Real Baking with Rose Discussion Forums

Marble Velvet Cake with Lacquer Glaze

2009-11-01T19:00:32-05:00

I finished the cake for my niece’s birthday. The cake is the Marble Velvet Cake from RHC, baked using bleached AP and a heating core in the middle. I covered it with a thin layer of Bill’s chocolate buttercream and then covered with lacquer glaze. I wasn’t too happy with the way the sides looked, it was not as smooth as I wanted it to be. So I piped mousseline buttercream on the side. The letters were made with Royal Icing using meringue powder. I didn’t make the stars and guitars. I was able to buy those decorations from Michael’s. Note the top of the cake on the second picture with the pink buttercream decoration. That wasn’t part of the plan. We drove with the cake for two hours in an improvised box since I couldn’t find a box big enough. The top wasn’t secured enough and part of it got stuck on the cake. It gouged a portion of the glaze. I only had a few minutes to do something about it and add the decorations to the cake. So I piped the buttercream, generally just to cover the gouged portion (I scraped the glaze back onto the cake). Lesson learned: make sure the box is secured enough to not touch the cake.

A couple of notes:
- The lacquer glaze was easy enough to make. I doubled the recipe from the book to make 2 2/3 cup. I doubled every ingredient except for the gelatin. As I was cooling it down, I noticed that it was not thickening as I expected even at 80F. I realized at that point that I forgot to double the gelatin. So I softened two more teaspoons in cold water, rewarmed the glaze to 144F, strained the gelatin (I didn’t want any more extra liquid than I have to add), and stirred it in. It worked!
- The lacquer glaze really need to be at the right temperature/consistency. I wanted to do a second coat of the glaze but I didn’t rewarm the glaze. It didn’t pour as easily because it has thickened. I used a blowtorch to smoothen the top. It worked somewhat but the top was not as smooth as I wanted it to be.
- I took mousseline buttercream out of the fridge and left it out for two hours before re-beating it. When I re-beat it, it was too cold so it turned curdly and watery. It looked really bad. This has happened to me before with neoclassic. I kept beating at high speed with a flat beater to warm up the butter (same thing I did the last time) and the mousseline eventually came back to its original fluffy and spongy texture. I just want to mention this because I see so many posts about failing in making mousseline. I have never had any problems in making Italian Meringue buttercream (aka Mousseline in Rose’s version) and if it turns curdly, I beat on high speed and everything turns out fine after a while. As long as the ingredients were measured correctly and the syrup was cooked to 248F, it always works for me. I have used Plugra, Land of Lakes, or the Kirkland (Costco brand) and never had any problem.

Below are pictures before the decorations added and after.

Jess

October Bake-Off

2009-10-05T10:19:40-05:00

Though I was an advocate of the “lets do citrus in citrus season”, I ended up doing an orange flavored cake - LOL!

I was intrigued by the Genoise Rose, the dough was very similar to what I had under my cheesecakes in the wedding cake, and it was so good. Making an entire cake of it sounded delicious!

Mine should be called Genoise Orange, first off I don’t have the rose bundt pan, and then it was obviously orange flavored. (Though rose water might be a great flavoring, too!) In the Genoise, I replaced 1/5th of the sugar by homemade vanilla sugar, and then used orange blossom water instead of the vanilla extract. For the syrup, I used a little less water to have room for more flavorings, and ended up using orange blossom water, tequila, a limoncello starter (no syrup added yet, just lemon zest steeped in vodka since 6 weeks), and after being afraid that everything is ending up too sweet I added 1 lemon’s worth of juice. I made it Friday night and we ate it Sunday night - one more day than Rose recommends, but it worked great. I served it with Almost True Orange Whipped Cream. Why almost? I didn’t strain the marmelade, but left the bits of zest in as I didn’t have any fresh orange to zest.

The end result was great - a very moist, delicate cake, better than I expected! And the orange flavors all went well together. Really nice. Will make again. The photos aren’t very spectacular but the cake was!

