Last Cake, Next Cake

I'm always surprised by the ingenuity of the Heavenly Cake Bakers. I'm such a rule-follower myself that daring - for me - would be using 57% cacao dark chocolate when the recipe called for 62%. Not that I've done such a scofflaw thing.
But you--you just blithely substitute white chocolate for part of the dark chocolate, or make them in square brownie pans instead of the requisite muffin pans.
Bungalow Barbara, this weeks's FEATURED BAKER is a good example of such direction-flouting daring. First, she cut the recipe in sixths because she wanted only two servings. Good for her--she didn't have to try to get 10 baby oblivions away from her sight so as not to give in to temptation, but she did have to divide everything in sixths. I call that impressive. Then she added raspberry liqueur to the cakes and to whipped cream and served them with a black raspberry puree (from black raspberries harvested from her own canes).

Barbara, her husband, and her cats, seem to lead a pretty idyllic life in her bungalow in Mazomanie, Wisconsin, a little village close to Madison, Wisconsin--famous for having the only de facto nude beach in Wisconsin (called Mazo Beach) and for being voted one of America's Coolest Small Towns. Lest you think that Barbara spends all her free time gamboling on the nude beach, my guess is that she doesn't have a lot of time to fritter away on such nonsense. Not only is she a Heavenly Cake Baker, but she's also a member of Tuesdays with Dorie, and she's already got Dorie's Cran-Apple Crisp posted on her blog.

I don't think next week's cake would work very well divided in sixths, but I could be wrong. The upcoming cake is the two-layer Woody's Lemon Luxury Layer Cake, with lemon curd filling and white chocolate buttercream. Its claim to fame, besides being the cake requested by Woody's t'ai chi sifu for his wedding, is that it uses 17 eggs (mostly yolks). Yes, 17. I expect a noticeable uptick in egg sales this week. Farmers won't know what to make of this break from the law of averages, but we'll understand what's going on. Save and freeze the egg whites for the angel food cake that will be coming up in January.
If you like lemon, do not be tempted to skip this wonderful cake. It doesn't have any unusual ingredients nor does it require odd-sized cake pans. You just need the courage to break 17 eggs.

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Two new cake bakers on the blogroll: Jennifer, my good blog friend, who has been baking cakes from The Cake Bible for many years (not that many, really). I know her as Evil Cake Lady, although she is not at all evil.
We've also added Joan. She has a brand new blog, and has, in fact, just posted her first blog entry ever.