One of the challenges they don’t explain to you growing up is that you don’t get to see your friends all the time. Respectfully, what's up with that? Furthermore, shows like Seinfeld and Friends told us a big fat lie that you and your closest friends would live right across the hall from each other and be able to stop over for dinner or even breakfast on a moment's notice (note: I always thought it was weird when the whole gang came over for free breakfast at Monica and Rachel's apartment).
As many of my friends and I venture into our late twenties and early thirties, I have noticed that the times we can get together begin to run further and further apart. A big factor in this is working schedules. As someone in the food industry, a lot of my working hours tend to be social hours for someone working a 9am to 5pm job. With this change in my social life, my love language for friends and loved ones has transformed into one celebratory food - cake!
Cakes are truly a labor of love - and they are an elegant dessert you can make for someone you care for. Whether it is a birthday or some other excuse to indulge in a sweet treat, go ahead and make your friend a cake. Before you reach for your box of Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines, I think you – yes you– can make one without Betty or Duncan holding your hand. Get creative! While I love plain ol’ chocolate or vanilla cake, lately I’ve experimented with mixing and matching flavors together. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here, just try and step out of your comfort zone.
One of my all time favorite cookbooks is More Than Cake by Natasha Pickowicz. In the book, Pickowicz gives you a ‘choose your own adventure’ in cake construction. On offer are several tried and true sponge recipes and a variety of extravagant and elegant buttercream flavors. A good rule of thumb for me here is to pick something wild and pair it with something a little more classic. My most recent I-care-about-you-cake went to my beloved partner. It was a Toasted Sesame Chiffon Sponge Cake layered with some homemade peach jam and iced with a classic vanilla buttercream. Let’s break all of those components down.
First off, let’s talk about what Chiffon is. This is a type of cake that has a lot of air in it by way of egg whites. You start off by whipping egg whites to soft peaks and slowly folding those into the rest of the batter ingredients. The toasted sesame comes in the form of a paste that you can either purchase at your local Asian grocery store (H-mart is a great place to start) or make on your own pretty simply by throwing about a quarter cup of toasted sesame seeds in your food processor with a teaspoon of sesame oil.
The sesame adds a really light nuttiness to the cake that makes any sort of fruit spread zap. I made my chiffon on a lined 18X13 sheet tray and then cut out 6-inch circles to make around 5 layers - Frankensteining scraps together as needed.
While my layers cooled, I quickly whipped up some peach jam with about 2 cups of frozen peach slices, a quarter cup of sugar and the juice of half a lemon. As it cooked, I macerated the peach pieces, let that come to a simmer and let it reduce by about half.
Once that was cooling I worked on my buttercream, I found this fabulous buttercream recipe on this hip and cool website, thechoppingblock.com. Did you know it just got revamped? Navigation is so easy - it took me no time at all to find this spectacular recipe from our very own Chef Kelly.
Make sure you poke around our new website after you finish reading this blog entry (it’s almost over).
Once all my components were complete, it was time to assemble. I lined a 6-inch cake tin with plastic film and laid one of my cake circles into the tin. I then put a small amount of buttercream along with a generous scoop of my peach jam followed by another layer. I repeated this process until all my cakes were layered. After this I flipped out the cake onto my serving dish and used the rest of my buttercream to ice the cake. Voila - my display of affection was complete.
It's not cake, but we're offering some pretty spectacular classes on how to make our famous TCB Apple Pie around Apple Fest this year. You'll learn how to make the pie and pick it up later in the day. We have three different classes to choose from on:
Stay tuned for some more fun baking classes we'll have coming up in this upcoming holiday season!
