The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

Tuesdays With Dorie (and Sunday With Julia - no, not THAT Julia, MY Julia): Perfection Pound Cake as Birthday Cake

Long enough post title for you?

 

This week's Tuesdays With Dorie challenge was to make the Traditional Madeleines found on pages 166-168 of "Baking, From My Home to Yours," and was chosen by Tara of Smells Like Home.   We were also given the option of choosing one of the past TWD recipes if we didn't have the correct pan to make the madeleines. 

And so for two reasons, I didn't make the madeleines.  First off, I don't have the right pan, and though I could pretty easily get one, there was reason number two - my daughter's birthday party and the requisite cake for that.  So, in my merry two-birds-with-one-stone killer way, I picked the Perfection Pound Cake, which was chosen back in January, long before I was a member.

Pound Cake, as Dorie mentions in the "Playing Around" section of the recipe, "lends itself to variations minor and major."  And that's exactly what happened with mine.  I had asked the soon-to-be Birthday Girl what kind of cake she wanted.  Asked her several times, in fact, because I know how often her mind can change.  Ultimately it boiled down to these three requests:  Strawberry cake, Purple on the outside, with Pink flowers on it.

Purple on the outside was simple enough - just color some fondant and that would be that.

Pink flowers - nothing I couldn't accomplish with some pink royal icing.

And the strawberry cake?

I used Dorie's Perfection Pound Cake recipe - tripled, because there would be at least 14 people, if not more, and I generally make about twice what I realistically need because I'm insecure that way.

To the cake, I added some orange zest, because, well, I've been using lemon (and lime) a lot lately, and I needed a change in citrus. 

And I sliced about 3 pounds of strawberries or so and macerated them briefly in some sugar.

And so here's how it all went down....

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour or 2  1/4 cups cake flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

2 sticks (8 oz) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 cup sugar

4 large eggs, at room temperature

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Getting Ready:

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Butter a 9 x 5 inch loaf pan or an 8  1/2 x 4  1/2 inch loaf pan.  Put the pan on an insulated baking sheet or on two regular baking sheets stacked one on top of the other. 

Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar on high speed until pale and fluffy, a full 5 minutes.   

(Add in the orange zest.)  Scrape down the bowl and beater and reduce the mixer speed to medium.  Add the eggs one at a time,

beating for 1 to 2 minutes after each egg goes in.  As you're working, scrape down the bowl and beater often.  Mix in the vanilla extract.  Reduce the mixer speeed to low and add the flour, mixing only until it is incorporated--don't overmix.  In fact, you might want to fold in the last of the flour, or even all fo it, by hand with a rubber spatula. 

Scrape the batter into the buttered pan and smooth the top.

(And scatter the strawberries on top and press lightly into the batter

Put the cake into the oven to bake, and check on it after about 45 minutes.  If it's browning too quickly, cover it loosely with a foil tent.  If you're using a 9x5 pan, you'll need to bake the cake for 70-75 minutes; the smaller pan needs about 90 minutes.  The cake is properly baked when a thin knife inserted deep into the center comes out clean. 

(The heart-shaped pans ranged in bake time from about an hour to an hour and a half.)

Remove the cake from the oven, transfer the pan to a rack and let rest for 30 minutes.

Run a blunt knjife betwene the cake and the sides of the pan and turn the cake out, then turn it right side up on the rack and cool to room temperature.

So those are my Perfection Pound Cakes - with strawberries pressed into the tops.  They smelled phenomenal, and I had to fight my family off in order to keep the cakes safe for Julia's party.

Once the cakes were cool, it was time for the construction.  I couldn't exactly level the surfaces of the cakes, because I'd end up slicing away a lot of the all-important strawberries.  And I could have put the strawberries in the bottom of the pan...and I had thought about it...but I forgot until I'd filled the first pan, so I just pressed them on top.

I also didn't want to cover the whole thing with fondant because - again - the strawberries.  They looked so yummy...I couldn't hide them.

First, I sliced each cake in half, so I'd have two layers per cake...and I slathered seedless strawberry jam in between the layers.

I also wanted to enhance the appearance of the strawberries, so I melted down some apricot preserves and glazed them with that.  Nice and moist and shiny.

Then I wrapped ribbons of fondant I'd colored with "aster mauve" and "delphinium blue" around the edges of each layer.

And to all that, I added some fondant ribbons and royal icing leaves and flowers, and this was how it looked:

Later on, after we'd sung "Happy Birthday" and Julia had blown out the candles, I started to cut the cake.

