Cake Recipes & Ideas

As winter finishes itself off, we often find ourselves with a few remnants of winter eating lingering in the back of the refrigerator: hardy, woody carrots, soft and wrinkled apples. We didn’t want to waste these last, sweet bites of winter. They are perfect for baking, and we shredded and diced them into a moist, tender cake that is deceptively whole-grain and not too sweet and not too rich. It’s a treat, for sure, but it’s all full of good things.

As a person of Irish heritage, I always feel a little treacherous admitting this, but honestly I don’t really like to drink Guinness. Still, once a year I do consume a bit of Guinness to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day — not in a pint glass, but in Nigella Lawson’s dark, moist Chocolate Guinness Cake. This cake couldn’t be easier to make—it’s a single layer with a crown of fluffy frosting, and you toss it all together on the stove top.

Last week, we spotted something called a Nantucket Cranberry Pie over at the blog Cooking Books. It’s a recipe from Laurie Colwin, and it involves so few ingredients and so little effort, we had to make it immediately. Yes, we know those don’t look like cranberries. Bear with us…There were no cranberries to be found at the grocery store (nope, not even frozen), so we went with a mixture of frozen cherries and blueberries.

We aren’t really whizzes with a pastry bag. In fact, we don’t own one. But we think we could get this look using a plastic bag with the corner snipped off. These dots don’t have to be too precise, or even the same size, to be charming…Polka dots are just cute; there’s no way around that. Dots of varying sizes all over a layer cake is simple enough to do, and they can hide imperfections in your icing (if, say, you have a few crumbs that got rustled up).

Back in LA for two weeks, I’m having flashbacks to the work I did here a few years ago on my book, The Greyston Bakery Cookbook (Rodale).One of the groups of recipes I added to the book that were not based on products from the Bakery were the individual cakes, which I affectionately called cakelets: Chocolate Molten Cakelets, Steamed Lemon Cakelets, and Sticky Toffee Cakelets. Any of these would be great for Valentine’s Day. Today I’m sharing the Sticky Toffee Cakelets.

Also called mousseline buttercream, this frosting is like classic buttercream‘s dolled-up older sister. It requires a little more skill and finesse to pull off, but the bonus is a frosting that will hold its shape and taste fabulous.Mousseline buttercream is made by cooking sugar and water to the softball stage (238°) and then pouring this slowly into the whipped eggs while the mixer is still running. Once this is cool, the softened butter is added.

Oh yes I did. Last Monday night I whipped up some sugar cookie dough, and bought some colorants for royale icing that would transform my plain Jane cookies into some hopeful sunrise cookies for election day.I was inspired by all the Obama cookies I found online and in particular the one I featured in my election night menu ideas post. Plus, with an invitation to an election party featuring “Real American Food” I figured some sugar, white flour and dye was in order.

We recently linked to a gingerbread-pear cake in our daily Delicious Links, and lo and behold, we found ourselves with that very same cake in the oven a few nights later. We wanted, you see, to give you a personal opinion.I have a Thing for gingerbread. Gingerbread cookies and gingerbread men – crispy, soft, and chewy – all kinds. Gingerbread lattes, gingerbread bread pudding – mmm, sometimes.

It’s harvest time, which means apples, which means that we’ve already made our harvest apple traditional recipe once – and we’ll make it again. What’s this recipe? An outrageously amazing apple cake, spiked up with brandy and drizzled brown sugar sauce. And when we say outrageous here, we mean it. This recipe is from Regan Daley’s fabulous dessert cookbook, In the Sweet Kitchen (see our review here).

Yesterday we took a “Hot or Not” vote on flag cakes (at the time we’re writing this, it’s pretty much a tie), and then we saw this smaller, round version. Just as festive, but not quite as kitschy. We vote “hot.”See another photo, without the raspberries, below…In the interest of full disclosure, our (Elizabeth’s) sister made this cake. So call us biased.

That being said, I had no intention of making a towering wedding cake. I just wanted dessert. Dessert around which some tiny semblance of ritual could occur. I looked at recipes for simple cakes, quick cakes, yellow cakes, and chocolate cakes. My trusted catering friend Katy phoned in every day from Portland, Oregon to see how I was holding up. When it came to the cake, she left no room for error and told me exactly what to do. “White cake is much more elegant than yellow.

Not to be confused with breakfast coffee cake, our Coffee Cake with Coffee Glaze is a fluffy, moist, and coffee-scented dessert with a sweet, creamy glaze icing. We wanted a lightly coffee-flavored cake with all the moistness and sweet fluffiness of our favorite coconut cake. It took some real testing to get there (we’ll show you our testing process later this week).

Blueberries are good hot, like when they’re baked into muffins or a cake and they pop just enough to let their juice ooze out in spatters of purple juice. We love them in this cake – it’s a dead easy butter cake, so soft and moist, with orange zest and nutmeg to bring out the flavor of the berries. Good for breakfast, with a crumble on top, or for dessert with homemade ice cream.

Rather to my surprise, this cake turned out deliciously light and soft. It has a very airy, tender texture, with a mild sweetness that reminded me vaguely of maple syrup.There is no butter – all the fat comes from eggs and buttermilk, so this is light enough to serve for breakfast with fruit and cream; and yet it’s unusual and grown up enough for an after-dinner dessert, served with dark chocolate or espresso sauce.

It’s the Jewish New Year so it’s time to celebrate and reflect. This weekend, since I didn’t have time to make my traditional, from scratch honey cake, I opted for a no-fail bundt cake recipe. I recently learned that the bundt pan was created by Nordic Ware here in the United States after a couple of ladies from the Minneapolis chapter of the Hadassah society asked Nordicware founders, Dave and Dotty, to make a pan similar to the ones their grandmothers used in back in Germany.

We celebrated the birthday of a Bermudian friend a few nights ago. On the menu were Dark & Stormies and Rum Cake, of course. Being with child, I did not gulp a D&S, but I did enjoy the cake. The recipe, in its original form, comes from the birthday boy’s mother in Bermuda, who gets it from Bacardi.