Monday, July 4, 2011
BBA #13a: Poolish Focaccia, Pizza-Style
A Tale of Two (or Three) Strawberry Cakes
For a number of years I made a strawberry cake collected off a flour ad--Martha White, according to my note, back when they were trying to market packages of 2 cups of flour (that being the most common amount needed for recipes, at least according to their market research). The recipe is an oil cake and calls for strawberry Jello and a bag of frozen strawberries, and came out lovely and moist and, pink. I used to think, very pink, until last week. <g>
So, the birthday was coming up, and I had flashbacks to that strawberry cake, but wanted something different. I started out thinking "get away from the Jello" but somehow ended up with an even more artificial look: a strawberry cake I found on Lottie+Doof. It used strawberry jam in the batter, added enough red food coloring to be Red Velvet Cake, then made a cream cheese frosting with more red food coloring and artificial strawberry flavoring. I really don't know why this ended up intriguing me enough to tackle it for my birthday cake, but both the violent color and a desire to use up strawberry jam from my fridge played into it.
My version of the cake was just as on Lottie+Doof, but the frosting called for cups of powdered sugar. I've gone off on that type of frosting, and used Rose's Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting instead, which is cream cheese, a little butter, a touch of sour cream, and melted white chocolate. I had very high cacao white chocolate from Trader Joe's, and used that. I couldn't find artificial strawberry flavoring and used natural. <g> And red food coloring. Lots of it.
Results: it's a good cake, moist like most oil cakes, but doesn't have much strawberry flavor. Same for the frosting, which of course I experimented with--could be both less punch from the natural flavoring, plus the white chocolate asserting itself in competition. The color was....striking, but all in all this one won't be repeated.
I still had a strawberry cake fixation, though, and so turned to Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Cake. It's a simple butter cake batter that is poured into a pie or cake pan (I used a 9" cake pan: a pie plate would have been much easier to serve from), then the top is covered with halved strawberries, sprinkled with sugar, and baked. Simple, lots of strawberry flavor....decidedly not Pink. I did cut back the sugar to 7/8 cup in the batter as Deb mentioned.
Most of my strawberries sank, unlike Deb's, and I'm wondering if that's another advantage to the pie plate over the cake pan. It can't be called a pretty cake, but I served it with whipped cream with a little strawberry puree mixed in, and it was very good.
I may still pull out the "Simple Strawberry Cake" with Jello recipe and give it another try--I don't recall it being artificial-tasting, and it was certainly moist and good. Be interesting to see how it seems after the RHC bake-through and other incidents in the evolution of my tastebuds.
Results: it's a good cake, moist like most oil cakes, but doesn't have much strawberry flavor. Same for the frosting, which of course I experimented with--could be both less punch from the natural flavoring, plus the white chocolate asserting itself in competition. The color was....striking, but all in all this one won't be repeated.
I may still pull out the "Simple Strawberry Cake" with Jello recipe and give it another try--I don't recall it being artificial-tasting, and it was certainly moist and good. Be interesting to see how it seems after the RHC bake-through and other incidents in the evolution of my tastebuds.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Lots-of-Ways Banana Cake
Bananas browning in the fridge (after aging on the counter first)...must be time to bake. I don't have a standard banana bread recipe and need to dig through my and my mother's recipe files in search of one, so for this occasion I went browsing in the cookbook collection. I ended up with Lots-of-Ways Banana Cake from Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours, a banana cake with options for the liquid and the mix-ins. Mine ended up with dark rum, sour cream, and coconut, and I made a half recipe to get a 9" round snacking cake--no frosting or other embellishments. In fact, baked in a loaf pan, this could easily be "banana bread".
It's good, nice texture, moist, banana flavor present but not overwhelming. The coconut doesn't lend much flavor, and the shreds (I used the grocery standard Baker's Sweetened Flakes this time) are something of an aggravation as they pull when you try to slice the cake with a less-than-sharp knife. That little problem would be greatly improved by pre-toasting the coconut as the recipe suggests, but which I forgot to do. This isn't a cake where I want dried fruit, but I might try adding toasted pecans next time.
BBA #26: Poolish Baguettes
I debated making a half recipe of the baguettes. I probably should have not only for cutting down on the amount of carbs in the house, but also because my baking stone is small for three baguettes which have to be somewhat fat to fit on the short stone. But I went ahead with the full recipe and managed in one baking, though the longest baguette hung off the edge (but surprisingly didn't burn) .
Another interesting direction in this recipe is to sift the whole-wheat flour through a fine sieve to reduce the amount of bran. I got a good bit of bran from my whole-wheat flour (the bran went into the prospective pancake batter). This is about a half-whole-wheat recipe, all to the good for my family, as we tend to eat more whole wheat and multigrain than white breads.
That done, the recipe proceeded more or less as usual, mixing flour, salt, yeast, water and the poolish, and machine kneading. I added the full 10 ounces of water then a little more to get an almost-sticky dough as specified. The dough rose rapidly--the first "2-hour rise" took about an hour and a half, the second an hour and 15 minutes.
I cut the dough into thirds and proceeded to shaping. I'm still working on the baguette shaping technique--the video Chris found helped, though I only folded mine twice and didn't elongate the loaves much due to the short baking stone issue. The loaves baked up very prettily. They got a little curved in the rush to slide them onto the hot stone from awkward angles as the oven rack doesn't pull very far out of the oven, my peel is too short for baguettes, and of course I wanted to minimize the heat loss from the open oven. 'Sall right, the shape didn't hurt the taste.
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