Rose Red Velvet Cake

The origins of the red velvet cake are shrouded in mystery. That's the only reliable thing I learned when I tried to figure out who thought it was good idea to bake a cake that is a color not found in nature and why. There's one story that's clearly false, but which explains why this cake is sometimes called the Waldorf Astoria cake. This urban legend has a woman asking for the recipe of the fabulous cake she'd just eaten at the Waldorf Astoria restaurant. When she found she'd been billed some exorbitant amount for the recipe, she decided to get even by broadcasting the recipe to everyone she knew. (The same story was going around about some chocolate chip cookies a while back. It never really made any sense).
A more plausible origin comes from the fact that cocoa used to be a lighter, rosier color. With the advent of darker, Dutch-processed cocoa, chocolate cakes took on a different hue, and people started adding red food coloring to try to replicate the original color. This story explains why the current red velvet cake almost always contains cocoa. Some recipes have enough cocoa to make it a real chocolate cake. Rose's recipe contains only a teaspoon of cocoa--just a "suspicion," as she says.

Rose also gives a variation using a quarter of a cup of cocoa. My mother used to make something she called red devil's food cake, which is apparently a distant relative of red velvet cake, but it was a definite chocolate cake, which the velvet version is usually not.

Dumping an entire bottle of red food coloring into a bowl of egg whites and vanilla was disconcerting, to put it mildly. Remember the Red Dye No. 2 scare? You probably don't, children, because you're all so young. But I do. Red Dye No. 2 caused cancer in lab rats, and everyone got really scared. Then it was banned in 1976. Everyone felt very virtuous until they noticed that food was suddenly starting to look very weird because we were so accustomed to having red dye in everything. That made me wonder what we use now. It is, according to Wikipedia, Red Dye No. 40 And just in case you think you're home free now that evil Red Dye No. 2 has been de-listed, you can find many articles on the internet about the evils of Red Dye No. 40. (If you click on this link, you'll find an article that begins, "The food in your refrigerator could make your child, or you, psychotic.")
I didn't see any signs that this cake made me, or anyone else who ate it, psychotic, at least no more than usual, but if you're worried about this kind of thing, you could substitute beet juice. (The recipe's directions tell you how to do this, but it's a lot more trouble than going to the grocery store and buying a bottle of red dye).
Rose's red velvet cake is unique, I believe, in that it does not use vinegar and baking soda. Instead, it uses just buttermilk and baking powder; Rose says using only baking powder "employ[s] the ful acidity of the buttermilk, making vinegar unnecessary." Because I've never had another red velvet cake, I can't compare this version to ones made with vinegar and baking soda, but I can say that it has a nice tang as it is, so I think vinegar might take it over the tanginess line.


Rose's recipe uses a mixture of oil and butter, for both flavor and moistness, while most traditional recipes call for shortening.

It is very, VERY red, both in its unbaked state, and as baked.

The frosting is Rose's riff on a simple cream cheese icing--the trick is that it has white chocolate instead of powdered sugar, which sweetens it as well as giving it some subtle depth of flavor.

Cream cheese frostings are often used for this kind of cake, but the very most traditional frosting seems to be something called "cooked flour" frosting, the first step of which is to cook flour and milk together until thickened. Okay, maybe this is good, but I've rarely read a recipe that has made me not want to try it as much as this one does.
My tasting panel consisted of our friends Greg and Barbara, in Minnesota from D.C.

I thought maybe that since D.C. is sort of southern, they'd know about red velvet cake, but they didn't. They were stupefied when they saw the color, and even more stupefieid when I told them about the bottle of food coloring. We had already spent a good part of the evening talking about The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, which we'd all read. I think Pollan probably doesn't whole-heartedly endorse using massive amounts of food coloring. But Greg and Barbara were good sports and took their tasting panel duties very seriously. There was no conversation during the first thoughtful bite. Then Greg said, "I wish it weren't so--RED." We actually ended up closing our eyes while we ate the cake, because we all felt that the color was somehow misleading our taste buds. And the more we ate it, the more we ended up liking it. Both Greg and Barbara asked for seconds, and really warmed to it. I'm usually the most critical taster because I always want perfection. I think I overbaked it by perhaps two minutes. At 25 minutes, the tester came out with no batter on it, but it was colored red. I baked it for another five minutes and by that time, it was starting to come away from the side. I believe it would have been a bit moister had I not been afraid of an underdone red cake. The texture is neither as light as, say, a chiffon cake nor as dense as a pound cake, but somewhere in between. I would make it again--but not with a bottle of food coloring.


