Cake-Off 2007! 14 June 2007 11:27 pm
Posted by Tracy in : baking, cheese, cooking, dessert, eating, eugene, friends, garden, kitchen gear, pictures , trackbackVictor may have posted first (and with lots of pictures here), but he’s still got schoolwork to do and I’m all hopped up on sugar, so here’s my much more verbose impressions of Cake-Off 2007 (and some pictures and stories of embarrassing baking mishaps, too!)
First of all, two pictures of my lemon Bundt cake in progress (the camera ran out of batteries or I would have taken more pictures of its evolution):
Look at all those shiny toys! The KitchenAid in particular makes fast work of so many baking chores, it sort of boggles my mind. But I can still manage to hose things up, oh yes (more on that in a bit). Also note zested lemons and the Microplane grater used to remove their fine outer layer. There were three lemons in all, but one had already been squeezed into the measuring cup at the time this picture was taken.
The mortar is full of minced lemon zest, soaking in lemon juice, which will give the cake its delicious flavor. I did not mess up this step. I did mess up the “make sure the camera is fully charged” step, but that’s pretty much unavoidable ever since I broke the viewscreen. Dangit. But I digress. My really big screwup of this particular baking endeavor was forgetting that silicone (you know, the stuff our Bundt pan is made of) doesn’t conduct heat as well as metal, so it’s important to bake stuff in it for an extra-long time. So the first time I tested the cake and optimistically concluded that a toothpick had come out clean, and let it cool and flipped it out of the pan… it cracked and quivered and oozed and I quickly flipped it back into the pan and into the oven, cursing a blue streak all the way as I turned the oven back on. The cake was in the oven for 10-15 more minutes and then cooled for another 10 before I dared give it another turn, and this time it came out without oozing or cracking. Yay for that! Boo for the cake turning out all lopsided and the whole experience making me a little grumpy. But yay for the cake being delicious for all its deformities, which are luckily not at all visible in the following picture, of the evening’s grand cake spread:
Starting in the lower left: Victor’s apple-spice cake, my lemon Bundt cake, Peter’s cheesecake, behind that is Eric and Shelby’s ice cream cake (a ringer, from Coldstone Creamery), between them are raspberries from Louis and Rachel, to the right of Peter’s big cheesecake is Mark’s cheesecake with apricot topping, and finally there’s Kevin and Laurel’s fantastic flourless chocolate-almond torte. Not pictured: Andy and Amy’s carrot cake (a late arrival). Here is a picture of the party’s aftermath:
We finished the apricot cheesecake and managed to send many people home with the remains of their cakes and pieces of other cakes as desired. Almost no one heard the story of how I almost destroyed my cake, and many people spoke very well of it, so I count it a success, even if Peter’s cheesecake was perhaps an even greater culinary save (let’s just say that there were good and bad points to my sleepy late-night suggestion of Marie tea biscuits as a substitute for graham crackers in the crust, and move on). I was also very impressed by the cheesecake’s light and fluffy texture. Peter says the secret is to bake really late at night, when you’re really tired, so you do all the steps of the recipe really slowly, so everything gets mixed really well. Hey, whatever works. I call it all delicious, but I must admit I’m really looking forward to trying a piece of my cake with some of these red currants from my garden:
…after I have a good long sleep during which to digest all of tonight’s goodness. Thanks for a lovely evening, cake friends!
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Chiara
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TracyFood
