Category: Cakes

My husband is a man of simple tastes. Vanilla ice cream, chocolate cake, apple pie. While sometimes I find it frustrating that he doesn’t enjoy more adventurous baking, he knows who he is and likes what he likes. Throughout our marriage I have come to make a mean apple pie, the best chocolate cake around, and have even recently mastered home made vanilla ice cream. However, I’m getting pretty tired of making apple pies.

Enter the Apple Cake! Not straying too far from the basics, but it’s a bit different – and I don’t have to make pastry! Win-Win!

Let’s Bake

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of apples. I love them in baked goods – but I’ve just never been one to just sit with an apple for a snack. For the most part I find a texture problem with them – almost grainy. That’s not to say I’ve never had a good apple – it’s just never my first choice of fruit. But cook ’em down and put them with sugar and cinnamon and other stuff – I’m there!

Oddly enough, my sister is the absolute opposite. She loves apples, but can’t stand them in baked goods. Apparently feelings for apples run deep in our family.

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The cake itself is super easy outside of the peeling and slicing of the apples. I didn’t have orange juice on hand, but lemon juice (or any acid really) serves just as well in this case.

When I got to the point of pouring into the bundt pan and baking I realized that this was a HUGE amount of batter. I upgraded my mixer last year to a professional series and the bowl is so damn big that I didn’t really notice how much was going into this mix. Once it was poured into the pan it was almost entirely to the top. There is almost NO room for this cake to rise.

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Were bundt pans larger back then? That seems unlikely. Also this is a LONG ass bake time. An hour an a half? I realize that the enormous amount of batter and the long bake time go hand in hand – but an hour a half seems long?

So like any good moron would do, I set the timer for exactly 90 minutes and then got involved in another project and forgot about it. Like, literally forgot I was making a cake. When the timer went off I was in the other room with my daughter and she was like “Mom? The cake.”

This is when it’s perfectly acceptable to cuss in front of your kids.

End Result

Yes, it burnt on the bottom. Yes, it’s far too much batter for this bundt pan.

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On the off chance it would still taste good beyond the burnt bits, I whipped up a quick glaze (powdered sugar, milk and some vanilla paste) and drizzled that on top once it was cooled.

Oh my. This is a GOOD cake. I mean seriously good. All the fruit did sink to the bottom (which is now the top) but it doesn’t matter. It’s moist and tender and not overly sweet. The glaze does add that sweet factor – but it’s still perfectly appropriate to eat this for breakfast.

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And isn’t that really what baking is about? Eating cake for breakfast!

We’re going to take a slight turn on this post and instead of doing an old recipe, I’m going to talk about the cake that kicked my ass. The Princess Cake has been on my bucket list of things to try for a long time now. Ever since I became obsessed with Great British Bake Off, I have always wanted to know how to do it, how it tasted and if it was as difficult as it looked.

The answer is a resounding yes. The bakers were given two and a half hours to do this cake and it took me the better part of an entire weekend. This cake is a nightmare. I walked into this process like a cocky ass who feared no cake. This recipe, when printed out, is three pages long with 24 different ingredient line items.

This is the recipe I used – straight from Ms. Mary Berry herself. I will admit that I said some VERY not nice things about Mary this weekend.

Let’s Bake…and bake….and bake

The first step was the pastry cream which is something I’ve made many times. If you haven’t made or had pastry cream – I strongly suggest you stop reading and make it. Immediately. Pastry cream is soooo good. Also, when everything has been added together and you put it back on the heat to thicken up – it’s like magic. I always sqee with joy every time it happens. Once the custard came together, I placed a cling wrap film on the top and set it in the fridge to cool. So far so good!

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Next came the jam. Again, super simple to make. Take raspberries and sugar and cook. You hard boil for 4 to 5 minutes, and then set aside to cool. In this case, I used frozen raspberries which didn’t seem to cause any issues at all.

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At this point I’m breezing through this, although I am thinking how completely unfair the time frames are that they are given. I’ve made pastry cream and jam and need to leave them to cool and I’m already an hour into the process.

Genoise is a Jerk

Next up is the cake. The only thing I saw as an issue in the beginning was that the recipe calls for a 9 inch springform pan. I only have a 10 inch. I can’t imagine that it would cause that big of a difference, right?