TASTING PANEL
Greg: "I wish it weren't so red, but I like it a lot. The frosting is especially good, not overly sweet and not overly thick."
Barbara: "There's just a faint taste of chocolate, but it's there. It improves a lot, the more I ate of it. I asked for seconds, and I didn't have any intention of doing that."
Jim: "It had a little tartness to it that I liked. It was a little dry compared to the coconut cake. [Jim is one who doesn't like coconut, but the coconut seduction cake has suddenly become his new gold standard.] It was a lot more red than I expected."

Plum Round Ingots

These little cakelets are so delicious! And if your eye-hand coordination is better than mine, yours can be really lovely, as they are in the book, with the overlapping plum slices making a perfect rose.
These little round versions of financiers look exactly like little fruit tarts in the cookbook, and I couldn't quite figure out how it was all going to work out, but it did.
Although I think I complained about all the steps involved in making financiers when I made the ones with cacao nibs, I've decided that they're really quite simple. The beurre noisette is the only thing that stops me from saying they're easy-peasy, because that is a little time-consuming. Because it freezes indefinitely, according to Rose, I decided to clarify and brown a whole pound of butter this time.

I've never seen so much butter melting away. The sight of this huge pot o' butter made Jim question my sanity, or at least my ability to follow directions: "Are you sure you're supposed to use this much butter?" But now I have three little plastic tubs of beurre noisette in my freezer, which is a lot, considering that I'd never even heard of it a month ago.


I liked the chocolate financiers a lot, especially the caramelized cacao nibs, but I think that chocolate almost does a disservice to the financier concept, because you lose the subtle flavors of the browned butter and the toasted almonds in the batter.

It's a snap to put all the ingredients together in the food processor, and then pour the batter into six individual tartlet pans. (The directions specify 3 7/8" pans. The only ones I could find were 4-inch, but I think that's close enough).

They can be topped with blueberries or currants, as well as plums, but I used plums because they're called plum ingots, not blueberry ingots.

I got all the fruit from the same bin, but that was the only red one, so my tarts don't all look the same.


As I was struggling to make my plum roses look like the plum roses in the book, I recalled taking an aptitude test in the third grade. The woman who gave the test told me that I had an extraordinarily low score in eye-hand coordination for "someone of normal intelligence." She told me never to work in a factory. I remembered that because I had a mental picture of how I wanted it to look, and what I ended up with didn't exactly match that picture.

Even the powdered sugar looks a little forlorn, instead of the delicate sprinkling that I envisioned. But you know what? I don't care because these were so fabulous. In fact, as I licked my fingers after finishing it, I thought to myself that what I really, really wanted to do was to eat another one. And they're not tiny, either. Jim told me to go ahead--he wouldn't tell. Then he taunted me by having a second one himself. But I'm made of sterner stuff.
TASTING PANEL:

Sarah: "There's a tartness I like. And I like the texture of the cake. The almonds give it a really subtle nuttiness."

James: "I've never had anything like this before! It's not too sweet, and it's got a really good texture."

Jim: "The crust has a really good flavor--just the right amount of sweetness. And it doesn't fall apart."

Karen: "I could eat a lot of these."

--And that's the way it is, Sunday, July 19, 2009.

Heavenly Seduction Coconut Cake - RECIPE

I'm so happy to give you another recipe--this time for an easy-to-make, truly delicious coconut cake. It's got coconut four or five ways, depending on whether you use the optional coconut cream powder in the whipped cream. The cake itself has canned cream of coconut, coconut extract, and desiccated coconut, which is just a $10 word for dried coconut. The whipped cream frosting is topped with sweetened grated coconut and flavored with coconut cream powder. (I didn't have the coconut cream powder; it was delicious without it, and might very well be even more delicious with it).
The cake uses only egg whites, so I could use up some of the leftover egg whites I had after making the tiramisu. (One of the handy things about this book, by the way, is an appendix telling you which cakes are made with egg yolks only and which are made with egg whites only.)

