I was on a rampage for something sweet recently. I purposely keep my house snack-free. I also don’t drink milk or eat whole eggs, so baking is often out of the question. However, I did have eggs for once, and I had a hankering for something dark and spicy and flavorful, as opposed to some yellow cake mix I microwaved. (Yes, I’ve done that in my desperate moments).

Without a mix, I endeavored to undertake a rare project – something from scratch. I looked for spice cakes on allrecipes.com and uncovered this gingerbread recipe. It is gingerbread in the form of an actual cake as opposed to the flat cookie we are more used to. I made a lot of substitutions to the original recipe because I can’t follow baking directions to save my life. I added allspice, cardamom, and nutmeg, and I switched half the hot water for rum. I also decided I wanted even more molasses, so I changed the white sugar to brown sugar. The modified recipe is below.

The flavor of this cake is spicy and complex with a hint of bitterness. It’s like drinking a stout beer in that respect. It’s certainly sweet enough to still be called cake, as opposed to bread, but I’m not sure if children would favor the more subtle sweetness.

Originally from allrecipes.com, with modifications:

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 egg
• 1 cup molasses
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 1 teaspoon cardamom
• 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup hot water
• 1/2 cup warm rum*

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9 inch square pan.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Beat in the egg, and mix in the molasses.
3. In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, and cloves. Blend into the creamed mixture. Stir in the water and the rum. Pour into the prepared pan.
4. Bake 1 hour in the preheated oven, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Allow to cool in pan before serving

*You will taste the rum. It gave the gingerbread a warm, tingly characteristic straight out of the oven but faded the next day.

So, some hijinks ensued, of coures. My brown sugar was dried out and lumpy, so I added some water and microwaved it. The hot, runny sugar mixed really well with the butter, but later, when I added the rum and hot water, I realized I should have scaled back the hot water to make up for the extra water in the sugar. I realized that too late, so I threw in some flour to fix it. It still turned out fine, amazingly!

Look at that beautiful texture. The cake was quite moist but heavy. The flavor profile is complex, and a single slab is heavy because it is such a tall cake.

And that shiny, caramelized crust. Mmm. Oh, it crackled and was simply delicious.

It’s a little boring to photograph, though, so while I was looking for ideas, my significant other, Louis, snuck in and added a gift bow to this slice. I thought it was amusing and slightly Christmas-y.

You can see that it had nice, crisp edges as well. I added a pecan just for this shot, but I do think that nuts would be a good addition to this gingerbread. The crunch would provide some textural contrast, and if they were roasted or sugar-drizzled nuts, the sweetness would be provide a foil for the rich and dark flavor of the gingerbread.

I saw this photo on Serious Eats of a pistachio danish at Grandaisy Bakery and decided I just had to go there. Luckily, there was a location just 10 blocks from a place I used to work, so, with my friend Allison in tow, I trekked up to 72nd street. They sell a variety of baked goods, paninis, and unusual ‘pizza’. It’s rectangular and features flavors like sweet potato, onion and potato, artichoke, fennel, and celery root. The bakery is in a tiny alcove next to a large Gray’s Papaya, though, and I admit I was tempted to get a hot dog for lunch instead.

However, I steeled my will and got a Greek panini, a pistachio danish, a carrot cake hunk, a lumaca cookie, and a raspberry cookie.

Here it is. It has a tart-like, rustic crust, with pistachios on a bed of cheese.

Lumacas are not photogenic at all so I put them atop the raspberry cookie. Lumaca roughly means snail, and you can see how the cookie curves in on itself like a shell. They’re pastry-like, but crunchy, with currants, nuts, and some apricot preserves folded in. The apricot gives it some unexpected bursts of sweetness, but I just didn’t feel this cookie. It was crunchy and covered in sugar, so it was messy, and the fruit and nuts really got lost. I don’t remember it tasting like much.

I love the light in this photo. Everything looks so clean and bright and breezy.

