Saturday, April 24, 2010

Everything's Better with Bacon

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, prepare to be amazed!  Prepare to be terrified!  Prepare to be shocked by the awesomeness!  Prepare yourselves for... Apple Bacon Bundt Cake. 

Now that you've had a chance to pick yourselves up off the floor and have steadied your constitutions, I'll repeat, prepare yourselves for Apple Bacon Bundt Cake.  That's right, there's bacon in this cake.  I have to admit when my wonderful mama passed along this recipe I was a bit horrified, so of course I had to try it.

Imagine, if you can, a combination of sweet/tart, warm cinnamon and nutmeg, with smoky, salty bacon all wrapped up and covered in a layer of glazed goodness.  That, in a nutshell, is today's cake.  You start by cooking the bacon until crisp.  Once the bacon is cooked, you remove it from the pan and add the apples to the hot bacon grease.  I really thought this step would make me gag, but the smell of the apples caramelizing in smokey bacon drippings was actually amazing.  Like a chocolate covered pretzel with its sweet/salty aroma, but a hogillion times better.

The batter itself is a pretty basic spice cake recipe, minus the bacon of course.  Once combined, you add the bacon and caramelized apples, pour into a greased/flour bundt pan and bake until the dogs are sitting in front of the oven salivating like Pavlov has rung a bell.  On a side note, all I could think while baking this cake was "There's a hole in this cake" in a very Greek accent.  Don't worry, I fixed it...

When the dogs have practically licked the door off the oven, take it out and let it cool for about 10 minuts, plop it onto your cake plate of choice, slather it in the glaze that's been sitting patiently in the bowl on the counter, and then sprinkle it with bacon.  You heard me... I said sprinkle it with bacon.  Do it... just trust me.  The end result is something that will make your mouth water and your boyfriend groan.. in a totally PG kinda way of course.

And now, what you've all been waiting for... Bacon Cake Pictures!




And because we could hardly wait to try it, here's what it looks like when you cut into it:


See the bacon pieces in the cake??  YUM.



What?  You want the recipe?  Sure thing.

Cake:
2 c finely diced granny smith apples
10 slices thick apple-wood or maple-smoked bacon
3 eggs
1 c natural no-sugar added applesauce
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp vegetable oil
2 c sugar
3 c all purpose flour
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp baking powder

Glaze:
1 1/2 c powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp no-sugar-added applesauce

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease and flour 10-in fluted bundt pan. 

Dice the bacon into small pieces (no larger than 1/2 in) and brown in skillet until crispy.  Set bacon aside to drain; add apples to remaining bacon fat and cook just until they are a little caramelized (about 1-2 min).  Remove apples from skillet and set aside. 

In a large mixing bowl, beat eggs with an electric mixer at medium speed until thick and lemony-looking.  Add applesauce, oil, and vanilla.  Mix on medium speed until everything is incorporated.  Add sugar and beat for 1 minute.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and baking powder; add into wet mixture and beat until fully incorporated.

Reserve 3 tbsp of cooked bacon for cake topping.  Add the rest of the bacon and the apples to mixture and beat for 1 minute.  Pour batter into pan and bake for 40-50 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Right after you put the pan into the oven, mix ingredients for the glaze and let sit in a covered bowl until the cake is ready. 

Remove the cake from the oven and cool on wire rack for 10 minutes.  Turn cake onto cake place.  Drizzle glaze all over warm cake and sprinkle with reserved bacon.

So, there you go.  Hope you all can terrify your friends and family, and enjoy!

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Cupcake Sunday: Beehive Cupcakes and Mini Pear and Walnut Cupcakes

I left you all last week with the mental image of me on the floor in front of the fridge and a teaser shot of the cupcakes that I made last weekend. Now that a week has gone by and I've been remiss in my blogging, I thought it was time I got off my lazy butt and posted like I should have done a week ago.

Last weekends cupcake was called a Beehive Cupcake.  It was a honey cupcake that had a yellow meringue frosting piped on in the shape of beehives.  The cupcake itself started off more like a chocolate chip cookie base (creaming together butter and brown sugar) than a cupcake base.


