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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Grandpa’s 100th Birthday Cake {Chocolate Mocha Layer Cake with Vanilla Buttercream}
My Grandpa turned 100 in December – an occasion that deserves a celebratory cake if there ever was one! I asked him what his favourite kind of cake was, and when he answered “fruitcake”, I had a worrying flashback to the last fruitcake I encountered – which happened to be the cake at his own wedding 11 years ago when he married his sweetheart Daphne, where it took three people plus a cleaver and an axe to cut through the royal icing on the outside.
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{Naked} Carrot Wedding Cake
In July, I made a wedding cake for my friend Clare and her now-husband Tony. I’ve known Clare for most of my life – we first met in grade 1, and we shared the unique experience of having parents who were teachers and/or principals in a small town, thereby ensuring that most of our friends had been either taught social studies, ukulele, French and/or given detention by our mum or dad. We were in French immersion together from grade 7 onward, and I have a vivid memory of dressing as the Spice Girls with a group of friends for one of her epic birthday parties (I, slightly unconvincingly, was Scary Spice). We sort of lost touch after high school when we both moved away to university and started Adult Life, but I was totally thrilled when Clare told me she was getting married and asked if I would make her cake. Obviously, I said yes!
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Daring Bakers: French Meringue Macarons
For the month of October we got to take on one of many bakers’ deepest, darkest kitchen nightmares: macarons. Our talented bakers Korena from Korena in the Kitchen and Rachael from pizzarossa made the intimidating task of mastering these French beauties a breeze.
I’ve fallen off the wagon with the Daring Bakers challenges over the past few months, but I jumped right back on this month to co-host a macaron challenge with my blog-pal Rachael. It was really fun to come up with this challenge together, capturing all our collective macaron wisdom into a Word document that we passed back and forth (I think we ended up on version eleven!), and deciding to create videos showing our macaron-making techniques (mine is here – recorded on my iPhone because my DSLR ran out of batteries, d’oh! – and Rachael’s is here).
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Caramel Cake with Raspberries and Cream
I turned thirty this past Sunday. Thirty. I know that age is just a number and I’m still plenty young, but it sounds a lot older than twenty-nine, somehow. It was a milestone, anyway, so there had to be an appropriate cake. As with every birthday cake I make, there was some agonizing over what kind it should be – but only a little. I already had it narrowed down between a crêpe cake or a caramel cake, and the caramel cake won. (But the crêpe cake is still on the list, because WOW.)
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Fun with Frosting
Apparently making cupcakes only once in a month is not enough cupcakes. Obviously. Also, I saw this frosting technique done somewhere (I forget where) and was looking for any excuse to try it out.
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Neapolitan Macarons
Since making macarons for the first time last Christmas, I have been saving egg whites in the freezer to make them again. I promised myself before we moved (twice in 6 weeks actually, ugh!) that I would only bring those frozen egg whites to the new house if I made macarons ASAP. So I did.
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Strawberries & Cream Birthday Cake
A birthday definitely deserves a cake, so for my 29th birthday this weekend, I made myself one. Some people might think that it’s sad to make your own birthday cake, but quite honestly it is one of the best birthday presents I could get. Not only to I get to bake all day (which I love, obviously!), but I get to make the cake exactly the way I want it, AND I get to eat it. Totally a win-win situation for me. Because I’m a planner (at least when it comes to cakes, anyway), I’ve been thinking about my birthday cake for a while. At first I really wanted to make this Mexican hot chocolate-inspired cake, but then I came across Julia Child’s French strawberry cake, which seemed more seasonally appropriate. I also had my eye on this hazelnut cake, so I added some hazelnuts to Julia’s cake. And then I really wanted to make Swiss meringue buttercream, and this custard buttercream frosting caught my eye. So much for following one recipe as written, right? This time, anyway, it seems to have worked out and this cake was awesome!…