Miniature Neapolitan Ice Cream Cakes

Passover's coming, and I (as usual) had cake in the freezer that I wanted to use up. I thought it might be fun to do some teeny ice cream cakes, so I went to the store and bought a half-gallon of Breyer's Neapolitan. I was waaaaay too lazy to make my own today.

Anyway, I had some chocolate and yellow cake layers and used a biscuit cutter to make six rounds of each flavor. By the way, I apologize for the lousy photography, but I was in a hurry trying to keep everything cold.

I then sliced each round in half so they wouldn't be so thick, giving me a dozen each of yellow and chocolate.

I worked with the cake frozen to keep it sturdy. You will have to work quickly to keep things chilly, keeping whatever you're not working with at the moment in the freezer. I started with a round of chocolate cake. I scooped a lump of vanilla ice cream into my hand, and worked very quickly to squash it into a rough-looking patty and stuck it on the chocolate cakes, then put the whole tray into the freezer.

Next, a chocolate ice cream patty on a yellow cake round. Then strawberry on chocolate. I built the cakes in the freezer to keep everything cold, squishing them a bit as I stacked the layers, and topping the strawberry ice cream with a yellow cake round.

I left the cakes to harden in the freezer for about an hour, then frosted them with the chocolate frosting at the bottom of this page, removing only the one being frosted from the freezer. I put in extra milk to make the frosting easier to spread. I did consider using a glaze or ganache because they are so silky, but I wanted to recreate that birthday party flavor of cake, ice cream, and a classic frosting all together in your mouth. Top with sprinkles and a cherry.

Voila!

Leave them in the freezer until ready to serve.

In Which I Make Things Out Of Bananas And Chocolate

Okay, first of all, I need to kill one of my neighbors. Someone keeps putting trash in one of my recycling bins and the recycling people won't take it. It is driving me crazy. The recycling bins are in the house and I take them to the curb on Thursday night for the Friday morning pickup. This morning one of my bins was left because there was a chicken tray covered with maggots perched on top of my recyclables because there isn't a lid. So I had to take that off and then pick about a dozen maggots off of my recycling so that I didn't have to trash it all. Thanks, asshole.

In more delicious news, I have done quite a bit of baking due to numerous parties in June. The titles link you to the recipes and my notes are underneath.

Banana Layer Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

This is the most delicious banana cake I have ever eaten. It practically begs for some dark rum and possibly some coconut, so I think I'll play around with that next time I make it.

* I made this cake in two 9-inch pans instead of three 8-inch.

* I used four bananas instead of two to make the cake more moist and banana-y. And I let my mixer mash them because I am lazy.

* I used nonfat plain yogurt in place of buttermilk

* I found that the frosting needed more than the recommended amount of powdered sugar. I probably used closer to 2 1/2 - 3 cups, but your mileage may vary.

* To fill the cake required about two bananas. I did a layer of cake, a layer of frosting, a layer of sliced bananas, another layer of frosting, cale, and then covered the whole think thickly with frosting. I put it in the fridge before stacking on the second layer of cake in order to let the filling firm up.

*I kept it in the refrigerator overnight and it was still extremely moist the next day.

***

Bittersweet Chocolate Cake

This is a cake for people who love good dark chocolate. I don't think it would do well with milky stuff at all.

* I used 60% cacao chocolate for this cake. For eating chocolate, I like 85%, but I think that the subtle, complex sweetness of such a dark chocolate would be lost in this confection and therefore I went with something much sweeter.

* With only three ingredients, the flavors need to shine. Buy the best ingredients you can for this one, folks. Use good, vegetarian-fed eggs with lovely orange yolks and a dense, high-fat butter with a fresh, creamy taste. You'll be so glad you did.

* I cooked it for the recommended 20 minutes and found it ever so slightly dry. I think 17 or 18 would have been better.

* I served this confection with a tart raspberry coulis and lightly sweetened rum whipped cream. The flavors and textures came together quite nicely.

* If you've never made raspberry coulis, it is quite simple. Thaw a bag of frozen raspberries, stir in 3 tablespoons of sugar (or to taste), about a 1/4 cup of water, and a teaspoon or so of fresh lemon juice (if you like), allow to sit together for about an hour, puree, then press the whole mixture through a mesh strainer to remove the seeds. It's a lovely fresh sauce and, mixed with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil, an excellent salad dressing. Fresh mint perks up the coulis nicely as well. Note: If you use frozen raspberries in syrup rather than just regular frozen berries, omit the water and reduce the sugar to 2 tablespoons.