The egg whites, some of the cream of coconut, and the extracts are mixed up and set aside.

Then the sugar and desiccated coconut are whirred around in a food processor until the coconut gets very fine. This gets mixed in with the rest of the ingredients, and then the egg white mixture is added. I told you it was easy.
It makes a nice, thick batter.

And it bakes in about 30 minutes, with no problems.

The whipped cream recipe doesn't call for any sugar, but I added about a tablespoon because I wasn't using the coconut cream powder. The sweetened coconut gave it enough sweetness so that it probably didn't need any extra, but I thought that Jim might laboriously pick off each little shred of coconut, since coconut is right up there with cilantro in his list of foods that do not improve his disposition. I figured that when Rose called this a "seduction" cake, she wasn't thinking of people who don't like coconut and how unlikely they are to be seduced by coconut.

Really, the only thing even faintly difficult about this recipe is accumulating the five sources of coconut, and, of those five, only the desiccated coconut and the coconut cream powder might present a problem.
Woody, Rose's assistant and friend, gave me some desiccated coconut so I wouldn't have to order it myself. I thought it was out of the kindness of his heart, but it turned out that he wanted some of the cake for himself. "Marie," he said, "let's just say you don't want anything bad to happen. And nothing will if you leave a piece of cake on the front porch for me." "What time, Woody?" I asked, tremblingly. I'll admit it--I was scared. A protection racket based on cake? I never suspected.
"We like to do these things at night--for obvious reasons," he said. "Nobody's going to get hurt if you follow directions. And I know you have some trouble with following directions, so listen up, capisce?" "Capisce?" I thought to myself. "Where's the Woody I thought I knew?" At 10:00 p.m., sharp, I put two pieces of cake on the front porch. I left a note: "Take two slices, please. I don't want any trouble." I turned the light on, and went upstairs to bed. It was a sleepless night. I tossed and turned. Finally, I crept downstairs and looked on the porch. The cake was gone. I was safe. For now.


TASTING PANEL:Laurel: "Interesting combination of textures with the whipped cream, flaked coconut, and just a bit of coconut texture in the cake."
Karen: "I've always liked very sweet desserts, but Rose has won me over with her not-as-sweet, more subtle approach to baking. And this is the best one yet."
Jim:: "All I can say is I had two pieces and I don't like coconut."
Jan: "This goes down real easy." [This is a compliment, for those of you who don't speak Minnesotan].

Heavenly Coconut Seduction Cake

Oven Temperature: 350°F/175˚C
Baking Time: 30 to 40 minutes

Serves: 8 to 10

INGREDIENTS
3 large egg whites, room temperature: 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons
(3 fluid ounces) (3.2 ounces, 90 grams)
Canned cream of coconut (NOT coconut cream): 2/3 cup, divided (5.3 fluid ounces)
(6.7 ounces, 190 grams) (processed in food processor before measuring)
Pure vanilla extract: 3/4 teaspoon
Ccoconut extract: 3/4 teaspoon
Superfine sugar: 1/2 cup minus 1 tablespoon (3 ounces, 88 grams)
Desiccated unsweetened grated coconut: 1/2 cup (1.2 ounces, 35 grams)
Cake flour: (see note) 2 cups (sifted into the cup and leveled off) (7 ounces, 200 grams)
Baking powder: 2 1/4 teaspoons (10.7 grams)
Salt: 1/2 teaspoon (3 grams)
Unsalted butter (65 to 75˚F/19 to 23˚C) (8 tablespoons, 1 stick (4 ounces, 113 grams)