PS: I also included a pic of our other weekend outing - we crushed our own wine! We joined a little winery this year and are going to get our own 1/12th barrel of wine! It’s not so different from baking bread I concluded, it’s all about yeast and fermenting.

November “Almost Flourless” Bake-Off

2009-11-04T19:14:20-05:00

Hi everyone, here is my Gateau Basque from the Pie & Pastry Bible! I was so excited to make this, I’ve been thinking about doing it off and on since Rose posted about it (August 2008), and her mention of it in RHC as one of her favorite pastries brought it back to mind.

I followed everything to the letter, except I made leaves from the leftover pastry scraps to decorate the top. I made the pastry cream and almond dough the day before, it went together pretty easily once those components were made. Rose’s method of rolling out the pate sucree and laying it over the bottom of a smaller pan, then putting the larger pan over that and flipping them, worked like a dream. I baked the leaves separately on a cookie sheet, then attached them with a little egg white as soon as the gateau came out of the oven (while it was still piping hot). I did need to add the cream mentioned in Rose’s errata for this recipe.

The only issues I had were minor and easily fixed. My bottom crust didn’t get as crispy as the top crust, next time I won’t put any foil under the pan (I was afraid the springform might leak) and I may try starting the pastry out on a pizza stone. The other issue I had was that I vented the crust before glazing, rather than after, so some of the vents were sealed by the glaze. When the filling gave off steam, the crust puffed up and cracked a little near the edges.

One note I have is that when making Rose’s pastry cream, I find it simpler, with the eggs, to just remove the chalaza with my fingers as soon as they are cracked open, rather than whisking in hot dairy and straining them out.

I loved the flavors of this pastry- almond sweet crust, vanilla-rum pastry cream, and cherries, all wonderful together. The Morello cherry conserve I found (Crofter’s) was utterly delicious, and organic. I’m going to buy more, soon. The label says it’s produced in Canada.

RHC Apple Upside-Down Cake

2009-10-19T10:50:18-05:00

I posted this on my blog for the bake-a-long, but I thought I would also post here. I made the Apple Upside-Down Cake last night. Also made the Chocolate Butter Cake and plain Mousselini from TCB. I felt very productive yesterday - even dreamt about baking last night . The Apple Upside-Down Cake is easy to make and it’s sooo pretty. I used Honey Crisp apples, baked it in a 9x2 inch pan with my brand new Rose’s Cake Strips. I use baking stone - preheated for 1 hour. I don’t have enough yolks - short by 10 grams but I was out of eggs and went ahead with the recipe anyway. Panicked moment happens when I tried to flip the cake, I didn’t have a plate big enough for this apparently. I tried one of the biggest plate that I have and since the sides of the plate was slightly slanted, the cake was a bit damaged on one side. I ended up using a sheet pan as the place holder. Anyway, I like making apple pie/tart but I don’t like the taste as much. I have tried numerous recipe including Rose’s and still not a big fan. But this cake is sooo good. I really like it. So maybe what I don’t like is the combo of pie crust and apples? . I will definitely make this again and will try the peach version as well.

Plum (Persimmon) Round Ingots

2009-11-06T20:02:25-05:00

Wanted to make financiers for a while, and since I had the little tartlet pans out and some persimmons that were ready to go I gave the fruity ones a try to bring to a dinner tomorrow night. They don’t look nearly as cute as the ones in the book, probably because I didn’t slice the persimmons thin enough and also because the persimmons don’t have the dark skin that make the plum ones look like flowers. (I used the flat persimmons, not the oblong ones with the adstringent taste unless very soft.) Added some almond slivers to the top to make up for it

The dough is easy enough, but I had some trouble to get them out of the pans. No major damage, but they didn’t want to release, but then I only used butter, no flour to coat them. Tze tze tze for not following Rose’s instructions…

Almond Cake, Revised and “Rosed”

2009-11-07T16:21:55-05:00

My sister made an almond cake from a recipe she found on line, “The Almond Cake that Will Save Your Soul”. It was a failure—the exterior was too dark while the interior was undercooked. (My sister had an extra challenge as she lives at 7,000’ elevation.) Using Rose’s chart on page 470 in TCB as a guide, I analyzed the percentages of major ingredients and found that the recipe was higher in fat and sugar than Rose’s pound cakes. The original recipe was to be baked in a 9” round pan and said it would fall in the center. Judging by the photo that accompanied the recipe, it falls significantly. This cake was really a Pound Cake Plus, with all the extra fat in contained. It contained way too much sugar for a high altitude cake, plus it would have been too sweet for my taste.