AlmondBoy approved:














***

White Chip Chocolate Cookies

These were pretty to look at and had a scrumptious, fudgey crumb. I made them using a cookie scoop, which made for perfectly round, thick cookies. Mine baked in the center of the oven for exactly ten minutes.

* My only note is to keep the dough cold at all times. Chill before scooping, and keep in the fridge between batches. Other than that, no changes. These are wonderful.

***

Chernowitzer Challah

This is my standard challah recipe and my absolute favorite. I get 16 rolls per batch. No changes because Maggie Glezer is a genius.

***

No-Knead Bread

I love this bread. It's easy, it's delicious, and almost foolproof. It lends itself wonderfully to add-ins like rosemary, dates, walnuts, kalamata olives, sundried tomatoes...the possibilities are endless.

* Don't skip the autolyse (that 15 minute rise under plastic) step. It really develops the flavor.

* I bake mine in a cast iron Dutch oven.

* For the final rise, I put the cotton towel/dough/wheat bran bundle on my pizza peel. I also usually need closer to 3 hours than 2 for a good rise.

***

Banana Split Trifle

I invented this dessert for my dad for some occasion or another, and it has become a family favorite. In fact, to encourage more frequent production, my dad purchased me a cherry pitter as a gift. I do not know how I lived without it.

Let me begin by saying that this is a fussy dessert in that it has lots of prep, but it can all be done well in advance. The ganache will keep in the fridge for a week; you'll just have to rewarm it. The cake will keep in the freezer for a couple of months if properly wrapped.

The structure of the dessert is a trifle dish with a layer of banana walnut cake, a layer of ganache, a layer of cherries, a layer of bananas, a layer of whipped cream, repeat.

You will need:

1 layer banana walnut cake
1 quart of heavy whipping cream
Ganache
1 lb pitted cherries, halved (Trader Joe's has a good price on organic Raniers right now)
3-4 ripe bananas (depending on size), sliced

For the cake, I use this recipe with a few modifications. You will not need to make the frosting, so only pull out 1 stick of butter.

* I double the amount of banana
* I use 2 9-inch pans
* I add in about 3/4 cup or so of chopped walnuts

Ganache is extremely simple to make. It is a 1:1 ration of heavy cream and chocolate, melted together. You'll need heavy whipping cream for the whipped cream layer, so buy one quart. Measure out a half cup of it and bring to a simmer in a small saucepan. Once the cream is simmering, remove it from the heat and stir in an equal amount of chocolate, either chips or chopped. I recommend bittersweet or semi sweet for this. Stir the chocolate until it is all melted in and the ganache is smooth. Allow to cool to room temperature.

For the whipped cream, I like to flavor mine with brown sugar and kirshwasser, but it's up to you. Just beat the rest of the quart of heavy whipping cream with your desired flavorings until stiff peaks form, taking care not to overbeat. (You'll get butter if you overbeat.)

Now, for the assembly:

Once your cakes are baked, turned from the pans, and completely cooled, wrap up one layer and freeze it for next time/snacking.

Divide the remaining layer in half and break each half into chunks, roughly 1 inch square. Put the cake into the trifle dish, pressing slightly to fill in the spaces. It's not an exact science, just somewhere between crumbs and chunks. Then drizzle the cake with room-temperature ganache.

Add a layer of cherry halves, then a layer of sliced bananas. Top with half of the whipped cream, then repeat the whole sequence. I like to decorate the top of mine with cake crumbs, chocolate drizzle, and a whole cherry. It keeps nicely in the fridge until you're ready to serve it.
































I have considered involving fresh pineapple in this recipe because I am fond of pineapple on my banana splits, but it's so good as-is. Maybe one day…

In Which I Bake A Fire Truck Cake

There comes a moment in every woman's life - if she is the mother of a small, fire-truck obsessed boy - when she will be asked to bake a cake shaped like a fire truck. And if this moment comes very early on a Wednesday morning and the boy is sufficiently wide eyed and adorable and her husband is already in the shower and can't intervene, she will say yes.

So, in the spirit of letting others learn from my mistakes, I bring you my step by step Guide To Making A Fire Truck Cake. Please note that I have never taken a cake decorating class. I can't pipe a beautiful rosette, or sculpt a scale-model medieval castle from gum paste. I did not walk to the fire station and take pictures first, so this cake is what fire trucks kind of look like in my head, but would cause you to panic if one like it arrived at your house for the purpose of flame extinguishment. I am a good baker, but a lousy decorator. So this is not a Duff Goldman cake. (Which, incidentally, are beautiful but don't taste so good.) This is a Mom Cake. This is a cake that suffered cake slumpage after being beset by cats and had to then be reinforced with bamboo skewers.

