I had a birthday recently and decided to take a break from my Colorado photos to post photos on my cake. If you’ve read this blog before, you know I love cake. Among cake, my true love is buttercream birthday cake. When I get cake in the supermarket, at parties, in the store, it is all with the comparison to birthday cake in my mind.

I grew up in a predominantly Italian town in New Jersey (shocker!). We had a lot of good pizza within 5 minutes and a very special Italian bakery about 15? minutes away. Baldanza‘s is a standalone bakery by a bowling alley on a main road covered with aging stores and strip malls. Despite the raggedy appearance of the area, you smelled this bakery every time you drove by. The scent of baked goods managed to penetrate even your closed windows. It was awesome.

One of my favorite parts of this shot is the rounded poof of frosting in the lower right corner. Very elegant.

When my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, there was nothing on my list, because I generally don’t want a lot, and if I want it, I just get it myself. However, this cake had been in my mind for awhile. I hadn’t had it in maybe 10 years, and now that I had a hobby of photographing food and writing about it, I realized everything was falling short when compared to my beloved Baldanza’s cake.

The first reason I hadn’t had this cake in so long was because, as you may know from my About page, I lost about 100 lbs a few years ago and basically abstained from anything delicious for 5 whole years. (3 to lose the weight, 2 to keep it off.) I’ve since introduced all foods back into my life so this was no longer an issue.

The second reason is that I lived at least 90 minutes from the bakery. My mother had also moved at least 45 minutes away, so I asked her for the cake, but told her not to do it if it would be a pain. As you can see, she came through. She drove down to the Jersey Shore in the wee hours of the morning, picked up the cake, then tried to drive home while holding it in the passenger seat so it wouldn’t fall off and die a tragic death.

Mm, birthday cake.

The extra variable in this equation is the summer heat. Summer + buttercream = melting cake. She packed cold sodas around it to keep it cool in desperation.

Luckily, it worked! I got my cake, and I was so very excited. As you can see, it is white Italian buttercream, lavender flowers, and lemon filling. Yes, lemon. My many, many cake tastings in the past 5 years have brought me to a very unusual conclusion: I love lemon filling. Not chocolate. Not strawberry. Lemon. Something about the brightness of the taste cuts through the buttercream in the most delightful way.

Action shot! We cut the cake.

The icing on this was great. I’ve had many low-quality buttercreams in my life, and that doesn’t even count ‘bettercream’, which isn’t pretending to be the real thing. I’ve even made my own buttercream in search of the perfect icing, and it’s just not the same. I usually make American buttercream, which is just butter+powdered sugar, and this was definitely NOT that. I also suspect it was not French buttercream, which uses egg yolks, because it was so white. That leaves Italian buttercream or Swiss Meringue buttercream. They’re both very similar and basically add corn syrup and egg white. I would guess, since this was an Italian bakery, that they used Italian buttercream, but who knows.

Glistening buttercream

It’s a fork shot! I ate my flower first, and the buttercream tasted as I remembered it; delightfully smooth, sweet, with no taste of butter. My mother detected a hint of rum in it, and I agree that there was more than a vanilla flavoring there. I want to emphasize that it’s not the taste but the mouthfeel and the whole experience. This buttercream might not make you blink until you’ve had so many bad ones, and then you really appreciate it.

My purple flower

More cake shots after the jump.

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After nibbling on two appetizers, eating a salad, having a tiny pumpkin muffin, and sampling elk, bison, and quail, I still had some room – or so I told myself. Look, it was time for dessert, and that’s my favorite part of any meal. Because I knew I would be taking pictures, I even went ahead and ordered two. Yes, I was one woman, of a normal weight, ordering two desserts, because I felt like it. It was awesome.

Getting two desserts solved the dilemma I’ve mentioned many times on this blog: I love cake, and I want to order cake, but I don’t always like the cake. So, what did I do? I ordered the cake, and I ordered the panna cotta, which sounded really weird and therefore extremely exciting.