The raspberry cookie was a flower pressed atop chunky raspberry preserves, all within a small round cookie. The jam was a wonderful, jewel-like crimson, and you could see large raspberry fragments in it for additional texture, so it was really quite lovely. Unfortunately, it was a shortbread cookie, and it broke in the bag before I could take a picture of it. I think, broken spoke aside, this photo still gets the essence of this treat across. How did it taste? The raspberry filling was just perfect. It was tart and flavorful. You were unmistakably eating smashed up raspberries, and there wasn’t a lot of sugar or other additives to confuse the experience.

Onto the carrot cake. I realize this photo is uninspired, but I found it difficult to take a compelling shot of what is essentially a small cupcake-shaped carrot cake. Take a look at the drink lid beneath the cake, to get an idea of the size. It was about 2 inches high, before icing, and 3 inches wide. The size works with a cupcake, but carrot cake is so dense and rich that it felt overly indulgent here. That said, it was still very good. The cake was incredibly moist and nicely spiced. The icing was good – bright and a little tart. I am glad they held back with it, because I could see the impulse to add an inch of frosting to this bad boy to even out its proportions.

Verdict? This is very tasty if you like carrot cake, but get it after dinner on a Saturday. This is not a donut you can just absorb into your day — it’s a full-on dessert.

Now that I got all the other items out of the way, I’ll return to the danish, my sole reason for visiting Grandaisy Bakery. While it is obviously topped with pistachios, there was a fruity taste as well that I believe was more apricot preserves sprinkled here and there. The folded crust is really quite lovely, and the texture was spot on.

As you can see, it was golden on the outside, but tender on the inside. I hate dry pastry crust that snaps into a mess of crumbs as soon as you bite into it, which was my problem with the lumaca cookie, and, luckily, that didn’t happen here. I should also note that this danish is about 4 inches across, and pretty deep, so you get a lot of filling and, overall, a lot of danish.

But how did it taste? Well, the interior looks to be farmer’s cheese rather than cream cheese. I discussed the origins of farmer’s cheese in my previous post on pierogies, but the important part to note here is that a cream cheese-based filling will be a little tart, but a farmer’s cheese filling will be nutty. This paired well with the pistachios and got punched up by the occasionally apricot chunk. It was well-balanced but ultimately, nothing to write home about. (Is that what I am doing right now? Oops!) Overall, I wasn’t struck by the desire to keep eating it.

Of all the things we ate, I’d choose the raspberry cookie as my favorite. I mentioned we also had a panini and some pizza. My panini was a little peculiar before you think of them as grilled and pressed, usually, but these were just sandwiches. The flavor I selected was good – chickpeas, hummus, greens, onions, and carrots.

Or was it?

When I looked this sandwich up on Grandaisy’s site, I found out the ingredients were actually skordalia, chickpeas, onions, carrots, and rocket. Skordalia? Rocket? Rocket is the British term for arugula, so that makes sense. I have never heard of skordalia before, though. It turns out is a Greek dip and condiment that is made of potatoes, garlic, and walnuts, all pureed together. It looked like hummus, but a little whiter, and I do recall it being quite garlicky. I’d definitely try skordalia again, both to eat and just for an excuse to say the word.

The pizza was good for what it was, which was thinly-sliced potato and onion layered on a thin crust pizza sheet. It wasn’t really pizza, and, if it had been hotter, I think it’d be better. I’d order a pie of it in a restaurant, but I wouldn’t stop by Grandaisy for it. It reminded me a little of pissaladiere, a French dish that layers caramelized onions on pizza crust, then adds anchovies and olives.

As I mentioned in the last post, I magically* came across a red velvet cake recently. I had a lot of good pictures of the exterior, but I also had several nice shots of a single slice of the cake that I also wanted to share – hence this part 2.

*I bought it at Shoprite

This photo reminds me of Christmas because of its red tones. Red velvet always seems to come out for Christmas in hats and santa outfits, so it makes sense. I’m not wild about the dark shadow on the right side of the slice, but I kept the shot because I like that it has an interesting background for once — the rest of the cake.