Now I don't know how many of you have made a meringue frosting before, but I never had.  I used to watch my grandma make it to put onto shortcake, but I'd never attempted it myself.  I was running a little low on eggs, so instead of wasting the yolks, I thought I would use the egg beaters egg whites that were in the fridge.  The container says 100% egg white, so I figured it would work the same... WRONG.  I sat there and beat those egg whites like they deserved it, and nothing... no white fluffy goodness.  Not even a substantial amount of bubbles that could lie and say they were meringue.    So yeah, I not only wasted egg beaters, I had to use the real egg whites anyway.  As C would say, lesson learned.  When I finally got it right, the frosting was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.  It's like the younger, prettier sister of the fluff that you get in the jar at the grocery store.  The jarred fluff wishes it could be like my fluff (...that sounds kinda wrong...).



The recipe called for foil wrapped bees, but let's be honest.... the closest I was going to get to finding foil wrapped bees were the bees that Squirt catches in the backyard.  Who thinks of these things?

This week's cupcake (mini Pear and Walnut Cupcakes) was equally delightful.  The best part?  I already had almost everything I needed on hand to make them.  All I had to buy was a can of pears and a small bag of walnut pieces.  Rock on.  I love when that happens because it makes me feel like a girl scout - always prepared.  The cupcake started off similar to last week's cupcake, but instead of folding in honey at the end, I had to fold in chopped up pear and walnuts. 


The frosting on these was like a little bit of Wisconsin in my mouth.  One of my best friends, B, has a significant other who is from them thar parts.  Said boy has an uncle who has a tree that made the maple syrup that went into the icing.  D-lightful.  I love knowing where my ingredients came from! (Side note - I've almost gone through the ginormous jar she gave me and that makes me only completely sad.)  C liked these almost as much as last week's cupcakes, but seriously, what can compete with marshmallow fluff?  That's right... nothing.


Sunday, April 11, 2010

Full Sheet Cake Adventure: Batter Battle

Lord, who knew making a sheet cake was going to be so much work!  Last time I posted about the pan that I bought in order to do the job, but that was only part of the equation. 

I assumed that making the cake was going to be the easy part.  Boy was I wrong.  The cake that was ordered was a key lime cake.  I knew I had to double my recipe in order to make a 9in layer cake, so I (stupidly) assumed that tripling the recipe was going to be enough for each half of the sheet cake.  Ha, right...  the tripled batch made a layer that was too thin to torte.  What I ended up doing was baking the tripled batch 4 times - each batch made 1/2 of a single layer - so when all was said and done I had multiplied the recipe by 12, I had gone through 2 dozen eggs, over a pound of butter, an entire bag of flour, an entire bag of sugar, 4 bottles of key lime juice, 4 lbs of powdered sugar, and 9 limes.  Ridiculous, I know.  If that wasn't crazy enough, the frosting used 3 quarts of heavy whipping cream and over a tub of piping gel (used t stabilize the whipped icing).

So once all the baking was done (which took 2 days of baking after work), I had to frost the sucker.  Since the cake had a key lime syrup over it to keep it moist and give it flavor, it stuck like a champ to the cooling racks as I was trying to slide it onto the cake board.  C had to hold the rack while I slid (aka shoved) the cake.  Once the assembly and frosting was done, it was time to put the cake into the fridge until delivery time.  Now, I knew that the cakes just fit side by side when they weren't on the board, but I assumed (again, stupidly... funny how that works, huh?) that it would be fine to fit into the fridge.  Nope.  Good to know that a full sized sheet cake on a board definitely does NOT fit. We ended up cutting off part of the board with an exact-o knife and then basically shoving the hogillion pound cake (who would have thought all of those ingredients would weigh so much...?) into the fridge.  And of course, the sides of the cake hit the sides of the fridge, and the door bar had to be removed so it wouldn't smash in the front of the cake.  So there I am, practically in tears because I've been working on this stupid cake for 3 stupid days and it can't even fit into the stupid fridge without getting messed up.  Stupid.  And of course as I'm sitting there being emotional about the hot mess that's in my fridge, C is trying to be rational and explain that I learned something valuable, and that it was good experience/practice... yaddah yaddah peanuts teacher face.  I know he meant well and that's one of the reasons I love him, but emotional me is a craptastic listener, so I'm afraid all of his words of wisdom were spent on the dogs (who were of course there for support - and to lick the frosting off the side of the fridge).

When all was said and done, the woman who ordered the cake was happy, I got to add money to the baking jar, and hopefully you all got a laugh from the mental image of me sitting on the floor covered in whipped cream icing in front of an open fridge cursing at an inanimate object.

Pictures!


In the fridge:


I know it's Sunday, and I'm supposed to post about cupcakes, but hopefully this post will do.  I did make the cupcakes, but it's time for me to log off and get ready for the work week, so I'll post about them later.  But in the meantime, here's what they look like:


Enjoy!