Equipment
A 9 by 2-inch cake pan, encircled with a cake strip, bottom coated with shortening, topped with a parchment round, then coated with baking spray with flour.
Preheat the Oven
20 minutes or longer before baking, set an oven rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 350°F/175˚C.
Mix the Liquid Ingredients
In a medium bowl whisk the egg whites, 3 tablespoons of the cream of coconut, the vanilla, and the coconut extract just until lightly combined.
Mix the Batter
In a food processor, process the sugar and coconut until the coconut is powder fine.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the flat beater, mix the sugar mixture, flour, baking powder, and salt on low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter and remaining cream of coconut. Mix on low speed until the dry ingredients are moistened. Raise the speed to medium and beat for 1 1/2 minutes. Scrape down the sides. Starting on medium-low speed, gradually add the egg white mixture in two batches, beating for 30 seconds after each addition to incorporate the ingredients and strengthen the structure. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, and smooth the surface evenly.
Bake the Cake
Bake 30 to 40 minutes or until a wire cake tester inserted near the center comes out clean and just starts coming away from the sides of the pan. It will be under-baked in the center if it is removed before it starts shrinking. The cake is so fluffy it will not spring back readily when pressed in the center. Because it is so wondrously tender, the top will dip slightly on cooling.
Cool the Cake
Let the cake cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes. Run a small metal spatula between the sides of the pan and the cake and invert it onto a wire rack that has been coated with cooking spray. To prevent splitting, reinvert the cake so that the top side is up, and cool completely before serving.

Note: I love the flavor and incredibly tender texture offered by the cream of coconut but it requires cake flour to prevent serious dipping in the center. The cake is also very delicious with coconut milk and does not dip in the center. To substitute, use 2/3 cup/5.3 fluid ounces (5.7 ounces/163 grams) canned coconut milk (stirred well before measuring). Be sure to increase the sugar to 1 cup/7 ounces/200 grams and the baking powder to 2 1/2 teaspoons. You can also use the same weight of bleached all-purpose flour instead of cake flour (the volume is only 1 3/4 cups).

Whipped Cream
Makes: 3 cups/13 ounces/370 grams
INGREDIENTS
Heavy cream, cold: 1 1/2 cups (12 fluid ounces) (12.3 ounces, 348 grams)
optional: Powdered coconut cream: 1/4 cup (1 ounce, 32 grams)
For the Topping: Sweetened flaked coconut: 1 cup (3 ounces, 85 grams)
In the bowl of a stand mixer, place the heavy cream and optional powdered coconut cream, and refrigerate for at least 15 minutes. (Chill the whisk beater alongside the bowl.)
Beat the mixture only until soft peaks form when the beater is raised or the cream mounds softly when dropped from a spoon.)
Mound the cream onto the cake and sprinkle evenly with the coconut. Serve immediately. Be prepared to swoon.

Highlights for Success
Cream of coconut contains solid coconut oil and needs to be processed in the food processor until smooth, or thoroughly whisked to break it up into small pieces.
If you want to top the cake with whipped cream more than 30 minutes before serving, you will need to add 1/2 teaspoon of Cobasan before beating or use the gelatin stabilized whipped cream (page 00) to enable it to stand for up to several hours at room temperature without watering out or see cornstarch stabilized whipped cream, which will keep it from watering out for 24 hours refrigerated.
Powdered coconut cream is available in Eastern food supply stores such as Kalustyan.
Understanding
This coconut cake is not as moist when held for several days as the coconut layer cake because of the slightly drying effect of the dried coconut and the low liquid/high fat content of the cream of coconut. The grated coconut, however, gives it extra coconut flavor and the higher fat content meltingly tender texture.

Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake

I brought this coffee cake with me to a neighborhood July 4th brunch, so it was actually the first cake of two cakes I ate at different July 4 festivities, but I actually made the tiramisu on July 3, so I blogged about it first.
What is not to like about a sour cream-apple coffee cake? It's an old standard for a good reason--everyone loves it. And it's easy enough to make that you can sleep in, read the paper and have a cup of coffee, mix it up and bake it, and let it cool--all in time to take it to a brunch.