And in that momentary silence, my little Birthday Princess said,

"I don't want any cake.  I just want ice cream...I don't really like cake."

~~~~~

Everyone else seemed to like it.  And of course I'd made way too much, but I gave everyone a chunk of it to bring home, and this was all that was left:

So Happy 4th Birthday, Julia! 

Next year you get pie.

Cakes - Over the Hill 50 - 2008

I made this cake last week for a surprise (I think) party for the husband of a friend of a friend.  Inside, the cake was lemon, and the frosting in between the layers was just a plain frosting blended with seedless raspberry jam.  Over the whole thing was chocolate frosting, and then the fondant covered all of that.

This has become my "Over the Hill" cake.  A hill with little mile-markers representing the person's age, meandering up the cake, until the marker for the person's milestone birthday- that one points down to the rocks.  I made one a while ago for my friend (same friend as above) for her boyfriend's 40th birthday, and that one led to this one.

I don't know what my problem is, but I stress out about these cakes until I'm in the process of decorating them (in this particular case, rolling the "rocks" out of colored fondant and building the stone side of the mountain.  Or hill, I guess.)  Then - once I'm doing the fun stuff...the grown-up version of playing with Play-Doh, THEN it's fun and I remember why I still do these from time to time.

A friend of the wife picked the cake up at my house on Friday - and a very rainy Friday it was.  She held the umbrella while I carried the cake out to her SUV, and I told her that the raindrops would leave little shiny spots on the fondant.  Couldn't do anything about that.

Then she got in her vehicle, and I went in my house, and woo-hoo!  Stress-B-Gone!  Until the next time.

Cakes - Chocolate Heart With Flowers - 1997 (Eek!)

 

Yeah.  It's not that pretty.  To be fair to myself, that red wrapping I used on the base is what throws off the color balance in the photo.  But still.  It's a rather ugly display.

It's chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, a 6" heart sitting on a 15" heart...decorated with rambling greenery and frightful flowers in "aster mauve" and light blue.

It was for my bosses's wife's birthday.  I know, really.  It's amazing I lasted another day.

I've got a few cakes like this - ones that I just cringed the whole time I was making them because I didn't really have any sort of theme or story to work with.  I think I was just asked to do something chocolate.  Maybe the heart shape too.  I don't know.

Anyway.  Let us close the door on this frightful chapter.  Thank you.

Cakes - Baby Shower - It's a Girl - 1997

Another person where I worked, but I never even met her.  She worked in another dept, possibly a different building.  Someone was throwing a baby shower for her and I was asked to make the cake.  She knew the baby was a girl, so that gave me a color scheme.  I also went shopping and got a set of cute little baby-themed cookie cutters - a duck, a rocking horse, a teddy bear, and something else that I apparently didn't use in this cake.  But I know there were 4 cutters.

Under all that pink and white, it's a spice cake with cream cheese frosting.  The little white lacy thing it's on is fondant, and the cake itself is covered with fondant.  The little cutouts are fondant as well, and my horrendous ribbony things are piped with royal icing and cause me to cringe whenever I look at them.

The baby blocks on top of the cake that spell out "BABY GIRL" are the only cool thing (my opinion) from this cake, because they are made entirely of royal icing panels that I piped onto parchment, allowed to dry, and then glued together into 4 blocks with more royal icing.  I think they came out pretty well.

And that's about all I have to say about that one.

Cakes - Hole in One - 1997

Another golf-themed cake.  More of that fun little Wilton #233 multi-opening piping tip (to make the grass).  I used that tip at every opportunity for a while back then.

I used a sphere cake pan set to make the golf ball - I think I bought the pan set specifically for this cake, and ended up only needing one of the two pans.  The little dimples on the golf ball were made by poking a plastic drinking straw into the royal icing.

The golf ball was white cake, and the little patch of golf course was chocolate.

My original idea was much more dramatic - and less kind.  I wanted to have the golf ball somehow teetering on the edge of the hole without going in.  Ultimate golfing nightmare.  But I just couldn't rig it properly with my limited experience in cake architecture, and I also rationalized that it would be nicer to let the ball drop in on the golfer's birthday. 

I remember he was tickled with the cake, and I ended up making a couple of birthday cakes for his son over the next few years.  Funny how things work.  The son is in college now.  I think he was turning ten when I made the first cake for him.  I'll get to those cakes eventually.

I like this cake.  It's simple, but effective.

Cakes - Assortment of Flowers - 1997

These were the first royal icing flowers I'd ever made.  Pansies and roses and violets and little white generic flowers.  And the leaves, too.  I wanted to make something pretty. 

This was for another coworker (gee, really?), and I didn't know her all that well, but she was an older woman who was very polished in appearance and flowers seemed like a good idea.

The guy I made the Alligator on a Golf Course cake for looked at this cake and told me it looked like a squashed hat.  People were quick to leap to my defense.  I just dismissed it because he was like that - he'd just say whatever popped into his head - there was no quarantine period between thought and word with him.  But he was harmless.  And, looking at it from a vantage point of eleven years later, I have to admit - he had a point.