Mexican chocolate cake

The Fort’s chocolate cake is a Mexican cake with a little chile spice in the mix. I’ve had chocolate with cayenne and chipotle before, and I quite liked it. This particular cake also had bourbon somewhere in it, but I am not sure where. I could definitely taste the tingle of the chile as I ate it, though. Boy, this was a generous serving – I think those two pieces were a quarter of an 8 inch cake.I managed a few bites and that was it – I was pretty full, and there wasn’t enough vavavoom to this dessert to inspire me.

Rosemary-infused panna cotta

I mentioned a panna cotta, which is basically cream and sugar that is set with gelatin. This variation was rosemary infused with huckleberries on top. I’ve never had panna cotta or huckleberries before. I’ve been missing out my entire life. I love smooth, creamy flavors, and panna cotta is so, so silkily textured. It was heaven in my mouth. The rosemary gave it a bright, lemony, herbal note in the background that was just wonderful. Of course, the berries were very welcome as well – tart and brightly colored, mixing with the mildly-flavored cream in lovely streaks.

Empty panna cotta glass

I found room for the panna cotta and in fact ate the whole thing. Do you see the patterns on the side? That’s where I was desperately scraping with my spoon.

Coffee with Frangelico

I mentioned in a previous post that I had an ulterior motive regarding the sunset. Well, it was about 8:30 and the sun’s official setting time was 8:52 on this glorious July day, so I decided to order a coffee to extend my stay a little. I am a sucker for coffees with liqueur because they somehow transform normal coffee into something magical topped with whipped cream. This one had Frangelico and maybe Kahlua in it. It was actually very good; I could taste the alcohol but in a very pleasant way. It definitely added to the flavor of the coffee itself, which wasn’t too robust.

The whipped cream was fantastic, of course. I wanted to take that axe stirrer with me, but it said The Fort on it like it was custom-made for them, so I thought it’d be wrong to take it. The coffee was a nice end to a very nice meal. Afterwards, I went to the patio to watch the moon rise and caught the sunset behind me, as documented in the last post. Success!

Rioja is one of many small, hip restaurants in Denver’s historic Larimer Square area. It’s well-reviewed, so I thought I’d eat there, and when I looked at the menu, the homemade donuts definitely sold me on brunch. It’s supposedly Mediterranean food, but I did not get that vibe from the brunch menu. It had some pasta but also some curry and other Indian influences, as well as tuna nicoise, and, well, waffles. This isn’t a bad thing – it’s simply not your typical Italian place.

I knew I’d be taking pictures so I sat outside in the direct sunlight, right around the hottest part of the day. It was somewhere between 90-100 degrees in Denver. My iPhone was soon coffee-cup hot, I was occasionally touching my water glass to my face, and you can see what happened to my butter. For the record, the bread they gave me with it — one lavender-flavored, one studded with olives — was pretty nice.

Butter in the summer in Denver

The donuts. Oh, the donuts. Freshly made donuts, made by anyone, are delicious. They’re hot, doughy, and comforting. These donuts were filled with lemon curd and mascarpone, the creamy cheese they use in tiramisu. I’m a sucker for lemon curd, and the combination here was excellent; decadent, creamy, velvety texture, cutting down the acidity of the lemon so you get a bright, but gentle taste of melt-in-your-mouth goodness.

Homemade donuts from Rioja

Did I mention the melt-in-your-mouth goodness? Because these donuts were hot from the oven, the filling was a delightful stream of yellow that I loved to mop up with the donut. The one downside was that eating these were messy. I had that powdered sugar all over my fingers and mouth. It was a fun, whimsical messy, though. It was the mess of eating something truly enjoyable.

I experimented with adding a fork to my photos to style them a little better. One can’t rely on macro shots alone, right?

