If you’ve been reading for a while, you may remember when this happened:
Well, in September, this happened:
We had a completely fantastic day with close friends and family, a gorgeous setting, and delicious food – including a homemade wedding cake by yours truly.
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This is not technically a Valentine’s Day post – February 14th just so happens to be the day I’m pressing “post” on something I’ve been working on veeeeeeeery slowly for the past 2 week. The only thing vaguely Valentine’s-y about it is that the inside is a little bit pink, but the point of today’s post is this: If you’re looking for a cake to put underneath your white chocolate peony, look no further. Without the peony, this cake looks plain on the outside but it is actually anything but – starting with the fact that it is flavoured with grapefruit. Lemon, orange and lime usually get all the citrus attention in baking, but replacing the lemon in lemon poppy seed cake with grapefruit and pairing it with white chocolate mousse frosting is pretty brilliant.
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This month marks a new direction for the Daring Bakers, who have now joined forces with the Daring Cooks in a single monthly Daring Kitchen Challenge. Shillpa of Cakeline the Journey kicked off this new format by setting us all the challenge of cake design – specifically the use of “edible clays” such as fondant, gum paste, and/or modeling chocolate to create fully edible cake decorations. I hardly need an excuse to bake a cake, so I was right into this challenge.
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Sorry for the complete lack of posts this month – I have a pretty good excuse, I promise (more on that to come!). To make up for it though, I bring you cake. And not just any cake: a gorgeously pink-tinged cake full of plums, which are fast becoming my favourite fruit for baking.
I’ve always had a soft spot for cooked plums – I love how they sweeten as they slump into themselves and turn that gorgeous jewel-toned garnet colour – and especially plums in cakes. Earlier this summer I came across a recipe for a plum cake with – get this – plum caramel, and I started pulling out ingredients the second I finished reading those two words. Plum caramel is a genius combination of cooked sugar mixed with pureed plums instead of heavy cream, and it is every bit as delicious as it sounds. I highly recommend you make some, immediately.
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So… it’s been a while. I wish I could say I’ve been too busy vacationing or holidaying to post anything, but I’ve just been working and unmotivated to blog. I actually made this cake for my birthday (32!) back in the first week of July, and it’s taken me this long to get it up here. We’ve had an incredibly hot and dry summer so far here in BC, and as a result there are hundreds of wildfires burning throughout the province. The day I made this cake, we awoke to a hazy sky and blood red sun casting an eerie, apocalyptic, Martian filter over the world, thanks to the smoke from all those fires settling over Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. It was the strangest light for taking photos, so please excuse if the pictures look a little weird.
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For the June Daring Bakers challenge Rebecca from BakeNQuilt.com challenged us to make Charlotte Royale and Charlotte Russe from scratch. Savory or sweet Charlottes were definitely tasty showstoppers.
As a kid, I remember seeing the Charlotte aux Bluets recipe in the Canadian Living 20th Anniversary Cookbook and thinking that it was the pinnacle of sophisticated and elegant desserts, so you could say that doing this month’s challenge was sort of like ticking an item off my bucket list. The Charlotte (Royale or Russe) is a chilled dessert based on Bavarian cream or mousse, either molded into a domed shape and covered in slices of jelly roll (Royale), or spooned into a loose-bottomed cake pan and fenced in around the edges by lady fingers (Russe). I had plans to make both versions this month, but only managed to get the Royale completed. Russe is still on my list!
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As much as I love making pies, the simplicity and ease of a galette is pretty hard to beat. No fancy equipment needed, no special skills or pastry techniques – just a good pie crust recipe and some perfectly ripe fruit. It’s still pretty early in the season for local fruit around here, so I used plums from California. I absolutely love the tart, jammy flavour of cooked plums, and they are just gorgeous when baked: the gradient from yellow flesh to reddish-purple skin is so pleasing. I added a little bit of fresh thyme (plums love thyme, believe me) and some almond cream underneath the fruit, because it helps to soak up some of the fruit juices that inevitably leak out of a galette, and also, YUM.
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For the May challenge Marcellina from Marcellina in Cucina dared us to make Lamingtons, an Australian delicacy that is as tasty as it is elegant.
The story goes that these little treats came about after a serving maid dropped some squares of sponge cake in chocolate icing, and her boss, Lord Lamington, Governor of Queensland, suggested that rather than throwing them out, she roll them in coconut “to avoid sticky fingers”. I’m not entirely sure that this story is water-tight, however, as the Lamington is also claimed by New Zealand and is known as cupavci in Bosnia. But regardless of who came up with them, they are a good idea.
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This year for his birthday, Nate requested a creamsicle cheesecake. I’ll admit that the creamsicle combination of creamy vanilla ice cream with orange isn’t usually my first choice – especially when there is creamy vanilla ice cream with chocolate to be had instead – but since it was his birthday, I acquiesced. Compared to the chocolate caramel bacon insanity cake from his birthday a few years ago, it was a relatively simple request.
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For the March Daring Bakers’ Challenge, Korena from Korena in the Kitchen taught us that some treats are best enjoyed upside down. She challenged us to make a tarte Tatin from scratch.
This month I was excited to host another Daring Bakers’ challenge, for which I chose the tarte Tatin. This classic French dessert is basically the apple pie version of an upside-down cake: apples are caramelized in sugar in a saucepan, covered with pastry and baked, and then inverted on a plate to serve. It’s a great example of the magic of caramelized sugar: the apples take on a deep, rich mahogany colour and become infused with the complex flavours of a well-cooked caramel, and the crisp puff pastry base also becomes practically candied with caramel at the edges, resulting in a fantastic mix of soft, crunchy, and chewy textures.
The tart is named after the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel near Paris in the 1880s. Apparently, one day one of the sisters forgot to put a bottom crust on her apple pie, but instead of the disaster she was expecting to pull out of the oven, she ended up with a dessert so loved by the hotel guests that it became the hotel’s signature dish. However, this sweet story conflicts with the fact that a similar upside-down apple tart called tarte Solognotte (named after the Sologne region in France) existed long before the tarte Tatin, suggesting that the Tatin sisters’ creation was actually just an updated and improved version of the tarte Solognotte. Either way, it is a stunningly delicious yet simple and rustic dessert….