Obviously blogging has not been a priority for the last six months, so this is my attempt to make up for it. Here's an overview of our amateur home pastry highlights from last year! How fitting that I should start with last February's Valentine's Day, since it is coming upon us again soon. Last year was Andris and my first V.D. as a couple. We had syphilis... uhh, I mean I made heart-shaped red velvet cupcakes with a raspberry filling and cream cheese frosting. And sprinkles! I used a fairly simple
red velvet cake recipe from the food network , which turned out great. I did not make the meringue topping suggested in the recipe, but instead went with a traditional cream cheese frosting made with whipped butter, whipped cream cheese, powdered sugar and madagascar vanilla. I wanted to get extra fancy, so I used an all-natural raspberry preserves for the filling, because I liked the idea of a bleeding heart.
Then, it was Andris' high school chum, Kerry's birthday, and she hosted a party at her apartment in Minneapolis where she goes to school. We made her a carrot cake because it sounds like her name. Her nickname is Ker, or at times it may also be Ker-Bear. The carrot cake recipe is a Devine original, Andris' dad's recipe in fact, with ground carrots and walnuts for texture, whole wheat flour for nutrition and heartiness, and cinnamon for flavor. I used the cream cheese frosting again, and toasted off some sweet coconut and pecans which were pressed into the sides. Cream cheese frosting doesn't hold up as well as buttercream, so it's hard to get a smooth smear. Using the coconut mixture alleviates this problem altogether. The cake was two layers with cream cheese frosting as filling in the center.
Here's a little shameless self-promotion. I was pretty ding-dang proud of the birthday card I drew for her, which turned out to be a three paneled comic, kind of.
Carrot gives Bear cake.
Bear is not interested in cake. Carrot is sad.
Bear eats Carrot instead. Carrot is dead.
The bear is kind of a rip-off of
Gloomy Bear,
but I drew this thing in the car on the way to MPLS, so I just went with something quick and easy.
The next birthday cake was in May, and it was the 81st birthday of Andris' Grandmother. She's Latvian, so she is called "Uma" in Latvian, but her name is really Dzidra. Andris's mom asked us to do this cake. Uma likes very dark chocolate and black raspberries, so I used Hershey's dark cocoa powder in the chocolate cake batter, and black raspberry jam for the filling. It is constructed with chocolate buttercream frosting, and then coated in dark chocolate ganache with fresh raspberries and white chocolate for embellishments. I gave the fresh raspberries chocolate buttercream leaves, but they kind of got lost on the dark ganache background. Although she is very hard to please, she seemed to like the cake very much.
I forget when exactly this next cake was made, but it was a "just for fun" cake. I was experimenting with yellow cake recipes and vanilla buttercream recipes. I was also experimenting with copious amounts of text and flowers, as you can see.
I had some pumpkin puree from the previous year's Thanksgiving pies, so in an effort to use it up I made pumpkin cream cheese muffins. The cream cheese filling turned out really well, but the muffin batter was not the greatest. It was a little too slimy? for me. Perhaps because I used too much pumpkin puree, or the humidity of summertime, or both factors contributed to the muffins going bad very quickly. I may try experimenting with pumpkin bread batter again for tea bread this year during Thanksgiving instead of doing pumpkin pies.
Time for another birthday cake! For Andris' birthday in July we went to
American Player's Theater to see A Winter's Tale. Part of the fun of APT is the outdoor venue, and most people picnic before the play, which typically starts just before sundown. I made a beef tenderloin dinner, followed by Andris' favorite dessert, cheesecake. He also really loves bright colors, so I did a rainbow, and flavored it with tutti frutti candy flavoring. The topping was straight up whipped cream sweetened with powdered sugar.
As I mentioned already, Andris looooooves cheesecake, so we really delved into cheesecake making in 2009. We started with traditional graham cracker crust and plain cheesecake and worked our way up. We tried all kinds of variations, primarily relying on the
Junior's method, since we purchased
this book. Junior's basic cheesecake uses a cake batter crust made with eggs and flour, and a waterbath method for baking. We found out quickly that the waterbath really helps regulate the heat in the oven and the cheesecake bakes more evenly, however, we are still battling with the foil wrap on the springform pan so that it doesn't leak and leave the crust soggy.
