Rum Cake

Here's the family rum cake recipe. I got it from Lily Gaddis in Hawaii.


Rum Cake

1 cup chopped nuts (optional)
1 package yellow cake mix
1 3 ¾ oz package instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup dark rum

Sprinkle nuts in bottom of 10-inch bundt pan.

Mix all ingredients and beat 2 minutes. Pour batter over nuts in the pan and bake 1 hour at 325 degrees. Cool 10 minutes in pan, then invert and remove to finish cooling on a wire rack.

Glaze:

1 stick butter
¼ cup water
1 cup sugar
½ cup dark rum

Boil butter, water, and sugar together for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in rum. Prick top of cake all over and drizzle and brush glaze over cake.

German Chocolate Cupcakes

How long can the cupcake remain wildly fashionable? When I decided to make cupcakes rather than cake for my recital refreshments this weekend I looked on the web and found that there are whole cupcake blogs, and cupcake shops!

I used to make the time-consuming traditional German chocolate cake recipe found on the back of the package: separate egg whites folded in at the end, extended creaming of butter with sugar, and so forth. This time around I used a delicious one-bowl recipe which I found at Diana's Kitchen.

German Chocolate Cake

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter,
softened
1 cup sour cream
4 large eggs
4 ounces sweet baking
chocolate, melted
1/2 cup milk
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Grease and flour two 8-inch square baking pans.
In a large bowl,
combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, butter, sour cream, eggs, chocolate,
milk, and vanilla. Beat with mixer at low speed until blended. Increase mixer to
high and beat 2 minutes longer. Spoon batter into prepared pans. Bake in a
preheated 350° oven for about 35 minutes, or until a wooden pick or cake tester inserted in center comes out clean.
Remove to
racks to cool completely.

(I filled cupcake liners 2/3 full and baked them 20 minutes. It yielded 32. I used the topping recipe from the back of the package.)

In a stroke of genius, I used a paring knife to make a big divot in each cupcake. This made room for more coconut-pecan topping, resulting in a better topping-to-cake ratio. I am saving the divots in the freezer to make a trifle or something.

Bûche de Noël

I'm not sure I'll ever do this again, but it sure looked cool.

Inside:
a "hot milk sponge cake" from Joy baked in a jelly roll pan
Kahlua-flavored buttercream

Outside:
chocolate buttercream
meringue mushrooms
powdered sugar
a rock from the yard
a pine branch with pinecones that I found in the street

The meringue mushrooms got gooey pretty quickly in the humidity.

These shots make it look a little campy, but indoors, in person, it looked quite pretty and log-like.

It tasted merely okay -- the cake was a little bland, and the Kahlua buttercream not quite perfect. The lemon meringue pie I also made for Christmas Eve dinner was much tastier.

Carnitas, and the Evils of Too Much Entertaining

We have been cooking up a storm around here. There were people we wanted to see after our long trip, so we started inviting them for dinner.

We had a nice menu on Saturday:

Guacamole

Homemade salsa

Chips
***
Guisado de Pollo

Flour or spelt tortillas

Steaming Soupy Beans

Spinach Salad with Apples, Pecans, and Blue Cheese

***

Fresh Pineapple

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Ice Cream

That cake was great, by the way. I spread the calories around the neighborhood, giving away several pieces. I used 2/3 cup each of whole spelt flour, plain white flour, and Bob's Red Mill Baking Mix. It dried out a bit the next day, but ice cream helped with that.

For general information, I make guacamole in the food processor, using 1 clove garlic, 4 fresh roasted green chiles (or a can), 2 green onions, 1/4 cup cilantro leaves, 2 avocados, seasoned with juice of a lime and salt. All to taste.

Then Dad requested carnitas for Sunday dinner with Grandma. I've had good versions in restaurants, but my favorite Mexican cookbooks basically directed me to boil pork chunks in lard until tender and brown. Not really my style. I ended up with an internet recipe which simmered the pork until tender, then browned it for a half hour in the oven. Not too bad--perhaps a little more fat was called for, but good.

Oh yeah, the evils of entertaining: it makes you fat. I tend to make lots of food and show off, and enjoy myself and eat dessert, etc.

Bread Now Lost to the World

This is the best sourdough bread I've ever made. During the week of the local food challenge I started a recipeless sourdough starter using Anson Mills flour. It was funky and foul for several days, stinking up the whole kitchen, but by the end of the seventh day it was bubbly and sweet and made an exceptional loaf of bread.