This may be the closest I've come to so far to a cake that you could decide to make with ingredients you have at hand. It uses just one Granny Smith apple, so you can make it all year long, and if you've got walnuts and sour cream, you're all set.
The cinnamon crumb topping is actually both the topping and the filling--
one-half cup of walnuts, brown and white sugar, and cinnamon are reserved for the filling.

The flour and butter are added to the rest of the walnut-sugar mixture and this mixture is set aside, refrigerated, for the topping.
Layer some of the lovely, thick, sour cream batter in the bottom of a cake pan.

Sprinkle with the reserved filling and place a layer of apples on top of the filling.


Then top with the rest of the batter.

When I put it in the oven, Jim said, "Aren't you forgetting something?"
"Aha!" I said. "I am forgetting nothing!"
He thought that I had forgotten the topping, which was chilling in the refrigerator, but the clever twist on this coffee cake is that it's baked until it's about half done and THEN the topping is added. This way, the topping doesn't sink into the coffee cake and it also doesn't get too brown. And Jim will never know whether I actually forgot or not.
After 30 minutes, the cake is maybe 2/3 done.

You're supposed to form some of the crumb topping into tiny circular blobs, but I got bored with trying to form blobs of 1/4-inch diameter, so most of the topping has no man-made crumbles. I don't think was the wiser.

Can you count the number of crumbles that I laboriously pre-formed? I thought not.
I didn't check this recipe against the sour cream coffee cake in The Cake Bible, but it's certainly similar, except for the part about baking it for a while before adding the crumble. When I made The Cake Bible coffee cake, however, the bottom got too brown. This one turned out perfect. There are also variations - peach-cinnamon and blueberry-cinnamon, and it would be hard to go wrong with either of these.
But no more coffee cake for me--I have many, many cakes left to bake, and I can't afford to look back.

Tiramisu

After making mistakes in my last two cakes, I decided to change my attitude from a teeth-clenched "must be more careful" to a blithe zen-ness: "If you try to aim for it, you are turning away from it."
So I read the directions twice, assembled the ingredients, and tried not to aim for perfection. The result? A perfect tiramisu.

I made a delicious tiramisu once before, many years ago, but I lost the recipe and have never found one that sounded as good as the lost one--until I read the recipe in Heavenly Cakes. Its flavors are pure and uncomplicated, and each bite is a marvel.
You start by making a batter with egg yolks, sugar, and sweet marsala.

You whisk this mixture over simmering water, whisking away for five or ten minutes. The old obsessive Marie would have fretted about scrambling the eggs. The new carefree Marie just stayed in the moment and enjoyed the whisking.

Into the custard go two cups of mascarpone and a cup of whipped cream.

I got the mascarpone at Broder's Cucina Italiana. Two cups cost about $20, so it's not a purchase you'd want to make every day, or every week, but I've tasted the mascarpone you can buy at a supermarket, and if you're making tiramisu, the quality of which largely rests on the creaminess and subtle sweetness of the mascarpone, it's worth the extravagance. (Well, that's how I justified it anyway).
Meanwhile, Jim was making two cups of espresso. I could have used instant espresso powder, but I was glad when he volunteered to make real espresso for me. I could also have gone to the local coffee shop and ordered a whole bunch of espresso, but that would probably have cost more than the mascarpone.

Rose has a recipe for ladyfingers in this cookbook, and I suppose I'll make them eventually, but for this recipe, since they were going to be soaked in espresso syrup, I bought them. "Soaked" isn't really the right word--they have to pick up the espresso flavor but keep their shape. No more than one second per side!

You can see that the first one was soaked a little too long and started to disintegrate, but the second one is just right.

After the first layer of espresso-imbued ladyfingers, half the custard mixture goes on top; then another row of ladyfingers and the rest of the custard. The custard is a little runny, but it firms up nicely overnight. In fact, you can make this recipe up to three days ahead, so it's a perfect idea for entertaining. All it takes is a sprinkle of cocoa when you're ready to serve it.