Homemade donut with melty lemon filling

They also kindly provided some blueberry compote for you to add to your donut. I tried spooning some into the donut, dipping the donut into it, and then just eating it off the plate, mixed with the remnants of the lemon curd mascarpone. It’s an interesting choice because blueberries are tart like lemons are, and it balances out the pillowy decadence of the donut itself. I didn’t need the blueberries, personally, because the lemon flavor was enough for me, but I can see what they were going for. As an aside, I like this photo because it’s like it is a waterfall of blueberries, slowly spilling towards you.

Blueberry compote

Those were so delicious, I was pretty much full and finished, but I had my ‘entree’ coming out. Yes, those donuts were just ‘starters’. To get something both healthy and interesting-sounding, I selected a dungeness crab crepe, filled with asparagus, shiitake mushrooms, and crab, then topped with black truffle hollandaise sauce. Sounds fancy, but they look pretty normal, right? It’s the hollandaise – I realize it’s a cornerstone of French sauces, but it’s bright yellow. I just can’t take it seriously. I also didn’t taste the truffle flavor at all, and all in all, eating an egg-and-butter sauce after those donuts was just too much richness for me.

Asparagus, crab, and shiitake mushroom crepes

I ended up just eating the inside of the crepes, which were very light. The asparagus added some crunch to the soft crab, and the mushrooms brought some earthiness to shindig. They were generous with the amount of crab, and overall, I thought this was a good combination of flavors. I just wish I hadn’t had the donuts before it.

Asparagus, crab, and shiitake on a fork

As I mentioned in my last post, these photos are not as stellar as usual because I had to take these cupcakes on the bus, then wander around a hot, unfamiliar city to find some good light at 6 PM . Sorry! I learned a lot about what not to do next time I have to shoot in the street on vacation, at least.

So, here we go. My last cupcakes from Happy Cakes were a Cherry Coke cupcake and a Cosmo cupcake. The Cherry Coke cupcake is a cherry flavored icing on top of a chocolate and soda-flavored cupcake. This icing was pretty thick, close to a fondant, and pretty cherry-flavored. As always, I wasn’t getting a lot out of the soda cupcake. Cola just isn’t a strong-enough flavor to stand up to cake. Now, cherry frosting? Perfect. We need more of this. I’ll even venture to say we need it more than strawberry frosting.

The Cherry Coke is the pink cupcake in the foreground with the white sprinkles. I don’t have a better photo because it got flattened at the bottom of my cupcake bag. Boo.

Cherry coke cupcake

Now we move on to the Cosmo cupcake. The cupcake part of it was vodka-soaked and flavored with cranberry. I rarely taste the liquor in soaked cupcakes, and this was no exception, but the addition of cranberry packed a punch. It was very assertive, and I found that delightful because cupcakes tend to have good frosting but boring cakes. This was well-balanced.

Cosmo cupcake

If there’s one thing I can say about Happy Cakes, their frosting is flavorful. This cupcake had lime buttercream frosting that pretty much planted a flag on your tongue and said, “I’m here, and I’m staying.” Combined with the bold cranberry-flavored cake, it was pretty tart, but I liked that. It reminded me I was eating something, and this is important because, all too often, flavors get lost in the  mouthfeel of frosting. Raise your hands – how many of you have had frosting that tastes just like lard or just like butter? I thought so. (Heck, even my frosting tastes like butter, to my continued dismay.) Actually, this Cosmo was on the Martha Stewart show as one of her Favorites because she supposedly likes bold, tart flavors.

Cosmo cupcake frosting closeup

I like how the sugar encrusts the frosting, like tiny Pavé jewels. I think I’m seeing a trend where cupcakes that skew towards adults have sugar crystals instead of sprinkles. Sugar crystals are more elegant with their sparkle, whereas sprinkles, with their rounded shape and dull surfaces, are for kids. (Disclaimer: I get rainbow sprinkles on all my softserve icecream.)