Unfortunately, it will only ever make one loaf of bread, as I forgot to save any starter when I made the final dough. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I'll make another starter soon, I guess. I probably wouldn't have been able to keep this one going strong, anyway, since I'm not a daily or even a weekly baker.

In other baking news, for this week's Free Times I wrote about that glorious microwave chocolate cake recipe that made the rounds of the internet a few weeks ago. So fun! I love microwave chocolate cake.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

The ex-girlfriend of an old friend of mine used to make chocolate zucchini cakes a lot. She would sit in front of the oven on a stool watching them bake through the oven door.

I don't have her recipe. But Clotilde's version is about perfect with just one addition: 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon sifted in with the dry ingredients. I used a springform pan.

I made one a few weeks ago when I found a giant zucchini hidden under a leaf in the garden. Lawson ate the entire cake within about three days and politely requested I make another one immediately. Unfortunately, that was the week the local food challenge started...and because there is no local cacao source, I didn't make another one until late last week. It's almost gone, too.

Grandma's Birthday Party

We had a birthday party for Grandma yesterday. First we had a recital of two-piano music by Donizetti, J. C. Bach, Schumann, and Mozart. Then I served a lunch of gazpacho and blueberry muffins, followed by a roast beef and blue cheese salad. The piece de resistance was this chocolate and raspberry mousse cake brought by GJ from Le Delice French bakery. It was the best purchased dessert I've ever had. And we had champagne.

Fruitcake

I made a fruitcake for Christmas this year. And I spent a lot of time trying to convince Lawson that it wasn't going to be gross. He was dubious...I guess he ate a lot of dry fruitcake packed with green candied cherries when he was a kid. I, on the other hand, ate a lot of tasty homemade and Collin Street fruitcake, so I have mostly good associations, its cultural status notwithstanding.

Making it was fun. I soaked tons of dried fruit in brandy, and made a delicious dark cake with the fruit, some nuts, and more brandy. I then wrapped it and put it away for a week to age. A few days before Christmas I tried a little, and it was tasty but a tad dry, so I soaked it with more brandy -- still less than the maximum amount the recipe allowed, mind you. But it got a little too boozy and fruity.

So I'm sad to report my fruitcake is a tiny bit gross. Maybe it needs to mellow more. It's a little too moist now, and it falls apart, and the booze isn't altogether pleasant. It tastes like fermented fruit in dough. So I guess I'll put it away again and try it next month.

Dark Chocolate & Orange Cake

This cake is among the most fun foods I've ever made. It ranks with the peanut butter/raisin/powdered milk logs I made all by myself at age 10. It is that fun.

Lawson's cousin was up from Florida for Thanksgiving and gave us a bunch of wonderful citrus, all of which are threatening to rot at once because, try as we might, we have been unable to eat 40 tangerines in two weeks. So I have been looking for good ways to use them, especially the many, many oranges.

I started thinking about oranges and chocolate and how I like the flavors together and would like to make a cake consisting of the two. Not a single one of my cookbooks had a recipe. But when I looked online I found hordes...and they were all British. Apparently Jaffa cakes, which I had heard of, are chocolate-and-orange flavored, so the taste combination is well established over there. And every British cook from Claudia Roden to Nigella Lawson has a recipe for a chocolate orange cake. I read many recipes, a task made difficult by all the volume and weight and temperature conversions, and eventually narrowed down what I was looking for.

I mostly used this one, with narrative encouragement provided here and further ganache research in the Joy of Cooking. My converted and revised version is posted below so you can avoid all the math yourself.

Here's why the recipe is so fun: you boil WHOLE ORANGES until they are soft, then chuck the entire orange in the food processor. The boiling tones down the bitterness of the pith, just like when you make marmalade. And, in fact, Nigella Lawson's recipe calls for a high quality marmalade instead of an orange. But that would be both expensive and no fun at all.

The ganache is also fun, because it's so easy and looks so fancy.

Dark Chocolate & Orange Cake

- 1 large or two small oranges
Pierce and cook in a covered pan with a few inches of boiling water for 30 minutes. Remove to a food processor and pick out the seeds before processing the whole thing until broken down but still coarse.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8 or 9 inch round cake tin or springform pan.

- 3 eggs
- 1 and 1/4 cups sugar
- 1 cup good canola oil (recipe calls for sunflower, which isn't common or cheap here)
- 4 oz bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, broken into small pieces and melted

Lightly beat the eggs, sugar, and oil. Gradually beat in the pureed orange and melted chocolate.

- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 250g/9oz plain flour
- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

Sift in the cocoa, flour and baking powder. Mix and pour into the buttered pan. Bake for 55-60 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes, then turn out on to a wire rack.

