Every Easter I see these pretty speckled robin’s egg cakes pop up all over the food internet, and I’ve been wanting to make one myself for a while. I’ve also been wanting to make a coconut layer cake, so I combined the two and here we are!
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Blackberry Hazelnut Layer Cake
The end of summer is my favourite, still sunny and warm with long golden afternoons but also a sniff of cooler air and the promise of sweater weather (which apparently is here now – we actually lit a fire in the fireplace last night!) and apple pie around the corner. The best part is all the glorious late season fruit – raspberries and peaches and plums (late summer is plum cake season, after all) and my very favourite: blackberries. Weekends in late August and early September, you will inevitably find me crouched on the side of the road or in the ditch foraging for blackberries, coming home with scratched forearms and purple-stained fingers and a bucket of shiny black fruit tasting of summer nostalgia.
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The Goldilocks Cake {Lemon Pistachio Layer Cake}
If you are a long time reader, you may be aware that I have been on a multi-year quest to make a lemon layer cake that is juuuuust right. I’ve made many, many attempts – the first one, with dense layers and teeth-achingly sweet cream cheese frosting; this meringue-topped beaut that introduced me to Tartine’s fantastic lemon cream; this lemon, blackberry and white chocolate behemoth; a cake with wonderfully soft and light layers but disasterously drippy frosting; another lemon and blackberry behemoth with more drippy frosting; and most recently, one that featured a brilliant lemon curd formula and was so pretty – but all were too dense or too sweet or too drippy, and still not juuuuust right.
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Lemon Sunshine Layer Cake with Lemon Curd and Marshmallow Buttercream
I noted previously that I was having a moment with Stella Parks, aka BraveTart, and wanting to bake all of her stuff. Well, the moment continues, and this cake is the result. I got the BraveTart cookbook for Christmas and have been drooling over it ever since. The things I’ve made from it have been fantastic so far (including Oreos, oatmeal cookies, English muffins, and caramelized white chocolate blondies), and the recipes are wonderfully researched, tested, and always teach me something new about baking and pastry cheffing. So I figured I’d be in good hands using BraveTart recipes for attempt number seven in my quest for the perfect lemon layer cake. And – spoiler alert – while it wasn’t quite perfect, it was pretty darn good.
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Swedish Kanelbullar and Chokladbiskvier
To make up for the fact that I’ve been a slacker these last few months with Around the World in 12 Plates, I’m bringing not one but TWO recipes to this month’s party. Sweden was November’s destination, and similar to their Danish neighbours’ appreciation for hygge – enjoying simple pleasures and general coziness – the Swedes have a serious appreciation for fika, which you could sort of think of as coffee break hygge. But fika is not buying a to-go coffee and inhaling it in your car on the way to somewhere else – it is intentionally slowing down to drink a cup of coffee (or tea), eat some kind of delicious baked good, and enjoy yourself – either alone or with friends. It is so much a part of Swedish culture that workers have fika breaks built into their work days.
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Melissa Clark’s Devil’s Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream
I’ve been trying to write this post about this Devil’s Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream for three days now but seem to be experiencing writer’s block, so in an attempt to get something down on the page so that I can share it with you in time for Valentine’s Day (because nothing is more appropriate than chocolate cake on Valentine’s Day), I give you the following Reasons You Should Make This Cake:
1) It has not one but two kinds of frosting: Swiss meringue buttercream filling laced with vanilla and cracked black pepper (yes, pepper), and the most divine whipped chocolate fudge frosting on the outside. Black pepper might sound like an odd thing to pair with classic chocolate and vanilla, but it’s not odd – it’s very, very good.
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Kade’s Birthday Cake
At the end of April our friends’ son, Kade, turned three. He had a birthday party in the park after his baseball game (seriously, can you imagine anything cuter than a bunch of three-year olds trying to play baseball?!), with hotdogs on the camping stove, lots of cut up fresh fruit and veggies, and a cake made by yours truly – I offered/begged his mom, and thankfully she took me up on it! She suggested a baseball-themed cake, and because Kade is super proud and excited to be on “Team Purple” (his team wears purple t-shirts), I decided to put his jersey (or a version of it) right on the cake.
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Christmas Baking 2011: Eggnog Macarons
Merry Christmas! Here’s another way to enjoy some festive eggnog ;).
As I have previously mentioned, my first encounter with macarons was in Paris with my aunt when I was 18. I immediately fell in love, but I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably have to come back to Paris to ever taste them again, which would either be a) never, or b) a very very long time off. It never even occurred to me that I could make macarons at home – they seemed like some kind of impossibly complicated, intricate pastry that only the French could create – until I started noticing them popping up on food blogs a few years ago. However, it was also noted that the homemade macaron was a highly temperamental creation, and that the very techniques and methods that some people swore by were the same techniques and methods that others blamed for their macaron disasters.
Armed with the knowledge that macarons were possible in my own kitchen, I set out to scour the internet and learn as much as I could about making them. This may have been a mistake. Sometimes it’s better to go into things a bit blind, because you aren’t aware of every little thing that can go wrong and therfore totally paranoid about them. The whole process became overwhelming and a bit intimidating, so I put off making macarons for fear of failure.
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