The Little House Cooking Club - 1, 2, 3, 4 Cup Cake

 

"Self sufficiency was the badge of the American pioneer. Self sufficient, indeed, the Ingalls seemed. Yet, they never dared settle too far from the country store. It was their lifeline, supplying the essentials that made survival possible and the luxuries that made life livable. "  This week, I chose to depart from the corn flour recipes and dwell a bit on the idea of a special celebration cake. The Ingalls would have had to time their visits to the general store around seasonal weather, harvest times when they could use some of their excess for trade, and the train supplying the merchants at the various outpost stores and general stores they used over the years.         

"It seems strange to have everything one could want to work with," Ma said at the end of the long winter when the supply train finally arrived." Now I have cream of tartar and plenty of saleratus, I shall make a cake." She was speaking of two important stores that made the difference between heavy baked goods and light ones. Saleratus, now called baking soda, and cream of tartar are the main components of baking powder, a key ingredient of cakes and quick bread ... "            - excerpts from The Little House Cookbook

Valentine's Day and Wedding Anniversary Cupcakes

 

It's been ages since I posted a quick food share, but Valentine's Day and my 42nd (count 'em!) wedding anniversary called for a special dessert splurge. 

Torta de Mele - Tuscan Apple Cake

A perfectly gorgeous apple cake with bits of apple swirled into the whipped batter and a cloche of apple slices swirling about the top of the cake ... dense and moist when it comes from the oven, with the most heavenly aroma of apple and vanilla sugar. It is a treat!

Sue Moran's Buttermilk Doughnut Bundt

Baking a good cake is always such a pleasure! I knew from the moment I saw Sue Moran's latest Bundt cake over on her blog, The View From Great Island that I would be making it for my little church's Sunday fellowship hour. So, that's just what I did this past Saturday.

Mjuk Pepparkaka - Swedish Spice Cake

Imagine my surprise, to do a little search on my little food diary blog and find all sorts of data about it through Google and some other blog research sites ... hmmm. I don't know how I feel about someone doing analytics on my little food diary.

Oh well, I suppose one should get used to being scrutinized if one puts oneself  'out there into the ether'. I guess I won't worry excessively. If people come occasionally to my little bit of Internet space and find some good food or commentary worth reading, so be it. On to other things !

Merry Christmas ! I thought I'd post a lovely little Swedish recipe for a spice cake that is worthy of a tea time treat or a light dessert after a special meal. My family shared it after our Christmas dinner last evening.

Spiced Zucchini Coconut Cake

Well, hello! It's been a while since my last food share ... and this is a nice way to return.  Our zucchini is doing what all zucchini does at this time of year. I'll bet your zucchini is taking way too much space on your counter tops also! My response was to make this wonderful spice cake. SB and I had it for dessert last evening and for breakfast this morning ... not that we're decadent or anything.

Apple Cake with Maple Frosting

Our berries have been stolen by chipmunks ... the little beggars have plucked any with even a bit of color and I am left with apples in my fridge. Instead of fresh biscuits and strawberries, I have been reduced to making an apple cake ... ah well. It's a pretty cake loaded with small diced apple bits and golden raisins soaked and puffed to perfection. The last of the maple syrup was added to butter and cream cheese to make a frothy bowl of frosting and voila! Another beautiful cake ...

Let those little thieves have the berries for the time being. We have apple cake with maple frosting !

This is a dense and very moist cake that is reminiscent of carrot cake. It has a big soft crumb and super moist chunks of fruit that are spread throughout the cake. It's a good keeper of a cake in that it stays terrific for a couple days ... sorry no photos of cut pieces, as it went to the little white church for fellowship time  ... it's a very good cake. Trust me.

Apple and Olive Oil Cake with Maple Frosting

an Ottolenghi recipe

Cake Ingredients:

4 tbsp. water

1/2 c. golden raisins

2 1/4 c. flour

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 c.olive oil

3/4 c. granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs, beaten

3 large Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, small dice (1/2 inch)

zest f one lemon

2 egg whites, whipped to soft peaks

Maple Frosting Ingredients:

7 tbsp. unsalted butter, softened

a scant 1/2 c. Muscovado sugar

1/4 c. maple syrup

8 oz. cream cheese, softened 

Making the Cake:

1. Pre heat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Grease an 8-inch spring form pan and line it with parchment paper.

2. Place the water and golden raisins in small saucepan and bring to a boil. Cover and turn off the heat. Let the raisins soak until cool.

3. Sift together in a small bowl the flour, cinnamon, salt, baking soda, and baking powder. Set aside.

4. Beat the olive oil, sugar and vanilla extract together until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well.

5. Turn in the diced apples, raisins and any residual fluid, and lemon zest. Mix well.

6. Turn in the dry mix and stir to a thick batter.

7. Turn in the egg white meringue in two additions, gently turning in until incorporated.

8. Turn the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 1/2 hours. A cake tester should come clean.

9. Cool the cake for five minutes and then release the outer band of the spring form pan. Let the cake, then, cool completely.

10. Use a serrated knife to slice the cake into two even layers.

11. Whip the frosting ingredients in a deep bowl until perfectly smooth and frothy.

12. Place half the frosting on the bottom layer. Top with the second layer and frost the top of the second layer.

13. Chill the cake before serving to set the frosting.

Frosted Carrot and Parsnip Cake

Nothing fancy here, unless you think that a cooked meringue frosting and candied orange and lemon peel embellishment makes for a fancy cake. This carrot and parsnip cake had butter instead of the more traditional oil component to the batter, brown sugar instead of white sugar, and golden raisins added with the grated carrots and parsnips. There are no nuts, no pineapple, no added falderal.