Still, I'm proud of the flowers.  I remember making them, following instructions in a book or magazine on how to pipe royal icing flowers.  Piping each one on a flower nail and then carefully removing it from the nail and setting it on parchment paper to dry and harden.

The cake itself was lemon, and the layers were 10", 8" and 6".

Cakes - Alex's First Birthday - Sea Creatures - 2003

I'm jumping out of order a bit with the cakes.  I'd been going through the ones I did about ten years ago, but I came across this picture of the cake I made for Alex's first birthday, and I thought I'd post it. 

I remember working on this cake.  I remember being in this kitchen, coloring fondant for the various fish and crustaceans...my niece, Lisa, was here and she helped make all the little gray rocks you see along the front base of the cake.  I remember piping the bubbles that spell out the salutation in royal icing...and the curling wave over on the top right, also with royal icing.  I remember painting blue food coloring and water onto the fondant for the surface of the cake.  I remember this one really well.  The cake inside was chocolate.

I'm still rather proud of the lobster and crab...although, yeah, I know they're only that red once they've been cooked.  But hey, it was for a year-old child.  Bright colors were more appropriate for that, I think.  Right?

Cakes - New Home - 1997

Another birthday cake for a coworker.  She and her husband had either just purchased or just moved into a new home, and this took place right around her birthday.  So the cake theme was pretty easy to decide on.

According to my  notes, the cake is alternating layers of chocolate and lemon, with alternating lemon and chocolate frosting between layers.  The decorating is all done with royal icing, and off to the side of the little index card I'm looking at it says "forgot chimney!" - oops.

Whenever I made these cakes for people at work, I would come into work earlier than usual the next day so I could place the cake on the person's desk, try to fix anything that suffered on the drive in (I brought a piping bag of royal icing with me), and take a couple of pictures of the cake.  I'm so glad I took these pictures, and glad that I wrote up a few notes about each cake.

I admit it, I loved the positive feedback.  Loved the fact that people from other departments would show up just to see the cake.  I had fun (for the most part) creating the cakes - first in my head and then in my kitchen.  I also was extremely critical of each one, aware of every flaw, every thing I would do differently the next time.  I was far more picky than I needed to be.  But my most critical moments were around midnight when I finally tossed the last piping bag of royal icing in the sink and headed to bed. 

I tended to like the cakes better in the morning.  And under the fluorescent office lights.

Cakes - Candy Bar - 1997

Not a whole lot to tell about this one.  The person I made the cake for worked for Nestle.  I don't have any other notes with this cake, but I was rather pleased with how it looked.

I started to write "I don't even remember what flavor the cake was" - and then I thought - this is eleven years ago!  Why should I remember??  I set odd standards for myself.  Fortunately I have come to accept my mommyhood-and-sleep-deprivation-induced-senility and I no longer get upset when I can't remember some trivial thing from over a decade ago.  I shrug now, and say "oh well" and go on with what I was doing.  While distressing at first, I've found it to be rather liberating.  If I don't remember something, doesn't that free up other space in my head?  And also, if I can't remember something, I also can't remember if it was something upsetting, like a rude person from another country openly criticizing an Easter dessert I'd spent a great deal of imagination, time and effort on and she was a guest in my family's home and she just blurted out her rude observation with no regard for how it might come across or how I would feel or what manners were or how to behave politely when you are a guest, and interestingly enough it was like everyone else disappeared and tumbleweeds blew by while the townspeople hid in the saloon and I hissed something sharp and sarcastic and bitter in reply and then let the matter drop because for one thing the sarcasm thing just went right over her head, and because there were other guests - nice ones -  and I didn't want to cause a scene, although the general consensus later was that it would have been understood if I had.

I'm sorry, what?  What were we talking about?  I don't remember.

Anyway, that's the cake this week.

Cakes - Alligator on a Golf Course - 1997

Wow.  I'm looking at the delivery dates for this cake and the previous two (the snowmen cake and the wedding cake), and all three were delivered within a two week period.  I realize this is nothing for a bakery, but this was just little ol' me, working at night after my real job, in my tiny kitchen.  I was a busy little bee.

Okay - of course there's a story behind this one.  The recipient had gone on vacation for a week in (I think) South Carolina, and he spent most of his waking hours playing golf.  And yes, an alligator showed up on one of the golf courses while he was playing.  He showed me a picture.  So I used that for the cake. 

If you look closely, you can see that the alligator has just chomped on the pole of the flag that had been marking the hole. 

The cake itself is chocolate, with chocolate icing between layers.  The grass is green royal icing piped with a #233 Wilton multi-opening tip (the same one I used for this Spider cake).  And I sprinkled light brown sugar on top of a thin layer of wet royal icing to create the sand.

The gentleman I made the cake for kept the little alligator in a little case with his other golfing stuff.  At least that's what he told me.  I have no reason to doubt it, especially since he would mention from time to time that he still had it.