The Tale of Two Cakes

Yes, the last post was obviously rushed, but I have catching up to do!

Technically some of those desserts were baked in January. Actually, technically, and in reality, they all were, but please do the time warp with me, so I don't have to go back and edit the time stamps on those posts. I know I'm not suppose to store up posts like this, but this is the last one. Promise.

And to demonstrate that I am in earnest, I'm going to cram two cakes into this one post. I think this is completely valid because both cakes were delivered on the same day to the same venue.

Exhibit #1: Lemon Ginger Cake With Lemon-Cream Cheese Frosting
This was dessert at a potluck. I went with this recipe because I'd bought a Costco-sized bag of lemons, buttermilk only comes in quarts, and I'd bought too much cream cheese for the cake below by a block and a half. I try really really hard not to waste. I tried candying lemon peel but wasn't quite as successful as I was with the orange. I tried to cut corners by using some simple syrup I already had in the fridge, but I completely forgot I had it on the stove. By the time I remembered, the syrup had already begun to caramelize and the peel was shriveled and sad-looking. I tried to rescue it by dousing the lot with water and allowing it to boil some more, but they still ended up kinda stringy-looking. I curled the wet strands around chopsticks and dried them in my toaster oven (because it was taking too long). I liked the cake and frosting combo on this cake; not overly spiced, but something different from the run-of-the-mill chocolate and yellow cake.

Exhibit #2: Lemon-Blueberry Cake with White Chocolate Frosting
For those playing along, this is January's dessert. This cake is a good stand-by. I love making it in the summer, when fresh blueberries are cheap and plentiful at the farmers' market. Because blueberries are out of season, I used frozen ones, which work fine in the cake, but aren't really very good to decorate with, so I ended up piping a shell border around it. I found myself wishing I had something to write on the top.

PB & C Brownies

PB&C are one of my most favourite dessert flavour combos. It can only be further improved by the addition of
B(anana).

Another charity bake item...but we're going backwards here. These brownies were bought back in October but I only finally delivered them in January. What was it they said about good things coming to those who...what? who's they? I dunno...them...they killed Kenny...they're bastards.

Anyhoo, Peanut Butter And Fudge Brownies With Salted Peanuts is the official name of this brownie (there's a better picture on the website). I'm not generally a big fan of brownies, too dense and too sweet. The saving grace of these is that they are neither too dense, nor too sweet, and there's a layer of peanut butter. 'Nuff said!

Chocolate cake *squint*

I wasn't able to recover the large format pictures after all (>_<);;

If you squint really hard, you'll see that I decorated the top of this cake with a chocolate drizzle. I may have gone in too many directions, coz it went from artistic to cat-on-string tangled-up. Oh well. I baked this cake for an elementary school bake auction. I haven't heard how much it managed to fetch yet. I'm hoping for a lot. A friend says I'm a sucker for charity.

The cake was the same chocolate cake recipe from the Definitely Chocolate entry a few posts down. I used the frosting recipe too this time. It was actually very easy to work with. It helps that it was freezing indoors and the frosting stiffened to spreadable consistency before I got impatient and stuck it in the fridge.

On the plus side, this has finally pushed me to decide to get a new camera...when my birthday comes around...in a few months. In my defence, this camera isn't available yet on the market. Vote for your favourite colour!*

*(not necessary the one I'll get)

Still more technical difficulties

Turns out that batch that was stuck on the media card weren't really stuck at all. Some weirdness previewed what was on the card as old images, but copying them anyways and then viewing them set them to rights.

I then proceeded to re-screw up and now all I have of a fourth dessert are tiny thumbnails. *sigh*

While I try and recover that last one, here's a picture of something baked but not dessert. These are gourgères, cheese puffs. Basically pâte à choux flavoured with a little parmesan and gruyere. Very yummy warm with drinkies :)

Technical difficulties

I have three dessert pictures stuck on the obsolete media of my somewhat old camera. Perhaps now is the time to get around to thinking about possibly purchasing a new camera.

I don't like to be photographed, and I don't particularly care to take photographs myself. Taking pictures brings about the need to organize and share them. And I'm just too lazy for that. I figured the old hunk-o-junk was good enough to snap a couple of cake photos every once in awhile. But this! Argh!