At first, Andris was the "crust man" and he played with all kinds of ideas, including using cookie dough batters for crusts. We discovered that in some cases it helps to bake the crust before adding filling, but in other cases you don't have to. We also discovered that the hardest part of baking a cheesecake is waiting for it to set before digging in! Andris made some major investments in our little "business," too, last year, including this wonderful piece of equipment:
The Kitchenaid Mixer! He got the 6 quart professional model, and of course, in true Andris style, ALL the attachments. Dough hook, meat grinder, juicer, ice cream bowl, pasta making attachments, the whole she-bang. We have had so much fun with it so far, and it will continue to inspire our home cooking and baking for years to come!! In addition, Andris went all out at Vanilla Bean, our go-to pastry supply store in Madison and bought an array of professional food color and candy flavorings which make our cheesecake ideas fun and crazy! (As referenced in the tutti-frutti rainbow birthday cheesecake.) If you know Andris, you know how much he likes things that are fun and crazy, and sugary, and bright-colored, and decadent.
The cheesecake above is blueberry flavored with strawberry swirl in the top, using a strawberry sauce we made from fresh strawberry puree, which is also drizzled on top of the whipped cream. Andris created some really great cheesecakes that I don't have pictures of (boo!), like the cherry cordial heart-shaped cheesecake which he surprised me with for one of our month-a-versaries! He bought a huge heart-shaped springform pan, made a chocolate cookie crust and a red cherry-flavored cheesecake, and then covered it in ganache, hence the cordial reference. Oh my me, this was a delicious cheesecake. Another one he did was hot pink and watermelon flavored. He has been experimenting with building layers of cake, fudge and cheesecake into a skyscraper but it is going to take some trial and error. I'm thinking Andris' parents have some pictures of these cakes, since they are our guinea pig taste testers, so if they send some photos my way, I'll be sure to post them. Andris is very adventurous, and I love how my traditionalism and desire to learn foundation baking techniques blend with his inventiveness to create some really fun and delicious creations. Our biggest cheesecake hit of the year, I think was the chocolate peanut butter layer cheesecake you see here:
It is as delicious as it looks! We also experimented with different sized cheesecakes to make some individual servings and minis. The first time we did minis we didn't use liner cups and we had to eat them out of the pan with a spoon, but we tried a whole variety of different crust and batter combinations. We used leftover filling that didn't fit in our layer cheesecakes.
The second time we did minis we used some cute mini muffin liners and a water bath. They turned out perfectly.
We also tried making 3 inch cheesecakes. These were with a graham cracker crust which turned out really well. Everyone who tried them was impressed! We are really starting to feel like we are perfecting our cheesecake making abilities! It is so much fun to please people with cheesecake!
You may have noticed the 3 inch cherry lattice pies in the picture above?
This brings me to another major event of the year: cherry picking in Door County.
We hand- picked, and hand-pitted our cherries using this little guy:
And of course we made cherry pie-filling with it. We were trying to research ways to make the cherry-pie filling without using corn starch, and we found some info on agar agar, but we decided to go ahead and use corn starch and a little almond extract to mask the corn starch flavor after getting some advice from a clerk at
U-Bake, another of our favorite Madison baking outlets. We still want to experiment with agar agar, but the almond extract helped make our cherry pie filling taste super delicious! It smelled so good while boiling the cherries in sugar water, and when the pies were coming out of the oven. Of course, we made our pie crust from scratch. I like to use
Paula Dean's pie crust recipe. It turns out perfect every time, (despite the fact that I over-baked the pie you see below and the edges are burnt), and the dough is fairly easy to work with for pie crust. I could use a little more practice on the lattice technique, however!!
And of course, we couldn't resist making a cherry cheesecake. We put the filling in the bottom, but it tastes good smothered on top of the cheesecake too. I decided we should definitely do a graham cracker crust for this one, and I even put some graham cracker crust mix up on the sides of the cake. I love that flavor combo of the cherry filling, the cheesecake filling and the sugary crunchy graham cracker crust. Classic.
One of many things missing from this 2009 rundown is Christmas Cookies! And, I think I will save that for the next post. We wouldn't want to over-stimulate those tastebuds!! Hopefully that post will come sooner than six months from now, right! Well, thanks for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed La Patisserie 2009! Stay tuned for Christmas Cookies next!
