Sometimes you’re just in the mood to bake a cake.
That was me one day last week. I had been feeling a little out of sorts and figured baking a yummy treat would help cheer me up. I also wanted to bake something other than cookies. Eventually, I settled on yet another recipe out of the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook and I wasn’t disappointed.
Continue reading “Magnolia Bakery 15 – Lemon Vanilla Bundt Cake”
My birthday was earlier this week, and as hinted at in last week’s post, I decided to bake my own cake!
After many recipe page views and checking a handful of different food blogs, I finally settled on one! I ended up going back to a tried and true baking blog, Sally’s Baking Addiction. This website features so many options to chose from, that it took a while to narrow it all down. I eventually decided on German Chocolate Cake!
Continue reading “My Birthday and the Cake!”
Wow!
I can’t believe it! What happened to May? It appears that, to date, May was my least active month on the blog. There was a reason for that: things started to open up, activities began again, and my time became more constrained. However, some of the things I had lined up for this summer have fell through, which is too bad for me, but it’s great for the blog!
I have a personal goal for June: 6 recipes made during the month.
To be honest, doing two will be easy since my birthday is just around the corner. I will, obviously, be making my own cake. I’m also making cupcakes for a work thing next week, as well.
I am going to try to include at least one savory recipe in the mix, but, as you may have noticed, my focus on been on baking.
It actually took me quite a while to find one that appealed to me. I knew I wanted to branch out a bit and make something outside of the Barefoot Contessa and Magnolia Bakery canon (even though the latter has some amazing cake recipes). After some searching online, I decided to stick to a tried and true baking blog: Sally’s Baking Addiction.
After paging through recipe after recipe, and one mouth-watering photo after another, I finally made my decision!
What cake is it?
It’s a surprise. You’ll have to wait until next week to find out!
This recipe can be found in Comfort Food.
Over the weekend, some members of my family got together for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. It was nice to see some of these people after many months of not being able to do so.
With my new interest in baking, it was requested that I make dessert. Of course, I obliged. In fact, I made not only one, but two different desserts for the soiree.
The first dessert is one that caught my eye immediately upon thumbing through Ina’s latest cookbook. I’m not sure if it was the stellar food photography, the head notes, or the dessert itself. But Ina’s Boston Cream Pie was one I knew I had to make — and soon!
In the cookbook, Ina states that it took her almost 9 years to develop and perfect this recipe! And let me tell you: it is amazing! It was also well-received by the party guests. Ina is famous for creating simple recipes and enhancing classic dishes. Her Boston Cream Pie is definitely unlike anything you have tasted before. The additions of brandy and Grand Mariner allow the orange flavors to come alive and throw your taste buds a dance party!
This recipe was a multi-step process, but nothing was too overwhelming. It also allowed me to work on many different skills such as making pastry cream, chocolate ganache, and a sponge cake.
Here’s some photos of the various parts in the whole
And finally….
The finished cake! If you ask me, it looks like an over-sized Boston Cream Pie donut. But I guess that’s the point, right?
Happy baking!
I recently completed my Master’s degree. So of course I had to celebrate the achievement! For me, celebrating includes baking and decorating a cake….and of course eating it! So, naturally, I turned to a recipe out of my favorite baking cookbook: The Magnolia Bakery Handbook.
I had been eyeing this recipe for quite sometime. I loved the idea of banana in a cake and combined with chocolate chips I thought “How bad could it be?” Plus it used one of my favorite ingredients. Nutella! I swear, I think Nutella was originally designed for the Gods, but it somehow made its way to Earth. Luckily for us, we now get to taste this wonderful ingredient.
Continue reading “Magnolia Bakery #4 Banana Chocolate Chip Cake with Nutella Buttercream”I hope everyone who celebrates had a wonderful Christmas!
I did not do too much cooking over the last few days, but I did end up making a Yule Log cake and keeping with the theme of this blog, I learned a few things.
I found a recipe on Sally’s Baking Addiction for the cake, but I chose to modify it a bit. For example, I did not use hazelnuts. Instead, I used peppermint extract and crushed up candy canes to give it a little peppermint flavor. Unfortunately, the cake ended up having a little too much peppermint flavor overall.
Continue reading “Christmas Recipes”This recipe is from Cook Like a Pro, pg. 224.
