Cherry Chip Cake

Guess who dropped out of grad school and signed up for a cake decorating class instead?  This girl.  No joke.

The cake I'm sharing today is the Cherry Chip Cake, another delight from Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson.  This was actually the first cake I made from the book, and was right before the busiest time period I've ever had in my entire life.  I'm glad I got to bake a cake first :)

So, cherry chip cake.  I've always wondered why people choose eclectic flavors for things.  It would just never dawn on me that I should make a non-standard cake flavor.   I mean, cherry is totally a non-standard cake flavor, right?

This is probably the first time I've ever purchased cake flour, if you can believe that.

This cake was also the first time I ever used my food scale to weigh cake ingredients.  I'm hooked on that now, because it seems so smart!  I even weighed the batter in each pan to get even layers!  I had a little panic when I realized I didn't have 3 8" cake pans.  Luckily my springform was the right size.  Accounted for in the weighing process, of course!!

The frosting for the cake was Cherry Buttercream, with a little bit of Kirschwasser, a colorless cherry brandy, mixed in.  The recipe also calls for dried cherries to be reconsituted and mixed in to a basic buttercream recipe.  I was happy that my boyfriend was able to find a tiny bottle so we don't have it sitting on the shelf for years and years.

I thought that the icing was a really gross brown tint from adding in the dried and reconstituted cherries.  So I added some red food coloring to make the cake pink.  Here are the before and after colors.  Pink was a good call, right?

Not that it needed any more awesomeness, but to add some extra awesome in there anyway, each cake layer is topped with chocolate ganache.  I didn't let it cool enough, which was a bit of a problem when I tried to put frosting between the layers.  Luckily it didn't seem to matter too much.  I worked it out.

Since this was prior to my cake decorating class, I wasn't schooled in the lessons of cake leveling, nor did I own a cake leveler.  As evidenced here!

Actually, the leveling doesn't look too bad with the icing on there!

One of my baking traditions is to take a picture of myself making a 'bite face' with my cake.  This cake led to the most epic, most amazing bite face ever. 

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Sneak Preview: Christian Moerlein Brewery Tours @ Taste of Cincinnati

Christian Moerlein Brewing Co. is opening its doors to visitors during Taste of Cincinnati.  They are currently putting the finishing touches on their Tap Room and will be opening up their cavernous beer cellars to curious visitors.

They advertised for volunteer "Beer Meisters" to lead the tours, and I jumped at the chance.  I'm all about Cincinnati, and I happen to really enjoy their beer as well.  One perk of attending Beer Meister Orientation?  Beer samples!!!  Here is a picture of me with a sample of their Hefeweizen ale, which is called 7.  It's a south German style wheat beer with a hint of banana. Quite delicious and definitely my favorite. 

I don't have much in the way of pictures because I was focused on listening and learning the content and the expectations of the tour guides.  But, I couldn't help but take a couple pics.

Want to see more pictures?  There are plenty of images on the web.  Here are a few links that show images of some of the things you will see on the tour.

Tap Room
Beer Cellars

You can't truly experience this unless you come out in person.  Want the details?

Christian Moerlein Brewery is located at 1621 Moore St in Over the Rhine.  They are offering tours during Taste of Cincinnati 2013, and will have their new Tap Room open with beer for sale.

During Taste, busses will provide transportation between Fountain Square and the brewery.  You can register for the tour at the Christian Moerlein Beer Garden on Fountain Square.

Tours are free of charge and are estimated to take about half an hour (allow an hour for travel time if taking the free bus shuttle).  They are running tours from noon to 8pm on both Saturday and Sunday, and from noon-6pm on Monday/Memorial Day.  Bring money for beer.  I promise you'll want some.

Hope to see you there!

Black and White Cake

Yeah, I'm still around.  Grad school has been eating my soul.  And I've been eating cake. 

This is the Black and White Cake from Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson, with a vanilla bean buttercream.