First things first. I recommend using a firm cake recipe for any kind of sculpted cake. I like the Magnolia cake recipes because they're slightly dense. If you want to use a mix, do the thing where you add pudding to make a kind of pound cake. Use 2-3 recipes/mixes per fire truck, depending on how tall you want the cake. I did 3 for each of these. The yellow cake is yellow cake (see what I did there?) and the red cake is chocolate.

I use the Magnolia buttercream recipe for almost every buttercreamed baked good I make. It's very tasty and very easy. The yellow cake is filled with vanilla buttercream and the chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream. (Which I make by replacing some of the vanilla's powdered sugar with cocoa powder.) Both are frosted with tinted vanilla. It took about half a batch to fill each cake and one batch to frost. Make all of the frosting at once (or in two batches, whatever you can do in your mixer bowl) and tint separately.

The yellow frosting was colored with a small amount of Wilton's Lemon Yellow gel coloring. The red frosting took three whole containers of No-Taste Red to color, which is typical for red. The color deepens and intensifies over time, so don't worry if it looks a little magenta at first. And definitely get the No-Taste Red because otherwise your cake will taste like evil.

For the silver, take some vanilla frosting and stir in some black decorating icing (the tube kind) from the store until you have a nice metallic gray. They make black gel icing but sometimes the color goes all weird and you'll need black for the wiper blades and stuff, so I say go for the tube.

Or, if you like, skip making your own and buy containers of vanilla frosting and tint.

Materials

1 sheet cake pan
Disposable pastry bags (Ziplocs work okay too)
1 large offset spatula
1 small offset spatula
Electric mixer
Silicone pastry brush
Bamboo skewers (if you have cats)
Cake board (foil covered cookie sheets are great)
2-3 batches of cake batter per fire truck
Roughly 1.5 batches of buttercream total per fire truck Meringue powder
Powdered sugar
Gel food colorings
1 tube black icing
Mini chocolate frosted donuts
Assorted candies

***

Okay, these pictures are pretty bad, but I was in a hurry.

***
Step One: Mix up the batter

I mixed the batters separately in my stand mixer, then combined them in a Tupperware vat to mix them all together. It was a lot of cake. You'll probably have to bake it longer than usual if you use 3 batters. If you go with 2, you'll probably have to underbake so it's not too dry. Just keep checking.

Step Two: Trim the cake

After the cake has cooled and you've turned it out of the pan, use a very sharp knife to even up the top and sides. If you like, freeze the cake and do all of the cutting frozen. I had to do that with a Mad Hatter-style cake I made once. It made things much easier.

Step Three: Cut the pieces

The cake is 17 inches wide and after trimming, I cut it into three sections of about 5 2/3 inches wide. One of these thirds was then cut into thirds along the width, each third being about 3 3/4 inches. Behold:

Step Four: Laying out the pieces

The two big pieces are the body of the cake and the three small ones are the cab. I set it up just to see what needs trimming and so forth. Note that I cut out a chunk from part of the top layer of the truck body. That's for that metal compartment on the fire truck.

Step Four: Glue it together

Spread thickly with buttercream and stack everything together. After gluing, I cut a slant from the top front of the cab for the windshield area.

Step Five: Crumb coat

Please crumb coat your cakes. It's easy and you will be glad you did. A crumb coat is just a very thin layer of frosting put on the cake to make the cake smooth when the time comes to put on the final coat. Use a silicone pastry brush (they're like $4 at the grocery store) to brush all the loose crumbs off. Then spread a very thin layer of frosting over the whole cake. Let the crumb coat sit for at least an hour. I covered mine with plastic wrap and left them over night, or you can take this time to make your royal icing.

Step Six: Ladders and glass

I used royal icing to pipe the ladders, windows, and windshields. Do not be scared of this. It is very easy, even for the severely Coordination Impaired such as myself. Royal icing is simply meringue powder, water, and powdered sugar. You beat it in your mixer, glop it into a pastry bag, snip a weensy little hole in the end, and have fun. I love it for cookies because you can flood with it.

I drew a template on white paper, taped it to a cutting board, taped waxed paper over my template, and made all the pieces for my ladder. The ladder pieces need about 6 hours to dry and the windows would do best overnight. You'll know when they're ready because they'll come right off the wax paper. Just be careful because they are fragile. After they were dry , I used more royal icing to glue the ladder together. Let the completed ladder dry over night at least.

If you've never used a piping bag before, you can watch this video here. I don't bother using a coupler and tip for stuff like this. Just use scissors to snip a tiny (really tiny - like 1/8 of an inch) piece off the end.

Note: The picture of the completed ladder was taken with my new camera. Even though I don't know how to really use it yet, the difference in image quality is impressive I think.

