egg into each one.  Cover and cook until whites are done but the yolks haven't set, about 2-3 minutes.

5.  Sprinkle the top with fresh cilantro leaves.  Serve from skillet, with one egg per serving.  Goes well with pita on the side.

Serves 6

Difficulty rating  :)