Since I last updated, I've lost 35 lbs (ok, maybe I haven't been eating all that much cake) and dyed my hair blonde.  I still prefer to go barefoot though.

Back to the food...I like to host Mother's Day brunch for my family.  My sister and boyfriend were coerced into helping me cook.  Many a joke about sweatshop kitchens ensued.  In the picture below, He is cutting challah for bread pudding, she is slicing strawberries for fruit cocktail, and I am working on the cake batter.

This cake was for my mom, specifically chosen because it is dark chocolate.  I thought it was very similar to oreo cookies.

This cookbook tells you the weight the batter should be in each part of the cake.  Never thought about weighing the cake pans.  It was a pretty good strategy, because the two layers ended up being pretty much the same size.  And that's the point, right?

I had to make the icing twice, and I still wasn't terribly happy with it.  The icing was tasty, but hard to work with.  Not sure if I did something wrong or if it was the recipe.  The basic buttercream recipe from the book worked fine on another cake that I made from the book.  I'm sure I'll make this recipe again (it was VERY good), so time will tell.

 

A big benefit of kitchen visitors is that you get more pictures of yourself cooking!  Here is the finished icing.

 

One of the cakes had a pretty big dome that I cut off, so I used a cup as a biscuit cutter to make some little samples for us to nibble on.  I made a mini batch of cake balls too!  No pictures of those...they were gone super quickly!

After our mini snack cakes, it was assembly time!

I tried to make chocolate ganache 'kisses' on top of the finished cake, but through a tragic combination of too warm ganache and too big of a hole in my ziploc, I had to use a 'modern' decorating style.  :)  My sister was a big help on this part.

Luckily, my mom loved the cake, and she didn't think anything was off about the decorating style.  I didn't mention that we took 100 photos of the cake.

And here I am with no shoes...

 

The cake was terrific.  It really did taste like oreos, but with a higher quality cream in the center.  Yum.





Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Sometimes, during the summer, I go out of town on a trip or two and leave my sad garden home all alone and neglected.  Rather than rue my absence, it puts all its energy into growth.

While I was processing this giant zucchini, I watched Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition.

And then I decided that this zucchini needed to be baked into a cake.  Too tough and stringy for anything else.  Weight loss shows and cake.  hmm.

I got the recipe from my favorite recipe standby, Epicurious.com.  The cake came together quite easily.  Since I wanted to do something a little fancy with it, I made two batches (I mean, I wasn't exactly working with a shortage of zucchini here).

So, nothing says fancy like canned cherry pie filling in the food processor, right?

Shut up.  It was totally delicious. 

The only thing left to do is make some frosting.  I used cherry flavored jelly to stabilize a whipped cream icing recipe.  I also froze the cake just to make sure it travelled well.  By the time dinner was over, the cake was thawed but still delightfully cool.

Here is my taste test sample using the bits I cut off the cake when I leveled it.

And here, is the finished product!  Voila!  You like what I did with that parchment paper?  Pretty terrific trick if you ask me.

The recipe I linked above is just for the single layer of the cake itself.  You can find a whipped cream icing recipe online with a google search.  And canned pie filling, well, that part is self explanatory!

I sure am going to miss the yummy fruits of my garden after the season is over!  Maybe it'll miss me and grow something fun for me to discover in the spring.

Summer Garden

One of my great joys is eating the fruits of my labor from the backyard garden.  I've always had garden help from a roommate, but the woman with the garden knowledge moved out this year, and I was on my own.

In the fall, I decided to try planting a "Second Season."  Except I waited way too long, so nothing really grew until spring.  In the spring, I had some unruly romaine lettuce, one head of spinach, and onions.  Look at the size of that lettuce leaf!!

While it was nice to have some produce early on in the gardening season, practically everything bolted, and I wasn't able to use very much of it.  I think this was due to my school schedule prohibiting work in the garden, but I don't entirely recall.

All excuses aside, I did manage to get a lot of plants in the ground over spring break. 

