Carrot Cake

I love carrot cake. It reminds me of Spring. The sweetness of the carrots, the crunch of toasted nuts and the frosting. Cream Cheese frosting. yummm. So when my friend Dave's birthday arrived yesterday I was delighted to hear that he loved carrot cake! I've made this recipe a couple of times before. Once I made it in a sheet cake pan and it was soup in the center. (urgh). So I stayed with the old stand-by. The 9" round cake pan. One thing I dislike about carrot cake is sometimes it can be dry and as dense as a fruitcake. Not this recipe!  I found it on Epicurious.com and the secret ingredient is orange marmalade! Also there is a thin layer of the marmalade on the bottom layer before it is topped with the frosting.  This made the cake even more moist and tasty.

The chopped nuts on the outside of the cake are a classic carrot cake decoration. Their crunch helps offset the cream cheese's sweetness.

This is the first time I'm posting a recipe so I hope you like it.

 

Marmalade Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

adopted from epicurious.com

Cake:

2 cups unbleached all purpose flour (I only use King Arthur's)

2 teaspons baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 large eggs

3/4 cup vegetable oil

3/4 cup sugar

2/3 cup packed golden brown sugar

1/2 cup orange marmalade (I used my mom's homemade but you can use what you like.  Beware of high fructose corn syrup varieties!)

1/2 cup orange juice (fresh squeezed is best!)

3 cups (lightly packed) grated peeled carrots (about 4-6 large)

3/4 cup chopped toasted nuts (I used pecans but walnuts work great too)

Frosting:

4 8-ounce packages cream cheese, room temperature

2 cups powdered sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

6 Tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

Nutty outside:

1 1/2 cups chopped toasted nuts

9" cardboard cake circle

For Cake:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 9 inch diameter cake pans with 2 inch sides.  Using a whisk, mix first 5 ingredients in a medium bowl. Set aside.  Beat eggs, oil, sugars, marmalade and juice in a large bowl until blended.  Stir in dry ingredients.  Fold in carrots and nuts.  Divide batter between cake pans.  Bake until tester inserted into centers comes out clean, about 40 minutes.  (Cookinmary note:  Due to all of the sugars in this recipe the cake begins to brown rather quickly.  Don't let this alarm you.  If the center jiggles when you move the pan the cake isn't ready - put it back in and check again in 10 minutes.) Transfer the cakes to racks; cool 15 minutes.  Turn out cakes onto racks; cool completely.

For Frosting:

Using an electric mixer, beat cream cheese and butter in large bowl until smooth.  Add vanilla and blend well.  Add sugar one cup at a time and beat just until smooth.  Taste to confirm it meets your personal level of sweetness.  (this is the best part!)

Assembly:

Place one layer on a 9" cardboard cake circle. Spread cake with 1/4 cup marmalade.  Spread 1 cup of frosting to cover layer.  Top with second layer.  Spoon enough frosting to cover top and sides.  Smooth sides.  Remember to keep frosting thick enough to allow nuts to adhere.  Grab a handful of chopped nuts and gently press them to the side of the cake (don't worry lots will fall off, just scoop them back up and use them for the next part of the cake).  Do this until the cake is covered on the sides.  I typically do this on a separate plate than the one I'm going to serve the cake on.  It's a messy process and by transferring the cake to a clean plate I can dust off the nuts that didn't stick.  This is why I always use a cardboard cake circle underneath my cakes. 

Penguin Cake

This is my first foray into fondant.  (except for the arms and legs of the monkey - but nobody really SAW it since I covered it with frosting stars!).  My good friend is fanatical about penguins. So when her 40th birthday rolled around it seemed as likely a time as any to make a go at it. I've always loved making 3-D animal cakes and luckily a penguin is relatively easy. I have a 3-D snowman cake pan from Wiliams Sonoma and thought it wouldn't be too difficult to carve it into a penguin!  I began with a few sketches, to get the proportions correct.

 

First I cemented the two halves of the pan with royal icing, wrapped the whole thing in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer.  After it was solid enough to carve I began by cutting off the top hat, the broom, and any other bits to give me a smooth head and body.  Obviously the snowman has curves so I frosted the whole thing with a coupler-fitted decorating bag without a tip.  Then, starting at the bottom, I frosted a long rope spiral up and around the body, filling in the curvy parts.  Once the spiral was at the top I used my small offset spatula to carve out the neck and smooth the whole body.  I then used a piece of waxed paper to create a template for the big fondant piece that was to cover the head and face.

By the way, I used a chocolate fondant which tastes a lot like tootsie roll!  I can't say I'm very fond of white fondant - which is why I left the body in buttercream. Once I had the hat smoothed over the head I used kitchen shears to trim the excess.

After that I added the "cape" and wings. Once it was transferred to the base cake I added some orange fondant feet...

As well as a nose and some eyes! Voila! A very happy Penguin!

Valentine cookies

I've been following a blog Bake at 350: (bakeat350.blogspot.com) She makes these amazing cookies in every kind of shape and size. Most importantly she has a lot of advice on how to get the correct consistency, color and flavor of icing. The most difficult thing for me is that my royal icing is never shiny when it dries. Apparently I'm overbeating it. So with these cookies I only beat the frosting for 5 minutes (half of the 10 min on the directions). I can see a tiny improvement from my Halloween cookies, but they're still not what I'd hoped. Oh well, I just have to keep working at it which means MORE COOKIES!