Last weekend I made another dessert recipe, the Triple Chocolate Loaf Cakes. While the recipe was very simple, this was not exactly something to write home about. It was basically a very chocolate-y cake in a loaf form. What I did like though, is that it yields 2 loaf cakes. But in reality, I feel like I could have combined the two pans into one and gotten a taller cake.
It was tasty and simple and can definitely be used if you don’t need a full cake for something, but again, I wasn’t overly impressed with it.
The recipe calls for chocolate chips to be coated in flour before adding them to the recipe. I remember Ina saying something in one of the episodes of Barefoot Contessa that this helps the chips not sink to the bottom of the pan. Well, I did coat them in flour — generously — and they still sunk. Oh well!
This recipe is found in Make it Ahead, page 261.
Here it is! The recipe review you’ve ALL been waiting for — at least I hope!
On Sunday afternoon, I made IG’s Banana Chocolate Crumb Cake and let me just say, it did not disappoint.
In the post announcing that this would be the recipe I would make this weekend, I said that the headnotes for the recipe were two sentences. After making it, I can see why Ina did that. The taste of this cake speaks for itself!
Following that pattern, this post will be short and sweet. Below is a photo of the finished product. I highly, highly, highly recommend you try this for yourself.
Doesn’t it look just divine!?
This recipe is NOT from Ina Garten, but I wanted to show off what I made because I was really pleased with myself and how it turned out! If interested, this recipe came from Sally’s Baking Addiction. The photos are mine, however. (Hers are much, much better!)
Snickerdoodle Cake is my new love! Three layers of cake with snickerdoodle pieces spread throughout, amazing cinnamon buttercream frosting, and just all around happy dancing!
Since this is not an Ina recipe, I will NOT be going into detail about the baking process. But…I do recommend you try this cake for yourself. It was so worth the effort!
Disclaimer: This post was started early Thursday afternoon and completed Thursday evening. I kept the “stream of consciousness” style so that you can see how my brain actually works when it comes to deciding what to make each week. Sometimes dealing with over 1000 recipes and a dozen cookbooks gets to be overwhelming.
Well, here we are. Friday….again.
Personally, this week was a little tough for me. The weather didn’t help much either. The lack of sun really starts to get to me after two days.
So, I’m looking forward to spending some time in the kitchen this afternoon preparing a tasty meal. I also decided to give Ina’s dessert recipes a little break. No desserts from her books this week, if any dessert is made at all.
That said, I still want to try to do two or three recipes this week.
I am thinking of branching out of my comfort zone and attempting some elegant and very gourmet.
After reviewing Barefoot in Paris yesterday, I realized that I haven’t made any of those recipes yet. So I’m thinking of doing Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic.
But then, when I looked over the recipe I realized that this chicken dish will feed a small army. We would have too many leftovers. So, it was back to paging through books to find a recipe that would work.
Which proved to be a bit of a challenge. We had fish already this week, chicken, lasagne, and pot pies. We also had a leftovers night which just repeated those dishes again. I am also hesitant to do anything with beef and lamb. The beef because I’m not a huge fan of it and the lamb because, well….the fear of the unknown. I’ve never had lamb.
After paging through Barefoot in Paris, I realized that it wasn’t going to happen this week. Nothing seemed easy and interested me. So, I picked a few books at random and thumbed through those. Soon enough, I found a recipe in How Easy is That?
Weeknight Bolognese for the win!
Bolognese is a meat sauce that is fairly common in Northern Italy. It’s an easy sauce to make and since it has meat (beef) in it, it helps fill you up.
(Disclaimer: I’m not opposed to beef in its ground form. Hamburgers, meatloafs, meatballs, etc are all OK in my book!)
I decided to use De Cecco pasta since it was on sale this week and use the called for pasta shape. I can’t wait to see how it turns out!
Since I’ve settled on this pasta dish, there will be no side dish or salad from Ina’s books to go with it. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, I won’t be making a dessert this weekend…from Ina that is.
I stumbled upon an amazing cake recipe that I just had to try! That review and write-up will be posted as well, however under a different category entitled “Other Recipes.”
Ina’s pasta sauce recipe will drop on Saturday and the cake recipe will be released on Sunday.
Enjoy the weekend!