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Full Sheet Cake Adventure: Part 1

So, about 2 weeks ago I got my first full sheet cake order.  One of C's co-workers is organizing a birthday party for her mother's 80th birthday, which means this cake is kind of a big deal.  Other than being totally excited, I was mostly nervous.  I'd never done a cake of that size before, so not only did I have no clue how much batter I was going to have to make, I didn't even have a pan that could make a cake that large.  What's that mean?  A trip to my favorite store ever, Cake Art! (http://cakeart.com/store/default.asp)  (side note for my fellow bakers - if you don't have a specialty baking store that you use, it's totally worth the effort to find one!)  Now I know the site doesn't look like much (And if I'm being honest, neither does the outside of the store - for my fellow Northern VA-ers, it reminds me of a sketchy, hole in the wall place somewhere along Rt. 1), but if you can get past the feeling of "dear lord I might die if I get out of the car" it's totally worth it.

The inside of the store is kind of cramped, but down each aisle there are shelves upon shelves of anything and everything you could possibly want for baking or candy making.  I'm seriously like a kid with ADD off their meds in that store.  They have every possible color of gel coloring, petal glitter, and candy melt that you can think of.  They have cake boxes, candy boxes, molds, and especially cake pans.  In order to make the sheet cake, I needed a ginormous pan.  Any old 13 x 9 pan just wasn't going to cut the mustard.  That brings me to the new love of my life:  My Big Daddy cake pan.  It's a 12 x 18" anodize aluminum pan and NOTHING sticks to it.  I mean I took the cake out of the oven last night and about 5 minutes later plopped it out onto the cooling rack.  A bakers wet dream, right? 

It's a sexy pan and I <3 it.

Coming soon.... Part 2: Batter Battle

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Cupcake Sunday: Apple Pecan Cupcakes

So the book (and my title) are big fat lairs.  This week's "cupcake" (and I use that term loosely) is totally a muffin.  Not only does it use a muffin method for combining the ingredients, but it has no frosting! Not even a glaze over the top that's trying really really hard to constitute an icing.  Sad.

This week's "cupcake" is of the Apple Pecan persuasion.


The first, and most time consuming, step for this one was peeling, coring, and coarsely grating granny smith apples. Combine that with some self rising flour, pecans, cinnamon, milk, eggs, and melted butter and viola! Muffins... er.. cupcakes.



If you like pecans, these are the cupcakes for you.  The apple doesn't lend as much flavor as I expected from a granny smith, so it's more of a pecan cupcake that is kept moist by the use of grated apple.  The book recommended serving them with yogurt or whipped cream, but C and I opted to have them with apple butter.  The cinnamony sweetness was a really good complement to the mild nutty cake.

 
I could see maybe making a cinnamon whipped cream to serve with them, or maybe even a cinnamon butter... mmm... cinnamon butter... maybe I should get on that...

Hope everyone had a great Easter, and I'll be posting about my next cake adventure soon!

Friday, April 2, 2010

Easter Came Early

And I'm back!  So this is what I did last weekend...

That's right... she's a drag queen... and we were eating brunch.  AMAZING.

And now that I've spent most of my week recovering from a weekend filled with Bridal showers and Bachelorette parties, it's about time for a new post!

A few weeks ago I got an order for a kid friendly Easter cake.  The client was having an Easter egg hunt for her daughter and some of her friends.  I tossed around the idea of doing a bunny shaped cake, or attempting to carve out an Easter Egg shape, but since I was going to have to do the work on a week night, I decided to go for a simpler double layer 9in round that had a bunny in a basket filled with Easter eggs.  This is the cake that I got my idea from:

It was a cake that was on the Wilton website.  I decided to pipe the center rabbit instead of use a color flow icing technique (technique that creates those crunchy candy pieces that we all loved as kids... or at least that I always loved so much as a kid that my bother and I would come to blows over who got the biggest piece), partly because I've never done it before and didn't want to screw up a cake I was being paid to do, and partly because I was just lazy.  So here's what mine ended up looking like:

And a little brighter:


 I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  I wish the paws were a little different, I wasn't super happy with the color of the basket, and I couldn't get the grass to work around the eggs because of the frosting I was using, but the client seemed to love it.  I will say that cream cheese icing is MUCH harder to decorate with than buttercream, so given that I think it came out rockin!

Happy Early Easter!