Frosting peak

After my tour, I went back to Happy Cakes because I just knew that I had to have more of their cupcakes and take pictures for you all. Now, this posed an interesting problem. I had gotten to the Highlands by.. bus. So, picture me wandering around a somewhat run-down (but lovely), historic part of Denver, with two bags of cupcakes, altitude sickness (ie a splitting headache), 90+ degree weather, a large camera bag, and unfamiliar transportation. I briefly considered taking pictures on the sidewalk with some weeds in the background because it’d keep with the character of the area, but I thought I’d look even weirder than I already did.

This sets the stage for why 1) my cupcakes were smooshed and 2) why my light was unusual. You see, I got back to downtown Denver in the late afternoon. There was plenty of light.. in the sky. Unfortunately, it was blocked by all the high-rises. After wandering around, I found a spot of sunlight on the street caused by the sun reflecting off a skyscraper’s windows. It happened to be between some pillars on some bank. The end result? Me nestled into a dubious alcove photographing cupcakes on the street. I’m sure passerbys are still trying to figure out what they saw that day.

Back to the cake. When I saw Happy Cakes had hat was essentially cake on a stick, I had to try it. They put it in this cute little bag all by its lonesome, where I was certain it’d get crushed.

Happy Cakes bag

It’s cute, right? I love rainbow sprinkles.

Cake on a stick

The white coating is white chocolate. For those unfamiliar, cake pops are basically cake crumbles mixed with icing, chilled, then dipped into some hard coating that is usually chocolate. The stick is optional. Pioneer Woman has a nice post about them here, and Bakerella is a good source as well, with more cake pops than you could shake a stick at.

Cake pop from Happy Cakes

As always, I love the rogue pink sugar crystal in the middle. It’s like a stowaway. This is the kind of detail you never notice without photos.

Close up on the sprinkles

You may notice the innards of the cake pop look like cake. There’s no indication of icing. I will also say that I didn’t taste icing per se. It was moist but I guess the flavors meld together when you chill the cake. As a result, this was a nice little treat that wasn’t overly rich. It wasn’t streaked with pockets or veins of icing, though that’d be kind of fun. I enjoyed eating it but can’t remember anything remarkable about it. I really love cake, especially frosting, but I think I prefer them a little more separate so I can experience their flavors individually.

Innards of a cake pop

Unfortunately, my dude was a little top heavy and fell off the stick, so here he is, half-eaten with a crack in him. These are the downsides of taking photos in the street.  I’m fond of the lighting in this picture, though; that yellow hue on my hand is the setting sun of Colorado summer. It lends a nice warmth to the picture.

Cake pop after a little nibble

I am back from Colorado! What an amazing place. Within a few hours of deplaning, I found myself on a Culinary Connectors tour, wandering around the Highlands district of Denver. I toured 2 restaurants, a wine store, and a cupcake shop. This cupcake shop has led me to deem this Cupcake Week because I have so many wonderful pictures from my tour and subsequent purchases from them.

The shop in question is Happy Cakes, consistently rated one of the best cupcake shops in Denver. The two owners first started baking in their homes, then moved into a shared kitchen with a cooking school. After a third owner, they moved into their own shop. It’s quite small. I would say the front and back could fit in about two parking spaces.

This cupcake is a liquor-infused creation. Given how many I’ve featured on this blog alone, I am pretty sure that booze is the #1 trendy thing in the cupcake world. Vegan might be #2. This bad girl is a Pomegranate Margarita. The cupcake is flavored like a margarita – very nice, a little limey – and the icing is so tart and flavorful because it is made with pomegranate liqueur. It was a delight to eat it – very bold. (The icing is cracked because I had to carry these all over Denver to find a place where the buildings didn’t block the setting sun. )

Pomegranate Margarita cupcake

I really like their practice of only doing the sugar in a v-like formation on one side of the cupcake. It’s a very distinctive, lovely look that also doesn’t add too much sugar to the icing.

