Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Cake

Sometimes a cake is just a cake.  And sometimes a cake is a fucking journey which takes you to the peaks of exuberance and the valleys of despair and tests the fortitude of your soul.  And sometimes I realize that I am pretty bad at both pictures and metaphors.  This is a really bad picture of the Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes:

Bostini

One of my friends recently decided to hold a dinner party and enlisted me to provide the dessert.  I've been looking for an excuse to make the Bostini from Rose's Heavenly Cakes for a while now, but given the limited number of servings one batch makes, it's been hard to find an appropriate event.  The dinner party ended up being the perfect venue for this awesome dessert.

Pure Pumpkin Cheesecake

I was invited to a party to commemorate the end of summer and the beginning of fall.  Fall themed foods were a must and my contribution to the party was this Pure Pumpkin Cheesecake.

Chocolate Banana Stud Cake

Kyle's birthday was last Tuesday, and knowing how much he looooves chocolate, I decided to make the Chocolate Banana Stud Cake for him.  This cake is becoming one of my standards.  It's always a big hit with people and it disappears pretty quickly.


 

New Mixer and Ebelskiver 9/18/10

I finally took the plunge recently and made a few purchases that I had been wanting to make for a long time.  I am now the proud owner of a shiny new KitchenAid stand mixer.  I have coveted one of these literally for years.  Here it is in all of its majesty:

Whoopie Pies 8/29/10

Last Sunday I got together with some friends and we went to a wine festival at Linganore Winecellars out in The Middle of Nowhere, MD.  And what pairs better with wine than some delicious cake?  Since we were going to be outdoors, I wanted to make something that we could eat with our hands and that I could transport easily.  I eventually settled on the Two Fat Cats Whoopie Pie from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.



I've made this recipe several times and it's become my fallback for events or small gatherings.  It keeps well a people really love it.  Here are all of the ingredients for the cake lined up and ready to go.

Rose Red Velvet Cake 8/26/10

My boss called me in to her office on Wednesday afternoon and posed the question to me, "Have you ever made a red velvet cake?"  Being an essentially truthful person, I replied that I had done in the past.  She then requested that I make one for an office celebration scheduled for the upcoming Friday.  Like the mildly psychotic baker that I am, I eagerly agreed.  Thus, our first cake is the Rose Red Velvet Cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.




Rose's Heavenly Cakes is the best baking book that I've ever owned.  The instructions are clear and precise, the measurements for almost all ingredients are given both by volume and by weight, the pictures are beautiful, and every single one of the cakes I've made from it has turned out amazing.  The Rose Red Velvet Cake (p. 83) is no exception.  Rose's version is a single-layer cake, but I decided to double it and go for two layers so that everyone in our office could get a piece without being too stingy.

Some housekeeping before we begin

I've been thinking about getting back into blogging for a while now.  It's something I used to do a lot back when I was in college.  In the end, the biggest problem that I ran up against was a lack of anything to really write about.  I started by writing about movies, which wasn't such a bad idea since I watch a lot of movies.  But at some point, I just felt like I was yelling into a vacuum.  Maybe it was my choice to review such gems as the 1978 classic:  Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band starring The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton.  That kind of subject matter didn't really draw in the readers.  And so I gradually stopped posting anything, allowing my blog to languish and die.

But in the intervening years, I have taken up a new passion.  And that passion is baking; specifically: cake.

So this blog will be a chronicle of my baking adventures.

For now, this blog will use one of the standard templates supplied by the Blogger service.  I am not entirely pleased with this concept as I am a little bit of a web design nerd and a huge do-it-yourselfer.

Also, I like to write about myself way too much.

I'd like to keep this short so in closing, there are two things I can promise you:
1)  This blog will feature lots of cake
2)  The look of this blog will be completely different within the next few weeks.

Enjoy.