Devils Food Cake with Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Frosting

My sons' evolving preferences over the years have me confronting increasingly challenging trials in birthday cake-decorating. In fact this is the first year that I completely failed him on that account. It would have been so much easier to just pick up a cake from a bakery but I take birthday cakes very seriously and what I lack in decorating talent as well as punctuality, I make up for with the sheer determination to make my kids birthday cakes that they will remember throughout the year.

But despite my best intentions, I just couldn't deliver this time: there I was at 4 a.m., just having finished frosting a 2-layer 9x13" cake, struggling to 'draw' Ben 10 with tinted buttercream, and failing. Miserably. An hour, and several errors later, I gave up and scraped the offensive Ben 10 figure off, replacing it with candy cake decorations. I then dropped it off at the school, sending up a prayer that the cake itself would appeal to my picky sons' taste buds.

Once he got home from school, I was rewarded with the very rare compliment that 'everything about the cake was so, so delicious' as well as a request to make it again over the weekend. The second time around, I decided to keep it simple and made a 2-layer 9-inch cake. It took us a couple of days to eat through it, and it seemed that the flavors just intensified the longer this cake sat around in the fridge.

The cake recipe can be found on Gourmet here.

The brown sugar cream cheese frosting is a twist on the classic cream cheese frosting and is one of my favorites ways to frost cupcakes. It comes from Joy the Baker and it paired so well with the chocolate in the cake, that I may never use any other kind of frosting ever again!

Baking With Dorie: Tender Shortcakes

These baking challenges and this blog are turning out to be the reason why I have to hit the gym at 5 a.m. daily. Seriously.  

But does the guilt stop me from at least wholly consuming everything I make? Nah. You already knew that, didn't you?

This weeks' recipe was chosen by Susi of Susi's Kochen Und Backen Adventures & we're joined this week by two new bloggers who have joined our baking group.

I made these short cakes in a hurry this morning & was glad that it wasn't an elaborate dessert that I would have had to labor over.

I've never made shortcakes before, so I was a little perplexed over the dough which looked too crumbly and didn't come together as well as I had expected it to. I didn't want to overwork it, but had no idea if this was even what it was supposed to look like. 

So, I just took the plunge and baked a batch of 4 to begin with. And guess what happened: burnt the bottoms. I had better luck with the second batch which came out looking great and was only slightly scorched on the bottom. 

Now handling these cakes was tough - they were crumbly and using a serrated knife to slice them just didn't work. So I did what Dorie alternatively suggests: pricked with a fork all around and then just lifted the top off with a spatula & layered it back on after spreading the bottom halves with fruit & whipped cream.

For the fruit, I chose to use chopped mangoes with a squirt of lime (as suggested by Dorie on page 425) . Her original recipe asks for berries, but I used mangoes because they are my favorite fruit and it's hard to resist them now, with the beginning of mango season here. 

I also played around with the dough & took up one of Dorie's suggestions of adding powdered as well as candied ginger into the dough. And for me, the blend of flavors from the lime, mango and ginger were a real treat. 

All the shortcakes then  needed, was some simple whipped cream.

Please go over to Susi's blog for the recipe, and the blogroll here to check out the other BWD bakers versions.

Our next recipe, due on June 7, is the Lemon Cup Custard (page 387). If you'd like to join the challenge, please drop  me an email at needfulthings at ymail dot com. 

Monkey Cupcakes

These were requested by my son today. 

He would never actually eat them, but thinks they're cute enough to take along to a friends' place. I've made these a couple of times before; for parties at his school and a bake sale. Kids always find these super moist cupcakes irresistible. 

Me? I love the cinnamon cream cheese frosting. It's completely delicious.

I got both the recipe and the idea for decorating these cupcakes out of the 'Cupcakes from the Cake Doctor' book. This book has so many ideas for cupcakes but I've only managed to try very few. All of that will change, of course, and I might stop browsing through the book and actually try out more fantastic ideas at some point this year. 

Ok, back to the recipe.