I brought this fabulous dessert to a July 4 cookout potluck. The other desserts were more midwestern in nature--to be precise, they were "bars," the quintessential prairie end-of-the-meal. We had Almond Joy bars (chocolate and coconut) and key lime bars. They were both good, but very sweet. The tiramisu was not sweet, but very rich. Two women asked me for the recipe. I hesitated, trying to think if I could remember the specifics, and then one of them asked me if it was hard. "I only do easy," she said. "No, not really. First you beat eight egg yolks over a pan of simmering water...." "You mean, like a double boiler?" she asked. "Pretty much," I said. "Oh, no, I said I do easy. That means I don't do double boilers." Please don't let a fear of double boilers keep you away from this recipe. It's every bit as good--probably better--than the tiramisu of yore that I could never re-create. In fact, if someone from Venice person dropped by, I wouldn't hesitate to make this tiramisu for them. They'd probably say, "I wish I could get this at home."

Banana Refrigerator Cake with Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting

This cake turned out just fine, and was the hit of our neighborhood Friday Happy Hour, which we do every Friday from Memorial Day to Labor Day. But allow me a few minutes of feeling sorry for myself first. It seems impossible for me to make a cake without making a few stupid mistakes. So far, the cakes have been excellent, even with the mistakes--but I want a PERFECT cake, not just a good one.
I decided on this cake because I had a supply of overripe bananas.

As a somewhat crotchety aside, I don't understand why fruit has to have cute labels on it, as if the fruit is talking to you--almost stalking you, really. This banana is supposedly saying, "Psst! I'm full of vitamins." I don't like to pretend that fruit has speaking capabilities and, at the same time, is begging me to eat it.

This banana cake is in the "quick and easy" list, and this is a legitimate placement. I won't say that you can just whip it up with items that you always have on hand, unless you always have creme fraiche, turbinado sugar, white chocolate containing cocoa butter, and cream cheese on hand, but you don't have to special order anything either.
You mash the bananas.

Then process them with creme fraiche, eggs, lemon zest, and vanilla.

Then transfer it to a mixing bowl, and add the sugar. Easy enough, but here comes my first mistake. "Gradually add the [canola or safflower oil]...."

I emptied my bottle of canola oil and still needed a bit more neutral-flavored oil. I pulled out my jar of vegetable oil and added enough to get to the required 108 grams. When I pult the bottle down, I realized I had instead used olive oil. Now, I realize that on a scale of global catastrophes, this is not even on the chart. But still.... And then I yelled at poor Jim, who was innocently standing by with his camera. "Did you know I was using olive oil?" I demanded. "Well, uh, sure," he said, "the bottle says olive oil. I figured you wanted to use it." I was in no mood for that kind of reasoning, I can tell you.
And when I smelled the batter, I could smell only olive oil. It overpowered the bananas. Once again, I was on the verge of tossing everything and starting over, except that I had already run through my supply of ripe bananas. I had to just hope there were no super-tasters in the crowd.

It's a very thin batter, and I wasn't sure that it would actually turn into anything resembling a cake.

But it did. It was not quite as tall as the cake in the photograph. Maybe the olive oil? But it looked respectable.
Next came the "dreamy creamy" white chocolate frosting. That name is just a little too cute for me. I'd be OK with dreamy white chocolate or creamy white chocolate, but not both. So I just said it was white chocolate frosting. With the crowd I was hosting, calling something "dreamy creamy" would get you nothing but ridicule.
This frosting is another of the super-easy food processor frostings, like the peanut buttercream from the first recipe. All you do is mix melted white chocolalte, cream cheese, butter, creme fraiche, and a dab of almong extract in the food processor. Let me just say that unless you have the steady hands of a surgeon, you should not measure 1/8 teaspoon of almond extract over the mixing bowl. As you might surmise, if your hand slips, you may end up with considerably more than 1/8 teaspoon. As you might also surmise, my hand slipped. I probably added about a half-teaspoon to the frosting--not a killer amount, but about 4 times more than it should be. Oh well, I thought, maybe the almond extract will cover up the taste of the olive oil.