This year, the strawberry patch really took off.  It's huge, and I imagine I'll have to take action to prevent it from spreading out any further.  I think I'll be thinning it out later in the summer, and trying to put something under the berries so they don't rot.

The berries I got were a mixed lot.  They didn't have as much flavor as I was hoping for, and randomly you would bite into a normal looking strawberry and it would taste terrible.  I did some research on how to grow them, and am planning some changes for next year.  I love strawberries, and this patch saved me some serious dough.

Remarkably, the raspberry and blueberry bushes I planted in the fall put out a couple berries.  I intended to eat them, but some scoundrel of an animal got a full belly before I did.

That animal got a lot of full bellies before I took defensive action:

I got that owl statue at Home Depot..He was the very last one, and he only has one eye.  The store employee gave me a discount on the spot.  I think I made out ahead, since now not only do I have an owl, it's a pirate owl as well.  I named him Blackbeard, after his pirate heritage.  Sometimes I rotate him to different fence posts just to mix it up.

Anywho, in the picture above, you can see my mistake...I planted about 5 zucchini plants.  They are so cute when they are seedlings!  You just don't realize how many zucchini they are going to produce.  At first it was fun looking at all the shapes and sizes.

But then I went out of town for two weeks and look what I came back to!!

Ok, I am smiling in the picture, so I have to admit that it wasn't all that bad.  I just peeled back the shell (the skin had turned super tough) and dug out the seeds, and shredded them.  No problemo!

My next challenge hasn't really been photographed yet.  I let the tomatoes rot into the garden last year thinking it would help refresh the soil.  Unfortunately, they re-seeded themselves and made new baby tomato plants!

I did a seed and seedling swap with a friend, so I already had three tomato plants going into the spring.  Unfortunately, I ended up with about 20 or so plants.  Obviously they don't all fit in my small garden plot, but I just couldn't bear to kill them.

I was only able to find homes for 3-4 plants, so I put a few in pots and left the rest in the ground.  The garden is insane right now.

I'm guessing I'll have between 200-500 cherry tomatoes all at once.  My mother has promised to teach me the art of home canning.  My first canning recipe is a zucchini tomato salsa.  Surprise, surprise!

Ria's Bluebird: The Best Pancakes in the World

Whenever I travel, I do my best to look up tasty food opportunities before I leave.  In 2009, I visited Atlanta for work.  On the menu?  Ria's Bluebird, billed as having The Best Pancakes in the World.

This year, we took a trip to Atlanta over Easter, and Ria's was the first place we headed for food.

While waiting for our breakfast, I had David take my picture for the blog!

 For the sake of posterity, here is a picture of me from the last time I was at Ria's.  Yep, used to be blond!!

Back to the modern day and my brunette ways:  it didn't take long for our food to arrive.  We split the 'Fat Stack' with toasted Georgia pecans and sausage links.

This might be a bit dorkier than I wish to admit, but I made sure both of us were wearing blue shirts for our visit to Ria's BLUEbird.  heehee.

Just one picture left for this post, an action shot!

If you find yourself in Atlanta, definitely make time for Ria's Bluebird.  I've heard it gets really crowded on the weekend, which is an awesome sign.  Get the pancakes.  Yum!

Provencal Rack of Lamb

My boyfriend really enjoys lamb.  We recently spent an evening cooking up some for dinner and I thought I'd share the recipe with you since it looked so pretty.

Here is a picture of me, holding up the rack of lamb.

The first order of business was to get the lamb nicely browned on all sides.  I started with it this way first because I liked the way it looked when it was stood up like that:

After it was browned, David got busy smearing it with a spice mixture while I sauteed some onions and took some pictures for the blog.

Then we put everything together in the pan and baked it for a little while.
Doesn't this look pretty?

And voila!  Delicious dinner for two!

Here is a link to the recipe.  I didn't use tomatoes because I didn't have any.