And here we go, straight into velvety goodness. That’s a good half-inch of icing per inch of cake. Mmm. The cake looks good, too – crumbly but somehow moist.

This picture inexplicably makes me think of an animal lying on its side.

The only thing I regret about red velvet cake is how odd and almost bloody it looks when the red crumbs smear into the white icing after you cut it.

Ah, look at that beautiful layer of crumbs on the side. I love it. It’s a great presentation style for this kind of cake.

I am not so fond of this picture for some reason, but felt I was lacking a shot of the cake itself post-cutting. It is here for completeness’s sakes, but I think the cake itself is too messy to make this a good shot. The angles are erratic, and the crumbs have smeared into the frosting.

I went to a barbecue on Labor Day, as I imagine most people did. It was a backyard affair, but a considerable one with 20-30 kids and adults running about. Naturally, we had a lot of food; one of my shots of the grill had 20 hotdogs and 10 burgers on it, and that was just round one. The meat was further complemented with sides, salad, and ziti. This bounty continued to our dessert table, which included three pies, a fruit salad, ganache cups (mine!), a carrot cake, and a butterfly cake.

The butterfly cake was specially chosen by my mother because my late grandmother loved butterflies. She likes to include reminders of her in our celebrations, even though several years have passed. Everyone was so excited to see it unboxed. The adults called me over to take pictures of it because the children were in fact circling hungrily and impatiently. When we cut into it, we found a.. pudding cake. Instead of fruit or mousse, the cake was filled with vanilla pudding. I was really surprised – I cannot remember the last time I ate one of those. It makes sense as a party choice, though, because vanilla pudding as probably as inoffensive as it gets. It was a little boring and bland, but if one wanted flavor, the carrot cake was a-waiting.

From a photographic perspective, a red table cloth would not have been my first choice as a backdrop here because I prefer neutral tones, but it works with the yellow, green, and gold colors of the cake. I actually really like the gold airbrushing on the sides. It’s a little random — who makes gold cakes? who serves them? – but it’s a nice backdrop to the other, simpler hues.

First things first: no, the butterfly was not edible. It is sitting in a bed of chocolate crunchies, the likes of which you find in Carvel ice-cream cakes, which were meant to be soil. The strange, plastic-like pieces strewn on the icing are so-called magic sprinkles. They are basically transparent glitter flakes, meant to add shine to your dessert, but I don’t think they were necessary here.

The ladybugs were ‘edible’. They were hard sugar-candy (gum paste), like the flowers you find on a wedding cake, so you could eat them, but it’d be like chewing on a jawbreaker.

I selected this side shot because I think it, along with the above ladybug picture, highlights the sheer height and texture of this buttercream icing. It was dramatically fluted, rippled, and layered on the cake in a way you rarely see; most birthday cakes stick with classic swirls, and most wedding cakes use fondant for these details.

I just like this photograph. It doesn’t necessarily convey any new information about this cake, but the swirls of the yellow icing, the contrast of the green leaves, and the fading gold of the undercoat simply please my eye.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

My meal at Osteria Marco covered a lot of bases. I started with burrata, an Italian cheese, then went on to seafood. The dish below is Frutti di Mare or Fruit of the Sea, which is a fitting name because it includes crab, shrimp, calamari, and lobster. All in one dish! It was served cold, with a binding of an aioli (kind of like mayonnaise) and chickpea paste. The red spots are a lobster-and-red-pepper oil.

The onions and celery made this almost like a seafood-salad experience, but one that had whole calamari and little tentacles in it. Because it was cold, it reminded me a bit of ceviche, but it wasn’t nearly as acidic as that dish is. The flavor here was mostly in the chickpea binding, because it was hard to distinguish the individual flavors of each specific type of seafood. It was definitely fresh, but not remarkable to me. I didn’t feel like I was eating lobster, or crab, or calamari.

To follow up my seafood, I had.. pizza. It’s an unusual choice to be sure, but this restaurant is famous for their gourmet pizza selection, so I dove in. I wanted to eat something truly unusual, and though I was originally thinking of the Carbonara, which is a pizza with pancetta and egg on it, I ended up with the fig and prosciutto pizza. I like figs, and it seemed vaguely healthy with some fruit on it. (Look, honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking.)