It's a tall cake, made in an 8-inch spring form and slipped to a pretty cake plate shortly after coming from the oven. I cooled it and then slipped it under the cake dome overnight to let the residual warmth in the cake create a moist environment to soften the crumb crust at the outer edges and top.

Christmas Spiced Chocolate Torte - Thanks, Nigella!

I haven't been making a lot of sweets of late, but today was a rainy day - all grey and sullen, buckets of rain pouring down and this end of the state under flood watch. I was in need of sweets. To boot, my friend Dom posted a round-up of cakes that his blogging friends posted in honor of his birthday month. I digested about a million calories worth of food porn along with my morning coffee. The temptation was just TOO GREAT!

When the urge hits, a chocolate cake is called for, don't you think? I scrounged around looking for just the right chocolate buzz and found it on Nigella Lawson's website. This slice of heaven is a combination of chocolate, orange zest, expresso powder, sugar, eggs, and almond flour. Yes! It's a flourless torte that reminds me of those chocolate oranges that come foil wrapped at Christmas time!

Madeleines and Apricot/Mango Iced Cream

Desserts in the grey cottage have been few and far between of late. Madeleines, though, have such a cachet for me that I couldn't resist making them as a special treat for SB and I. To boot, I found a lovely iced cream recipe in Diana Henry's latest cookbook, A Change of Appetite that I had to try!

Maple Apple Cake - Gluten Free and Great

I very rarely return to a recipe within a few weeks, even if I love the recipe. Those food bloggers who make a recipe to the letter the first time, and then return right a way to adapt it and perfect it before posting it are a different breed of cooks. I am a food diarist. What you see is what you get and if I adapt a recipe, I usually adapt it right out of the gate because I've read the recipe through and thought about it's ingredients or the cooking instructions, or the constraints of my pantry or the likes and dislikes of our house full of hungry folk, or, or, or ...

That being said, I want you to meet this Maple Apple Cake. This cake (above) started out as Rum Apple Cake, a recipe straight from The FOOD 52 Cookbook.

Triple Apple Cake

Look at this sticky, sweet/tart cake ! I was originally thinking that it should be served warm with a  big gob of vanilla ice cream along side, but ...

A Different Kind of Carrot Cake ...

Most carrot cakes that I have made over the years have a considerable amount of vegetable oil in the batter. The carrots are grated coarsely and join sweetened coconut, crushed pineapple, and walnuts to make a thick batter that has a heavy moist crumb. This version of carrot cake is a bit different, though.

New Orleans Praline Pound Cake

It's been a while since I baked a sweet cake ... a beautiful cake ... a pound cake ! This is a variation of a typical pound cake recipe that I found in a cook book by Nick Malgieri. The man knows how to tempt me. I should learn not to take cook books to bed for browsing before sleep. The idea of this cake kept rattling around in my head before I dropped off last night.

Red Velvet Cake

... I will NEVER be a cake decorator, but boy, was it fun puttering over this one! ...

Gram Lindquist's Banana Cake with Maple Frosting and Salted Hazelnuts

Banana Cake ... Maple Frosting ... Toasted and Salted Hazelnuts ... Yup, I squirreled a piece to bring home from the party. I know. I'm bad.

Taming the Leftovers ... Gingerbread and Cranberry Bites

I have been such a slouch of late, as far as The Spice Garden is concerned! I apologize to those of you who drop in regularly. It's not that I've been a complete couch potato. I haven't. I've been extremely distracted with prepping the house for Thanksgiving visitors, working with the little ones in my little church's Sunday school on Advent activities, sewing and prepping a Christmas box for German friends that must be sent very soon, reading some awesome books, visiting some family and friends, and baking for my church's fellowship hour and for that cookie jar/cookies post for the Typhoon relief bake sale. It seems that my energy just ran out when it came to writing and photographing for a Spice Garden post!

New Cookbook - New Cake ! Random Recipe !

Well, it's official. My collection of cookbooks is out of control. I have become a cookbook junkie and everyone in my life knows about it. To boot, they're aiding and abetting my obsession! This past week a new friend popped through the back door with gifts for SB and I ... he got a map cover for his biking maps and I got Mollie Katzen's cookbook called Still Life With Menu Cookbook. The look of this book is so interesting; Mollie's original painted illustrations highlight each short collection of recipes that are themed to make an entire vegetarian meal from appetizer or soup to dessert. I like that. I often wish that every cookbook recipe would have a brief snippet about what other dishes go well with the recipe or how the recipe might be incorporated into a larger meal.

At any rate, I have already turned each page of this newest addition to the cookbook shelf and have slipped little markers into a few pages for dishes and desserts that will make it onto our dinner table or onto the party buffet table come holiday time.

Pound Cake - A True Baking Basic

Look in any baker's pantry and you will find the basics - flour, sugar, leavening agents, salt, milk, eggs, and butter ... anything else is incidental and serves to jazz up the basic baked goods that are main elements for family eating - breads, biscuits, muffins, cakes. These are the baked goods that most of us started out making when we stood on a chair next  to our mothers or grannies and watched and learned and licked the spoons.

We learned that a basic cake recipe could be made special by adding just a few flavours ... cinnamon and spices one time to make a spice cake, apples and raisins the next time to make a fruit laden coffee cake, citrus juice and fruit zest to make a light tangy teacake ... but always there was a basic recipe to start from.

Puddings, Cakes, and Bakes ... A Random Recipe

This month's random recipe brings us to the back of the book, so to speak ... the sweets and baked goods that end a good meal or give us a little bit of sweetness alongside tea or coffee. So here we go ...