For the ganache:

- 8 oz good bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, broken into pieces
- 3 fl oz or 1/3 cup cream...or half and half, which is what I had around, which worked beautifully.

Put the chocolate into a heatproof bowl. Bring the cream to a boil in a pan, pour over the chocolate, and stir until melted, then whisk until glossy and totally smooth. Let cool to about 90 degrees F and pour over the cooled cake (which I inverted because it was a bit cracked and domed on the top).

Baseball and Cold Supper

Last weekend we went to Grandma's to watch the final first-round playoff game between the Diamondbacks and the Cubs (we won). We collaborated on a perfect, mostly cold, supper for the occasion: Buttermilk Chicken; Italian scalloped potatoes with tomatoes and onions; homemade whole wheat bread; cold asparagus with curry mayonnaise; and chocolate cake.

I made the chocolate cake from a Gourmet recipe I found on the internet. I was specifically looking for a small, cocoa-based recipe because that's what I had on hand. It was pretty good fresh that night, but the next day I found it to be dry and tasting of baking powder.

Everything else was good, though. Here's the chicken recipe, which I used to make when you were living at home. It's from a heart-healthy cookbook, so the chicken is skinned.

Buttermilk Chicken

2 cups buttermilk

1 clove garlic, minced

1 teaspoon mixed Italian herbs

1/2 teaspoon pepper

salt, optional

6 half chicken breasts or thighs, skinned

Combine buttermilk, garlic, herbs, and pepper. Marinate chicken in buttermilk mixture about 8 hours. Drain and discard marinade.

1 cup bread crumbs

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

Combine bread crumbs and Parmesan. Dredge chicken in crumbs. Bake on baking sheet covered with foil for about 45 minutes at 350°. (Thighs make take a little longer than breasts.)

Self-Portrait with Soba

Yesterday was Lawson's birthday. I knew I wanted to make him some carrot cake, because I only recently found out he is a big fan of it (who knew? I have always thought of carrot cake as really lame.) So I made some carrot cake and decided that homemade, with lots of nutmeg and trustworthy raisins, it's pretty okay, though still not favorite-worthy.

Anyway, at the grocery store Saturday I bought some wonderful fresh tuna. Good fresh fish is so rare here that I rearranged all birthday meal plans in order to cook it right away. And I knew exactly what I had to make with it: soba noodles. From scratch. I might have gone a lifetime happily buying soba noodles from the store, but my friend Ken (the one who works at the mill) gave me some soba flour last month, and I had to use it for something. I swear, these grain gifts from Ken force me into overambitious food experiments -- I suppose that's a good thing.

We do not have a good Japanese cookbook. I looked up soba noodle recipes online and learned that I'd need to use part wheat flour and part soba flour -- buckwheat has no gluten -- but never found an authoritative recipe. I ended up using 1.5 cups of wheat flour, 1.5 cups of soba flour, two eggs, salt, and water. The dough was nice and easy to roll out, but the noodles were a little firm and bland. So next time I think I will use a larger proportion of soba flour.

I tried to cut the noodles by hand according to some instructions I found online, but I abandoned that pretty quickly and pulled out the hand-cranked pasta maker.

Ronnie pulled down a noodle and ate it:

Recital Refreshments and Guisado de Pollo

After my piano students perform in a recital I always put on a dessert buffet for them to make up for the trauma--complete with a lace tablecloth and 100-year-old china. Yesterday's spread included German chocolate cake, cream cheese and blueberry tart, lemon bars, chocolate chip cookies, grapes, and various candies. Continuing with the Valentine theme we had pink lemonade to go with the coffee.

Tonight we are having an old favorite, Guisado de Pollo, which is a Mexican chicken stew. It's light but flavorful and simmers away with a minimum of fuss. I serve it with flour tortillas.

Guisado de Pollo

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
2 pounds chicken pieces (I like thighs)

In large casserole, heat olive oil and brown chicken pieces on all sides.

2 tomatoes, diced (canned or fresh)
2 onions, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 slice (1 ounce) boiled ham, chopped (optional)
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon oregano
2 mild green chiles, cut in strips
1 tablespoons capers, drained
Approximately 1 1/2 cups dry white wine or vermouth
Salt and pepper to taste

Add remaining ingredients, using enough of the white wine to barely cover them. Simmer, covered, for 40 minutes or more until tender. (White meat will cook much faster than dark.) If the sauce is too soupy, remove chicken and boil the sauce to reduce before serving.