When I look at this picture, I see a normal pizza with cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, and maybe sausage or mushrooms. However, those ‘tomatoes’ are actually figs, that cheese is goat cheese and fontina, the brown lumps are caramelized onions, and the shavings are prosciuttio, or pork. Regardless of the ingredients, this is my favorite photo of this set and probably my best pizza photo to date.

After eating a whole puck of burrata and a similarly sized serving of the frutti di mare, I was a little too full. The sweetness of the fig was just not the right pairing for those things, either. I didn’t want sweet after the rich, clean taste of cheese, then the briny taste of seafood. I wanted earthy, savory, salty pizza. I should have gotten a sausage pie, basically. Well, I learned a lesson that day – I don’t like sweet pizza.

You may have noticed the above picture seems to have a bite taken out of the crust. I assure you that I did not eat my pizza on the wrong-end, then hastily take a picture of it. Here’s that extra piece of crust on the pie plate. I would like this picture so much more without it; if the white plate was cleaner, this would be a great photo.

I said I was too full to enjoy the pizza, and indeed, I ate about two mini slices and picked at a third. However, nothing would keep me from trying out dessert, so I plowed ahead and ordered this chocolate cake. It’s a hazelnut torte with nutella syrup on the edges and vanilla gelato. I hoped the nutella would make it interesting, or that the hazelnut, a flavor I love, would shine through, but it was your standard dense chocolate cake. The gelato was unremarkable. I left most of this dessert on the plate.

In its defense, I don’t like chocolate cake. I like cake as a general rule, so if I see cake, I’ll order it, but over and over again, I have found that chocolate cake just doesn’t do it for me. It overwhelms all other flavors, it is often dry, and its often served icing- and filling-free. I need to just accept this and stop ordering it but the rest of the menu is often no better. I always want dessert, but never what’s on the menu. Sigh.

Back to the photography, I do like the picture, but wish I had paid more attention to the edge of the table in the upper left corner. I’m pleased with this from a personal perspective, because the light was fading fast when I took this shot, and subsequent photos were blurry, so I am glad this one came through.

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.

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)

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

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.

Here’s that mysterious dark center.

Not pictured is a ginger cookie they also sold, which was soft, spicy, and one of the best I’ve had. I dislike hard snickerdoodles, or ones that aren’t ginger-y enough. This hit the mark perfectly, and I was pleasantly surprised that the 90 degree heat hadn’t dried it out. I have a photo of the cookie, but it’s not that interesting, and this post is already too long.

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.

I had some more pictures of the cake in the last post that I wanted to throw up. Showers of happiness, indeed – this couple is getting married on July 10th, so congratulations to them.

I just love the decorative abilities of icing — look how well it takes this ribbed shape even when seen in close-up.

More frosting after the jump.

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I went to a bridal shower recently that had the traditional white cake with flowers. For some reason, these white cakes always taste special – much better than a cake you can buy at the grocery store any day of the week. I find this particularly strange because the same grocery store may in fact make this cake. Maybe they have different recipes for the more expensive things? I know someone who works in a grocery store bakery, so maybe I’ll ask. The frosting on this cake definitely had some heft to it. It wasn’t a cheap version made with crisco.

You might be able to tell I have a special place in my heart for frosting. Well, flowers are the pinnacle of my obsession. I haven’t seen good ones in so long. Whole Food creates absolutely beautiful flowers for their cakes, but they taste like shiny lard. I was very happy that these beauties were indeed edible and not rock-hard ‘sugar flowers’. These tasted like light sugary goodness.

I love the violet ribbing on this lavender flower. To achieve this effect, the decorator will carefully align purple, lavender, and white icing together, then feed it into their pastry bag so that, when it squeezes out, it has multiple shades and streaks like this. It’s hard to get icing into that bag with any precision, so I admire these flowers even more now.

I wish they had done that for the pink flower to give it a little more oomph.