Boston Red Sox Cake

I love the Boston Red Sox almost as much as my Kitchenaid Mixer. So when a friend called and asked if I'd create a birthday cake with a Sox theme I did a multitude of jumpy claps and said YES! My sketches were very elaborate - three dimensional baseballs and a replica of the team cap. But time became my adversary. I had commited to attending an overseers meeting for my alma mater so I had to scale back on the decorations.

So I went to my old stand-by: Chocolate work! I decorated the sides with the team Logo, the twin red socks, the iconic "B" and two banners, one for each world series win of this century.

I had initialy created the scoreboard for the front face but when I was arranging the top it seemed to fit there perfectly. I even included the guy's age as their pitcher number. Sublte, no?
The baseball cap is actually a candle. I'm going to make one out of cake one day. I'm adding it to my to-do list right now!

This is the logo that I made to go on the top of the cake. But it seemed too big. I'm glad I chose the scoreboard but now I have this big white chocolate disc with nowhere to go!

Monkey Cake

I received a last minute request for a first birthday cake with a monkey theme. I had seen a pattern for a 3-d monkey in the 2009 Wilton magazine and really wanted to try it. The mold is a mini-bear and I just cut here and added fondant there to create the ears, arms and legs of the monkey.

Isn't that a cute face?!

Christmas Cookies!

I've been decorating Christmas cookies since I was a little girl. Every year I try different shapes and sizes, collecting unique cutters and decorations. This year I started with a tasty gingerbread recipe from Cook's Illustrated which resulted in delightful Rudolphs:
And some fun candy canes:

For months I've been baking butter cookies, perfecting the recipe until I've found the right balance of ingredients and cooking times. Here's an example of one of my newest cutters, a poinsettia!:

My favorite shape of the year is this elfish candy cane. It's a bit larger than what I usually do but it is such a fun shape and I found this interesting decorating pattern in the Williams Sonoma catalog.

Holiday Cranberry Vinegar

This holiday season many of my gifts are going to be homemade foodstuffs. (Who can resist?) I started with these flavored vinegars. Mom and I visited a cranberry bog in October where I picked up three pounds of fresh New England cranberries for $6.00! My freezer is filled with them so they are going to be featured in many of the goodies I'll be baking this week. I love this vinegar drizzled on salads. It's so tasty that I rarely need any oil (but I do make a ginger oil that goes perfectly with it. More on that later)

Puff Pastry Cornucoppia

This year I decided to make my favorite Puff Pastry Cornucoppias. I wasn't doing the major cooking for Thanksgiving dinner so I thought these would be my special contribution. They were a big hit, some guests filled them with steamed green beans, others with a mixed nut and dried fruit combination. Either way they were very delicious!

I start by making a cone out of aluminum foil:


Then I wrap 1/2" strips of puff pastry around the cones:

Here they are coming out of the oven:


Once the aluminum foil cone is removed (very gently!) they're ready to be filled!

Baby Shower Cake

I was so excited to create a cake for a baby shower that was contemporary and without any typical baby themes. So I searched the internet for ideas and found myself going back to the website where I consistently find inspiration, fabulousstationery.com. It is filled with tons of amazing graphic patterns. I've not only purchased stationery from them but used many of their designs as inspirations for cake patterns.





So this cake was inspired by their design titled, "Zany Zinnias" The flowers are made from dyed white chocolate which allows me to get a very fine detail that holds its shape unlike anything else I've found.

Autumn inspiration

This is a cake I made for a friend's housewarming last year. I've always been fascinated by autumn leaves and wanted to capture their beautiful color- in cake!


Each of the leaves is done in the same technique as my previously posted butterfly cake.


White chocolate is dyed multiple colors and swirled to give the leaves their "season changing" effect. Unlike the butterflies, where I drew a template before hand, I use real leaves to get the texture and veining that you find in nature.

Halloween Cookies

Cookies and Halloween, two of my favorite things! I recently borrowed a series of vampire books from a colleague of a friend and I wanted to make something as a "thank you" So I baked and decorated the cookies you see here. The skeletons in the coffins and the fangs were my favorite! I use a simple butter cookie recipe from Cook's Illustrated and royal icing.

Train Cake

So I've been busy baking lately. Last weekend I created a cake for a friend's 2 year old son. It met the typical requirements for toddlers: some chocolate cake, some vanilla cake and (of course!) Thomas the Tank Engine!

Southern Dinner

Every Sunday night my neighbors and I take turns cooking dinner then watch True Blood on HBO. Since the show is set in Louisiana, we always love the subtle nuances about the South. My culinary heritage is based in Kentucky where my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers all learned to cook. This week it was my turn to make dinner and I thought it would be fun to prepare all the dishes I so fondly remember enjoying in my great grandmother's house in Glasgow, Kentucky. The menu included baked, smoked ham, fresh coleslaw, collard greens that had been simmering for hours in smoked turkey stock, corn pudding and fresh buttermilk biscuits. I made baked beans too but forgot them in the kitchen! During the show I served Nilla wafer pudding - homemade vanilla pudding with fresh, sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. It was addictive!