WRONG! What in the name of God is wrong with this cake?!? Why would anyone choose to do this? No cake should be this finicky. Everything can look perfect and as it should – and you won’t know until it comes out of the oven if it was mixed correctly! Just look at the difference in these two cakes! How in the hell am I supposed to cut that cake into THREE layers!?!?

I left the jacked up cake to cool and turned on Netflix to watch the specific episode where they made the Princess Cake – all the while screaming “That’s exactly what I did!”

Now I had a hard choice to make. Do I try to hack this cake into little pieces OR do I try to do it again. I have to choose wisely, because my egg supply is low and the marzipan, that has yet to be made, needs two eggs. Suddenly lightening strikes and I remembered that I had store bought marzipan in the pantry! Brilliant! Round two of cake was a bit more of a success!

Marzipan Is From The Devil

With all the separate components cooled the cake partially built – it was time to make the marzipan. Since I’m a genius and already have the store bought, all I have to do is tint it green and roll it out.

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Rolling out store bought marzipan is the equivalent of me trying to put spanx on. It’s like trying to flatten a concrete cinder block by hand. This was like Thor’s hammer and Cap’s vibranium shield all rolled into one. I had LITERAL sweat running down my face. What the hell is this made of?!? Clearly this was not going to work AND even if I could roll it out – I don’t have enough to cover the whole cake.

I packed it up for the night and drank wine.

The next day I had to borrow eggs from my mother to make the marzipan. THIS time it’s gooey and soft and perfectly pliable. It’s easy to roll out and cover the whole cake.

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Everything just sort of falls into place at this point and the cake is, thankfully, done.

Final Results

I’ll admit the cake is very pretty, especially when it’s cut and you can see all the layers. It tastes lovely as well. The tart of the jam with the sweet of the pastry cream and cake really do meld perfectly. The marzipan adds an interesting texture with a slight almond taste.

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Was it worth two days of work? Absolutely not.
Will I ever do this again? Hell no.

But I did it, and can cross it off my list.

This is exactly what I think an old recipe from past generations should look like. Handwritten on an aged piece of paper with what are probably food stains on it. There were a couple things about this recipe that made me eager to try it out. The first was the line ingredient Oleo used throughout. It only took me a second to figure out that Oleo is just margarine. Which is not really something I would ever cook or bake with. Even though my original intention was to cook all these recipes, at least the first time through, with no changes to the original, I didn’t think a trip to the grocery store just for margarine was worth it.

The second thing that jumped out at me was close the bottom of the page “add 1 pound of sugar”. In truth, that’s just a bit more than 2 cups – but it’s still a shed load of sugar! Also, couldn’t tell you how excited I was to have actual instructions to follow. Should be a pretty easy process.

Our ingredients aren’t too crazy – with the exception of the shortening. It’s not often I have that in a cake mix, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever melted it before. Getting the cake mixture together was easy enough – and it, for the most part, resembled cake batter.

Mix the flour and sugar in a bowl and set aside. Bring the butter, cocoa, water and shortening to a boil, and add to the flour/sugar mixture. Add the eggs, buttermilk and soda. Pouring it into a greased 12 x 18 pan was odd though. That’s a big pan. And makes a VERY thin cake.

These were the ingredients for the ‘frosting’. And I’m going to use the term ‘frosting’ very loosely. Bring the milk, butter and cocoa to a boil and then add a POUND of sugar, and a cup of nuts. We’re going to play the odds here and given my family is from Texas, any reference to a ‘nut’ is going to be a pecan.

Visually, this isn’t a bad looking cake at all. Looks can be quite deceiving though. The cake is far to thin and over baked, and the ‘frosting’ is basically flavored granulated sugar. It literally crunches in your mouth. It was not a good mouth feel.

Personally, I think this recipe can really work with some tweaks. I would use a much smaller pan, or two small rounds to get a lighter more ‘cake like’ structure. The sugar in the frosting would need to be melted or cooked down in some way for that to work. The butter and the sugar could probably be creamed in a mixer as well to make a fluffier frosting. Quite a few changes could be made to this.

It wasn’t inedible – however a trip to the dentist afterwards may be needed because of all the sugar. The cake, after a night in the fridge, almost took on a chewy consistency. I would never label this, as is, as a chocolate cake. Chocolate was not the taste you identify at all. At this point, we’re going to mark it as ‘undefinable’ and see where the next attempt takes us.