Pink frosting on a Pomegranate Margarita cupcake

I love my close-up sprinkle/sugar shots as you know. The square, faceted shape of these pink and purple sugar crystals makes them look like emerald-cut jewels. Speaking of emeralds, I adore the rogue green sugar crystal in the middle.

Aerial view

Extreme pink sugar closeup

Good cake to icing ratio. I like to not have to ‘save’ my icing. I don’t want to be afraid that I’ll run out before I finish the cupcake part! (Remember when we were young and used to lick off the icing first?) As you can see, the cake had a good crumb, and the icing was on the denser side.

I call this the bitten side view

Again, that magnificent sugar coating adds so much to the picture; the texture on the right is wonderful.

Pomegranate Margarita frosting

Since I am traveling in Denver right now, here’s another travel-related post. I went to Oregon last summer and stayed in Portland for a few days, mostly to try their famous coffee. I was generally underwhelmed with the flavor – it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t spectacular. However, the coffee shop vibe can’t be beat. This particular Peet’s let you bring your own mug and had 20+ exotic tea flavors that I would have loved to try if I only had more time.

Lou decided to branch out, so this lovely coffee leaf came from the now-closed Portland Coffee House on Alder St, a block from Peet’s. That sweet white kitty you see in the background is made of chocolate – but that’s another post.

My first coffee art

I love the rich hue left behind by our coffee in these cups.

Empty coffee cups

I think this was either a blueberry muffin or a raisin bran muffin. Knowing me, it was a raisin one because I am obsessed with raisins, but that black speck and smooth texture is pushing me towards blueberry. This muffin was extra large, as coffee shop items often are, and I  don’t recall it being either fantastic or terrible.

Bran muffin from Peet's

Sweet Avenue Bake Shop is a local vegan cupcake bakery I’ve discussed a few times. I most recently had margarita and pina colada cupcakes from their new liquor-themed line. I saw a Tweet today that they had a new flavor – Jack and Coke. I didn’t know what they meant at first, I’m embarrassed to say, but after further reading, I found out this was a cola-flavored cupcake, with a cola-caramel filling, and whiskey frosting. My significant other loves soda, whiskey, and rum, so I knew this was the perfect Friday pick-me-up. I got two Jack and Coke’s and a S’mores cupcake that I’ll post about later.

As I said, these are vegan cupcakes. That means they are made with no meat or dairy products – no milk, eggs, or butter. They are some of the best cupcakes I’ve had.

Jack and Coke cupcakes

These fat icing swirls make me think of the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man in Ghostbusters. This icing does have a slightly marshmellow-like texture to it; it’s very thick and doesn’t instantly dissolve into butter in your mouth. It still coats your mouth with sweet goodness, but it is a little more substantial than butter+confectioner’s sugar. Vegan frostings typically use shortening instead of butter, and that’d explain the longer-lasting mouthfeel, but this doesn’t taste artificial enough to be shortening so I’m not sure of the source of the magic here.

Sweet Avenue cupcakes

The whiskey flavor came through wonderfully. I felt like I was really consuming alcohol. (That said, I almost never drink, I’ve been to a bar maybe three times, and I’ve only had whiskey once, in egg nog, last Christmas. It doesn’t take much to overload my palate with whiskey flavor.) I really enjoyed this, much more than the margarita and pina colada icings I had. The whiskey stood up well to that thicker texture I mentioned, and it really stuck with you as it coated your mouth. The only downside is that it overwhelmed the cupcake part a bit, and I was bracing myself for a bran-muffin flavor because the cupcake looked like one. The cola flavor is much more delicate than the icing, and I don’t think I can accurately say I now know what a cola-flavored cupcake tastes like. Unlike a bran muffin, though, the cake was very moist with a great crumb.

Whiskey icing

These sugar crystals are courtesy of my new 60mm macro lens. Love.