This was my first effort to “Rose” a cake—adapt a traditional recipe to Rose’s method and ingredient proportions. I decreased the sugar from 1 1/2 cups to 1/2 cup and used an 8-cup tube pan for more even cooking. As the almond paste added more sugar to the recipe, it was sufficiently sweet. I also used two whole eggs instead of 4 egg yolks to decrease the fat somewhat. I used 50% white flour and 50% sifted whole wheat flour, because I’m a whole wheat baker.

The result was perfect and well received by guests. Even with the whole wheat flour, it was still meltingly tender in the mouth. I’ll never make another cake that calls for the traditional creaming method without first adapting it to Rose’s method, now that I know how easy it is.

stand mixer opinions

2009-01-27T20:51:14-05:00

Hi gang,

I’m sorry for asking this, I’m sure that this topic has been covered ad nauseam here at the forum, but I need some help choosing a stand mixer and I couldn’t find a thread that would answer this question for me. I really want the KA Pro 600. I like the large capacity, it has more power (which will be good if I’m doing double batches, large cakes, or breads with a heavy dough), I like that the attachments are raw stainless steel and not coated with the paint (or whatever that coating is), and I like the lift-to-bowl design rather than the tilt head. The problem is that I won’t always be making double batches of cake batter or heavy bread doughs and I am concerned that when I make a regular sized cake the mixing bowl will be too large and the batter, or any other small amount of product being mixed, will not be mixed sufficiently because the attachment won’t be deep enough in the product to be mixed. I’ve asked this question with others and I have heard that I should go with the KA 10-speed Artisan stand mixer, but there are so many things about the KA Pro 600 I like better. I am just worried that unless I end up making a lot of breads, or end up doing large batches of batter and frosting, I will have too much of a mixer on my hands rendering it more useless than useful.

What do you folks think?

Thanks,
Matthew

Cupcake Shelf Life

2009-09-22T11:24:13-05:00

Hello Everyone,

I’m going to make a big batch of cupcakes for another party next week. if i bake them and frost in the early morning, will they be fine sitting out all day or in a closed box until the evening. All of rose’s recipes instruct to wrap cakes airtight. will they stay moist for a day sitting out frosted? Would using an oil and butter combination help extend the time the cake stays moist. I know oil is great for moistening a cake, but butter has better flavor so I would think of doing half and half.

Thanks.

Too Many Carrots!!

2009-11-04T18:01:06-05:00

Well somehow I have managed to accumulate 20lbs of carrots in my fridge. I would like to eventually make some individual carrot cakes, but not enough to use up 20lbs of carrots. Does anyone know if I can freeze grated carrots for future use? I don’t think my family will eat 20 lbs of carrots before they go bad. I was away for a week and didn’t realize my husband bought a 10lb bag while I was gone. So off I went and bought another 10 lb bag. Next time I better check before I head off to the grocery store.

Small things make me so happy…

2009-11-03T18:25:42-05:00

The UPS driver just left, and I received TWO new things in the order that made me VERY happy to get (waiting for a delivery is like being a kid waiting for Christmas!). One item was a new cd from the UK Jazz group Down To The Bone, “Future Boogie,” those of you that don’t know them and get TV reception in the US from NBC can hear their style during the commercial breaks for Saturday Night LIve. Funky, jazzy, brassy, saxy; reminds me of NYC in some of the little jazz bars there; great CD, I’m listening to it now!

The other item is a pair of replacements for my old smelly cake strips (see photo)...

sometimes it is definitely the litttle things!