Cranberry rolls and cherry blossoms

It's not always all cake all the time with me. I like to branch out and do a little savory sometimes too. I joined a few friends for a picnic on the National Mall last year and brought along these Cranberry-Nut Rolls made from a recipe found on Epicurious.



I love making bread. Not as sweet as cake but every bit as versatile. The cranberries and nuts in these were absolutely fantastic!



I also love how yeast makes dough rise. It's like magic!



The recipe made a TON of rolls, all about the size of my fist. Far more rolls than three friends could eat at a picnic lunch. I was noshing on rolls for the rest of the week.



And after our picnic, we went for a nice stroll around the National Mall and the monuments. It was cherry blossom time, so we took in some beautiful views among the massive crowd.

German Chocolate Cake

In my quest to bake everything in Rose's Heavenly Cakes, there are cakes that are easy and ones that are difficult. The German Chocolate Cake was almost ridiculously simple.



But there are a hell of a lot of ingredients in it.



While the cake is a pretty basic chocolate cake, the star of the show is the coconutty filling. Extremely sweet and flavorful.



Pretty and delicious. Maybe a little sweeter than I'd like, but it seems I have a really low tolerance for sweet lately.

Almond Samah Chiffon

I am still alive and baking, although I am also still too lazy to update with any kind of regularity.  It certainly doesn't help that the internet decided to eat my original post.

In any case, today's cake is that Almond Samah Chiffon from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.



It's been over a year since I made this, so I don't remember very much about it. I think it was for a birthday?



I do remember that I made my own almond flour for this though. Sugar and almonds. A little pricey, but very tasty.



I also had to purchase a bottle of amaretto to brush on the cake. My liquor cabinet is an extremely diverse collection of bottles with only two tablespoons missing from each.



I am very bad at decorating, but I can do simple stuff with a piping bag and whipped cream. Raspberry whipped cream topped this cake and made it extremely tasty.



The cake was ultimately eaten during the weekly pub quiz. Even though we probably didn't do very well, at least we had good eats!

Mud Turtle Cupcakes

The Mud Turtle Cupcakes from Rose's Heavenly Cakes have a lot of bits and pieces to make them up but they are tasty and impressive looking.  These were definite winners when I made them.

The ingredient list for these is somewhat intimidating.  This may be the most individual ingredients I've ever put together for one recipe.
 

I love caramel, but this made a LOT of caramel.  Far more than I'm used to making. Although I may have doubled the recipe...

Yeah, I definitely doubled the recipe.  This is way too much batter for one batch of cupcakes.
 

Without the decorations, the cupcakes are pretty good basic chocolate cakes.  Not too chocolatey or too sweet.

But after the decoration they're even better.  A little bit of caramel, some pecans, and some mini chocolate chips make these mud turtles amazing!

Lemon Meringue Cake

I love lemon!  I love meringue!  I love this lemon meringue cake!

The batter for this one required a TON of lemon juice.  Luckily, I buy my lemon juice in bulk.  Because I have a mental problem.

The batter for this cake is more of a biscuit than a normal cake.  It's very light and not terribly sweet.  The lemony filling more than makes up for the savory nature of the cake itself.
 

This was obviously before I learned how to properly cut the parchment to line my cake pans with.  So dumb.

Uhhhhh...  So I clearly did not realize how much meringue this recipe would make when I selected this bowl.  There were egg whites all over my kitchen, but luckily the majority of the meringue did not overrun the tiny, tiny bowl I selected.
 

Before sending the meringue-d up cake through the oven for a few minutes it's pearly white.  Very light and pretty looking.

And after going through the oven, it's pretty nice looking too!  This was one of my favorite cakes, but it was a bitch to transport.  The lemon juice in the cake itself seeped out all over my refrigerator and the inside of the cake carrier.  The meringue also didn't look so hot after a long walk in my cake carrier with the edges sliding around and hitting the carrier lid.  But looks and leaks aside, it was very very tasty.

Pecan Torte with Coffee Cream

I'm really bad at writing these posts.  REALLY bad at it.  So although I haven't updated in over six months, I have been making cakes regularly.  So I'm gonna do a bunch of short posts in order to try to clear my backlog.

In any case, the cake of the week almost a year ago in February 2011 was the Pecan Torte with Coffee Cream from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

There are a lot of pecans involved in this little baby.  I don't mind that at all though since pecans are some of my favorite nuts.

The batter is mostly egg yolks and sugar which the pecans are then folded in to.

Apparently this was somewhere in the middle of a long run of bad luck that I had with unmolding cakes.  Luckily this one was only slightly ruined and the mistake was easily disguised by the whipped cream.
 

An evening in the refrigerator and being topped with the coffee whipped cream caused this cake to dip quite a bit in the middle.  That was fine though as the dip just became a perfect receptacle for more tasty cream!