Step Seven: Frosting and decorating the cake

Spread a generous layer of tinted buttercream over your crumb coat. If it's sticking, it's probably too thick. Whip a little milk into the frosting until it spreads smoothly. Also, keep a glass of water handy to dip your spatula in and smooth over rough spots as needed. Not too often or you'll sog the cake, but a little is okay.

Spread the silver frosting over the indentation you made between the body and the cab. Pipe a silver border around the base and over the wheels if you like, and use the small offset spatula to make the bumper. Use the mini donuts as wheels and put a dot of silver in the center of each for a hubcap.

Use whatever candies strike your fancy for the rest of it. I used Tootsie Pop Drops, a Rolo, and a licorice allsort for the top. The doodads on the side are mini jujubees, the headlights are licorice allsorts. The red cake has some licorice wheels on the silver part to help disguise the slumpage-induced crack. I got all of the candies from the bulk candy bins at Wegman's. The hose thingies on the side are Oreo cookie straws. I stuck toothpicks into them, spiked those into the cake and, for good measure, used a ledge made of a popsicle stick. In retrospect I would have skipped the ledge because I don't like non-edible decorations on cakes.

Perch the ladder on top, and voila! (Note the enucleated red cake in the background. SIGH.)

At first I considered doing this in fondant, but even marshmallow fondant doesn't taste great. I also thought about doing a lot more detail, like a bi-color top and also making a little door with a shield and a latch on it, but I think this is fine for a 4 year old's party, to be honest with you. He seemed happy, anyway!

In Which I Prepare For Snow And Valentine's Day

We're due for about two feet of snow this weekend. It's supposed to start tomorrow and last through Saturday night and I AM SO EXCITED! I love snow. This has been a very snowy winter indeed and I couldn't be happier about it.

Forseeing a possible snow-in, I'm going out tonight to pick up shoes for the romantical Valentine's evening Mr. Marzipan and I have planned supplies to make Valentines for AlmondGirl's classmates. I also signed up to make cookies for their Valentine's Day party, so maybe we'll bake cookies this weekend too. They freeze well. I use this recipe from Epicurious for my cutouts, and I think the subtle nutmeg flavor really adds a lot to the standard sugar cookie experience. I've also heard good things about this shortbread though. Perhaps two batches of cookies are in order...

Frosting-wise, I'll probably do standard royal icing. I like do to a piped edge and then flood the center before letting the kids decorate with various sprinkle.

Cookies! Snow! Arts and crafts! I'm such a child.

In Which I Fail At Parenting But Succeed At Muffins

This morning I drove AlmondGirl to the bus stop which was devoid of people and, after a few minutes of waiting, also still of the bus. So I drove up the the school which was desolate as well. "Huh!" I exclaimed, idling in front of the playground like the Creepy Person I warn my kids about.

"Mrs. K said 'see you on Monday,'" my daughter piped up from the back. "That's why there was no homework last night."

"Well," I said, waiting for some kind of Parenting Cop to materialize and issue me a citation of stupidity. "Well."

I called my son's school to ascertain whether or not it was open (it was) and I dropped him off while figuring out how to reconfigure my morning. Miles to run, bread to bake, chickens to brine...crap.

I called my friend whose daughter is the same age as AlmondGirl. "No school today," I remarked when she answered.

She agreed that this was the case.

"I might be an idiot," I said, and told her what I had done. Because she is my friend, she laughed at me and suggested I drop AlmondGirl off to keep her daughter busy. I happily accepted. She is a good friend.

Also, I made her thank-you muffins. Banana ones frosted with peanut butter-molasses frosting and topped with Reese's Pieces.

Banana Muffins

4 large bananas, mashed

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 slightly beaten egg

1/4 cup melted butter or vegetable oil

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups flour

Walnuts or chocolate chips, optional

Mix the mashed banana, sugar, egg and butter together. Set aside. In a separate bowl, mix together baking soda, baking powder, salt and flour. Combine wet and dry ingredients, stirring as little as possible to keep the muffins tender.

Divide among 12 greased muffin tins. Don't use paper liners.

Bake at 350 degrees F oven for approximately 20 minutes.

Peanut Butter Frosting

So this is an adaptation of another recipe because I like very, very peanut-buttery peanut butter frosting if I'm going to bother.

1 jar good peanut butter (no Skippy or Jif or what have you)

1 tablespoon molasses

3 - 3 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar

1 stick butter, softened

2-4 tablespoons of milk

Cream butter using the paddle attachment of a mixer, then beat in the peanut butter and molasses until smooth. Beat in 3 cups of sifted sugar, then the milk and any more sugar as needed. Resist impulse to eat with spoon.