Baking With Dorie: Apple Coconut Family Cake

There's something so rustic & comforting about the term 'family cake'. And I expected to like this one very much because of the unlikely combination of apples and coconut. As usual, I wasn't disappointed. 

I halved the recipe & used just one large apple for the filling. It may have been too little because my cakes were airy & moist whereas other BWD bakers described theirs as slightly 'mushy'. 

I used unsweetened, finely shredded coconut which lent a nice chewiness to these cakes & coconut was the dominant flavor here because I had subbed water for the rum. Once baked, I brushed my cakes with very little thinned orange marmalade because that is what I had on hand.

Verdict: very simple & delicious cake which, if given the chance to sit overnight, will taste even better the next day. Although this might be more of a 'cake for adults' as Tina said because even though my daughter 'helped' me make it (she layered the apples on top and then sprinkled them with sugar) she didn't quite seem to like it very much. Here's a look at one of her creations: 

If you'd like to get the recipe for this cake, please head over to Mia's wonderful blog Bright Morning Star, or to page 214 of Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan. 

Next up, we're baking Coffee Break Muffins. If you'd like to join our baking challenge, please drop me an email at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

Baking With Dorie: Lots-Of-Ways-Banana-Cake

One of the very first kinds of cake that I ever made, years and years ago, was Banana Cake. 

It was out of a book that my best friend and I co-owned. Or she owned it and I borrowed it so often, that I began to think of it as my own. To cut a long story short, I was bitten by the baking bug back then and so, feeling over-confident and using my newly acquired 'skill', I made banana cake to take to school.

Everyone seemed to love it. Except a smart-mouth who said, 'You couldn't have made this. And it surely doesn't contain any real bananas: it's just banana extract'. How mean!

In the years between then and now, I've made banana cakes and banana bread dozens of times. But never without thinking of that smart-ass comment.

And I thought of it today as well, while I assembled the ingredients for this weeks Baking With Dorie challenge. 

I chose this weeks' challenge as well and I am so glad that I picked this recipe. Let me just say I love the dense sweetness of this cake.

I halved the recipe and made a single layer, dusted with icing sugar. 

The moment I smelled this cake baking, I regretted not making the whole recipe and smothering it with chocolate whipped cream as I had originally planned. 

It is wonderful on its own but begs for a scoop of ice cream.

It does seem a bit lonely out there on its own, don't you think? 

This cake is really good. 

Contains real bananas. 


Toasted coconut too ;-)

Lots-Of-Ways-Banana-Cake

(Pages 205 & 206, Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan)

2 2/3 cups all purpose flour

1 1/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1.5 sticks butter

1 cup light brown sugar

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

2 ripe bananas

1/2 cup coconut milk

1 cup sweetened , shredded coconut. preferably toasted.

Whisk the flour, baking soda, salt and nutmeg in a medium bowl. 

In a large bowl, beat the butter till creamy. Add the sugars and beat for a few minutes. 

Add the eggs and vanilla. The mixture will be silky smooth - add banana and lower speed. 

Mix in the flour and coconut milk alternatively, beginning and ending with the flour. Stir in toasted coconut. 

Pour into two 9" pans and bake for 45 mins. Cool for 5 minutes in pan before inverting on wire rack to cool. 

Dorie suggests lots of ways to serve this cake. I chose the simplest possible & dusted with confectioners sugar. 

The next challenge will be posted on April 26th, and fellow blogger Elizabeth has picked The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart (pages 331 & 332) for the next recipe. 

If you'd like to join the challenge, please drop me an email. 

Cake Balls/Pops - Tips & Tricks

The tutorial by Pioneer Woman doesn't leave any gaps and is an excellent guide for making cake balls/cake pops. 

However, here are some things that I learned along the way which helped me: 

- If you use a recipe for a very moist cake, you don't need the equivalent of a can of frosting like Bakerella suggests. She uses a cake mix + 1 can of frosting. I didn't use either a mix or ready made frosting so all I needed was a couple of tablespoons of frosting per 9"x13" cake. 

Start by adding 2 tbsp of frosting at a time. Stop when it feels right: the cake should just come together in a moist (but not wet) dough-like ball. There shouldn't be any loose crumbs and it shouldn't fall apart. It should hold well together. 

- Use a melon-baller to get bite-sized cake pops. (I thought of this after I was done hand-rolling all of my not-quite-identically-sized 400 cake balls :P )

- It helps to refrigerate the cake balls overnight.Or at least a couple of hours.

- If you can't get candy melts or, quite simply, don't like the taste - use either ganache or melted chocolate for dipping. Both will work fine. Candy melts might give a smoother look, though.

- I am not as patient as Bakerella and so, even though she recommends dipping one cake ball at a time into a small bowl of melted, warm candy melts, I had to make 400 and needed to work faster. So I dipped 4-5 at a time in a large metal bowl. 

- I kept boiling up some water in a saucepan, taking it off the heat and placing my metal bowl on top of it while I worked. The steam from the hot water ensured that the chocolate wouldn't cool or thicken quickly while I worked. Therefore decreasing the number of times I had to heat it up between uses.

- Bakerella's technique of tapping the spoon against the side of the bowl is excellent - you get rid of any extra chocolate; ensuring a smoother cake ball. I started out doing it her way but then what I found easier was to use a tablespoon to take the cake ball out after dipping using my left hand, swirling it back and forth in the tablespoon (drips all the extra chocolate off) and then dropping it into a teaspoon (held in my right hand). I would then tap the teaspoon on the back of the tablespoon several times and plop the ball onto waxed paper. 

Does that sound confusing? I wish I could have taken photos to do a tutorial but seeing that both my hands were occupied, it wasn't really possible. 

I hope that helped. 

Now go ahead, give it a try and indulge yourself! 

Happy Anniversary

Ever since I came across the recipe for Cheesecake with salted butter caramel sauce on Tartelette's blog, I have been dreaming delicious dreams of this cake. And with an anniversary coming up, it seemed I had found the perfect moment to indulge my craving for what sounded and looked like a truly decadent dessert. 

But since I went and completely lost my sense of smell and taste (and no way was I going to make that cheesecake and not enjoy it), I had to settle for making something else. 

I didn't want to make anything too labor intensive since I'm not really up to it like I mentioned in my earlier post today. So, it had to be something simple ... and chocolaty - there's no such thing as too much chocolate, right? Maybe with a hint of orange in the frosting or otherwise...