My Tasting Panel was my entire neighborhood, who first chastised me for "breaking the first rule of Happy Hours." "What rule?" I said. "The 'no baking' rule," they replied. "There is no such rule," I protested. Then, after they were done chastising me, they wanted more: "Why didn't you bake two, as long as you were baking?" These are difficult people to please.
They were extremely enthusiastic about both the cake and the frosting. When I said I wanted quotes to use in my blog, they said things like, "It's delicious." I asked for something more quotable. Joe looked thoughtful and said, "It is delicious, but if I were going to critique it, I might say there's just a touch too much almond flavoring in the frosting." I couldn't argue with him.
On a roll, Joe continued, "And, although it's very moist, I detected a slight note of chalkiness in the cake." The rest of the neighbors turned on Joe. "Are you crazy? Do you think she's going to bake more cakes for us if you tell her they're chalky? This is not a chalky cake!"
I was with Joe on the excess almond, but not on the chalkiness. Still, maybe he's another super taster. Or maybe my olive oil tastes like chalk.

Golden Lemon Almond Cake

Poor Jim. This was his Father's Day cake, and I screwed it up royally. It's not a hard cake to make. In fact, it has a place on the quick and easy list, and rightfully so. It's a simple butter cake, with the addition of sour cream, lemon oil, grated lemon rind, and ground almonds. And yet, I totally messed it up.
When Sarah walked in the door, I announced that I had ruined the cake. She was ecstatic. "Oh, that's great," she said, "Is it bad enough for Cakewrecks?" It is her goal for a cake of mine to be pictured on cakewrecks.com. I don't find this to be a particularly supportive goal.
When she looked at it, she was disappointed. "Mom, it doesn't look like a wreck at all, it's pretty!"

But when I showed her the seamy underbelly, she had to admit it wasn't so lovely.

Here's the problem. I had all the ingredients ready to put in at the right time, and I thought I had done that. When I re-read the ingredients after I'd finished mixing everything, I realized that I'd forgotten the sugar. I was disappointed because it meant that the sugar wouldn't be added at the right time, which I believed would affect the texture. But at least it would be added. So I scraped all the batter in the pan.

Then Jim asked, "When did the almonds go in?" Or that's what I thought he asked. He says he asked, "When do the almonds go in?" I said, "When they were supposed to go in." He thought I said, "When they're supposed to go in." Then, after I smoothed all the batter in the pan, I saw the ground almonds, still in the food processor. Which shows, I guess, that you shouldn't have two old deaf people working in the kitchen together. I dumped the nuts on top of the batter, and stirred them in, but I could see it wasn't going to work out that well.
This is my new NordicWare Bavaria cake pan.

I love its intricate design, which is prettier than the regular Bundt cake design. It also makes it harder to remove from the pan. I sprayed the pan heavily with Baker's Joy, but a few dabs of cake still clung to the pan when I inverted it.

When the cake comes out of the oven, you poke holes in the bottom, and brush on some easy-to-make lemon syrup (lemon juice and turbinado sugar). After ten minutes, you invert it and place it on a platter.
I decided to put it on a plate, and then transfer it to the serving platter later. DO NOT DO THIS. You would think I'd have learned about transferring a finished cake after the ginger cheesecake broke in half. But some people learn the hard way. The cake was firmly embedded in sticky lemon syrup, and did not want to be moved. I finally transferred it, but let's just say the transfer did not improve the cake's looks. I ran to the garden to cut some roses to put in the center so you could not see how the cake was on the verge of collapsing.

I wish that I weren't getting so much experience in disguising disasters.

The truly amazing thing is that, after all this, the cake was good! A definite, although not overpowering, lemon taste, a richness from the sour cream and butter, and a moist but not heavy texture.

(Lots of lemon flavor from two big tablespoons of grated lemon rind, plus lemon oil (courtesy of Woody), plus fresh lemon juice in the syrup).
I'm very curious to see what it would taste like if I made it the right way, and it may be the first cake that I repeat, because how could you not like a buttery almond lemon cake that is still delicious even if you make serial mistakes?

TASTING PANEL

Karen: "You made me think this was going to be awful, but it's really, really good."
Sarah: "This is the best cakewreck I've ever tasted!"
James: [big piece of cake in mouth] Gives thumbs up sign.
Jim: "Can I have the rest of it?"