Sugar crystal close up

To bring things back to reality, here’s the Jack and Coke after Lou got to it. I scarfed down my cupcake in about 20 seconds this evening with my bare hands and didn’t take time for pictures, but he delicately sampled it with a fork and put most of it away for later. Yeah, I don’t get it, either. However, his odd eating methods usually mean he loses interest or forgets about it, which means I get more cupcake later. Maybe I’ll be able to concentrate more on the cola flavor in the second go-around.

After a Lou-sized bite

There’s a bonus sugar crystal photo after the jump.

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I changed the site quite a bit yesterday so please let me know what you think. There’s now a carousel of recent pictures, a contact page, and a new logo. The photo flipping that used to be on the front page has been moved to the Photo Gallery link, so that the blog itself can be on the front page. I am still adding things, so if you see any weirdness, please let me know!

Redesign cupcake

On the fourth of July, we went to Ringwood Manor, a fantastic historic mansion in northeastern New Jersey. George Washington’s mapmaker lived there, so it was an important part of the Revolutionary War. I’ve posted non-food pictures of the Manor several times on my other photography site, including shots of dragonflies in the pond, the blacksmith hut, and the loom demonstration I saw on the Fourth.

But now on to the good part — the food. Ladies in period gowns were selling baked goods made from recipes originating in the 1800s. I believe most of them came from Amelia Simmon’s American Cookery, the very first American cookbook, written in 1796. They ate well back then. Certain things, like sugar, were quite expensive, but cake was still cake and therefore delicious.

214 years later, I would still eat this! I actually did not get a piece of it, though, because I got so many other things. Fun fact – the chocolate cake recipes of the time referenced “5 cent Hershey bars” in their ingredient listings.

Colonial chocolate cake

This next treat is called a jumble. It’s a cake/biscuit spiced with anise seeds, caraway seeds, and coriander, then dusted with sugar. It was meant to keep on long journeys. The taste combination was strange; I’ve never eaten anything sweet that had caraway and coriander in it, that’s for sure.

This is Martha Washington’s Jumble recipe:
“Take a pound & a halfe of fine flowre & a pound of fine sugar, both searced & dried in an oven, 6 youlks, & 3 whites of eggs, 6 spoonfulls of sweet cream & as much rose water, fresh butter ye quantety of an egg. Mingle these together & make it into stiff paste. Work it a quarter of an hour then break it abroad, & put in as much annyseeds or carraway seeds as you shall think fit, & put in A little muske & ambergreece. roule them into rouls & make them in what forms you please. lay them on pie plates thin buttered, & prick them with holes all over. then bake them as you doe diet bread. If this quantety of eggs will not be enough to wet ye flour & sugar, put in 23 or 4 more, but no more cream, butter, not rosewater.”
–Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, transcribed by Karen Hess [Columbia University Press:New York] 1995 (p. 348)

Old-fashioned Jumble (Anise and caraway biscuit)

This next spice cake is called Independence Cake. It was very tasty – most likely because it had one of my favorite things, brandy-soaked raisins.

“Twenty pounds flour, fifteen pounds sugar, ten pounds butter, four dozen eggs, one quart wine, one quart brandy, one ounce nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, mace, of each three ounces, two pounds citron, currants, and raisins, five pounds each, one quart yeast ; when baked, frost with loaf sugar ; dress with box and gold leaf.”

- Amelia Simmon’s American Cookery

Independence Cake

These next two pictures feature Queen’s Cake. I think of them as rose-muffins. They were made with rose water, and I thought they had rose jelly in the center, but the recipe says there should be currants. There was definitely a dark, fruity center in these. I believe the topping is lemon zest. I liked these – they weren’t great but definitely as edible as any blueberry or apple cinnamon muffin you’d make at home. Rose water elevates them a little.

Queen's Cakes on a silver tray

Here’s that mysterious dark center.

Inside of a Queen's cake

Hope you learned something! If not, how about this: that “ambergreece” Martha Washington mentioned is actually a perfume-like substance found in the intestines of the sperm whale.