Month: October 2019

Jeremy here! It was birthday season for me and Lauren these past few weeks. That means you can have your cake and eat everyone else’s for the whole month of September! Her family has at least 1 birthday each from August-April with most of the celebrations happening in mid to late September, including me. We made a sort of agreement of baking each other’s cakes: I work on hers. She works on mine and we don’t touch the other person’s work.

Her mom and I got to work on a lemon buttercream frosting and colored it tie-dye based on the graffiti cake from Pinterest. Well, we couldn’t actually air-brush paint it like professionals, and since we don’t have fondant other than pink, we settled on painting it with food coloring and making a pattern with colorful fresh blackberries and raspberries. I guess that turns it into a lemon-berry splatter cake with buttercream and berries. It reminded her of doing spin-art as a kid.

The inside was full of berries too. We wanted it to be fluffy and bright.

We made a costly mistake however of leaving it out with only a plastic cover over it for a few days. The whole confection rotted from the inside out with a gagging odor in 3 days time. Nothing disappoints like a festered cake. So, we learned to keep anything with fresh fruit in it in the refrigerator. 

Hello World! Lauren speaking, September is birthday season for my family. (5 birthdays and 3 anniversaries to be exact. Good thing we don’t have to squeeze Rosh Hashana in there too.) I decided to bake a lavender cake for my darling boyfriend with our own extract and a perfect purple vanilla-lavender frosting. 

The cake recipe was from my mom’s ever-reliable Betty Crocker cookbook from the 1950’s. She found a sunshine cake recipe in there that didn’t need too much work, considering this was my first time EVER helping her out with a cake. (Besides eating it.) We could’ve done a starlight cake, but that shade of white on the inside comes from beating up egg whites until stiff peaks, adding in butter by the Tsp and sometimes clear vanilla for extra whitening. We didn’t have the time for all of that. After all, Funfetti is fun and games for the first few bites, but he wanted a yoga theme and lavender sounds more zen to me. Funfetti uses white cake to make the colors spring-load at you.

What comes up white and comes down yellow and white? EGGS! Yellow yolks give you a yellow cake. Whites are in there too, but yellow  yolks completely overtake the color scheme. Sunshine cakes are very yellow on the inside. The key difference is in the way the yellow cakes use fatty emulsifying yolks instead of relying on just whites and shortening to give it some tenderness to the thicker grained vanilla cake. Oh, you must not have guessed…white or yellow, it’s still a vanilla cake. It’s just which way you use your eggs.

Our extract was from the bottom of the vanilla bottle. Alcohol burns off when it’s cooked. It’s not the flavor, but the solvent content to it. Vodka doesn’t have any flavor, so we used that. It’s one of the best. Store bought extracts tend to have extra fillers and sugars in them anyhow. NO BODY WANTS EXTRA SUGAR! One or 2 you can use straight off the bat. Others you’ll want t wait a week or 2. We used dry lavender from our last trip to Lavenlair Farm. It was super easy, just measure out the lavender, pour the vodka and let it sit until it’s ready to strain out. I mean, come on, who wants actual lavender pieces in their mouth? I didn’t think so. You know that rule: Don’t Eat the Garnish! well, if you can’t eat it, then why put it on the plate? Right?

My mother had to help me with this one, seeing as how I have never baked more than biscuits by myself and she didn’t want any pictures taken during the bake, so I respected her wishes. It turned out great. They fell right out of their pans without anything sticking to the metal. That’s what happens when you use Crisco. It was a delightful shade of yellow on the inside. We had just the right amount of vanilla to lavender to give it a calm but fragrant taste. 

Buttercream frosting was out of the question, what with the lavender-vanilla mix, it would have been too sweet and rich, totally crashing down on the delicate nature of the cake with a heavy frosting. So, I found a simple vanilla frosting in the frosting section of the cookbook and just used half of the vanilla and the other half lavender. The fun part was mixing the dyes into the powdery goop and getting that perfect shade of purple. I could’ve used more powdered sugar so the icing wouldn’t droop and drip off of the cake so much, but I hate powdery tasting frosting. Jeremy doesn’t like too much frosting on his cake either, so I tried to cover the boundary between the 2 layers with a ribbon of green squeezed icing. It could’ve been better executed if I had gotten a turn-table like in the bakeries, but that goes to show that I’ll need practice.

 

I never went to any kind of baking class -just a cooking club in middle school- and  Cooking isn’t Baking. It’s like a boogie boarding vs surfing. Which means I still have a lot to learn. At least my icing writing was spot-on and sparkled with flair. Don’t you love that little bit of glitz and glam on a cake? It was much appreciated. He didn’t even see the break in the layers until I turned the cake around! It just goes to show that when you put the love into something and do your best to perfect it, your company will appreciate that most of all. He said it was the greatest cake he ever had! Chalk that one up as a victory for the girls team! Oh wait…I’m not a cheerleader. I’m Me!!

 

It’s time to go back to school, grab $5 for lunch and run over to the line serving chicken patty on a bun. The smell that stained my high school cafeteria walls for life! That squishy and salty mush needs a makeover. Wouldn’t you agree?  Yes, please.

We started off with ground chicken. There are a million different spice combinations one could do with this. I remember school lunches being almost mass-produced, devoid of flavor, and completely bland. YUCK! Of course, these could go in the other direction and over spice them, that wouldn’t be good. YIKES! As a Libra, I’ll say the cliche, it’s a balancing act. If you want to be safe, better over-flavored than underwhelming for your first try. Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it with each try.

We mixed together some minced onion, cilantro a little salt and black pepper along with our favorite thing of all in the vegetable drawer…GARLIC!!!!!! We forgot to add the breadcrumbs and egg to this, but they still came out decently. Breadcrumbs serve to retain moisture, so it’s not too dry- filler and flavor- while the proteins in the egg bind the chicken together, called a binder. You get a better hold in your sandwich. You don’t want to have to finish a sandwich with a fork or spoon, or you don’t want the patty to fall into pieces and mix into the dirt on your picnic.

Remember when cooking chicken the internal temperature needs to be 165 degrees F. One thing I need to remember is not to keep flipping them and let the crust form on these patties. Lauren has to pull me away sometimes so I can Leave Them Alone. Remember this old jazz tune? Same idea. This crust, formed via caramelization, also adds tons of flavor. Let these suckers do their thing and only flip once, giving them at least 5-6 minutes on each side at roughly 350 degrees F on the skillet. Other than that, these are quick and easy, perfect for school-lunches, fast dinners or just a craving.