Heavenly Cake - Carrot Cake

ב''ה

A Truly Fabulous Carrot Cake!

My little princess Shayna decided to help herself to some (of her grandma's) brownies...

Mis en place:

Carrots and dry ingredients.

Mix mix...

The requisite toaster pic. My wife pointed out to me that Cuisinart has a  pizza-stone/toaster oven/rotisserie. Baking in the toaster has become just too easy. I will now rotisserie all my cakes!

I had to do this cake in two shifts as the batter would simply not all fit in one pan.

Melt the white chocolate...

Decapitated Cakes.

I really had a lot of trouble mixing the frosting. It really should be done in a food processor. I had to keep on taking the blender off and manually shoving the stuff down so that it would all get processed. It took a while. It just was too thick to really blend.

frost...

When I imagine the taste of a cake in my mind, this is what I imagine. It's awesome Rose!

חנוכה שמח! :)

Last weeks Challah

ב''ה

5 cups bread flour
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp inst. yeast
2 tsp salt
1 1/4 cups water

It turned out a little dry. I am not sure why. When I realized I tried to add more water but it just made the dough soggy and I had to add more flour. I tried to add more water to no avail several times. It still had a very good taste tough.

Sephardic Lachmageen

ב''ה

These traditional sephardic middle-eastern treats (mazza) are made with chop-meat, tamarind, onion and pignoli nuts (although my grandmother used to make them with pomegranate syrup when she could not get tamarind-which makes them a bit sweeter.) My wife asked me to make the dough. I added some bread flour and a little bit of whole-wheat. The bread flour made it a little hard to roll out so they were not as thin as they could have been but I think it may have added to the tast/texture.

Sourdough Bagels

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This used all my starter. I'll have to make another one. Oh well, it was a little weak anyways...

Heavenly Cake - Pumpkin Cheese Cake

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This cheese cake was just wonderfull!

As a full sized spring-form pan will not fit in my toaster oven I had to make mini cheesecakes.

Needless to say, they did not last very long.

Blackened pecans and burnt noisette... err... I mean toasted Pecans and buerre noisette...


My first attempt at toasting these:

It is a bit more difficult to toast nuts in the toaster as they are very close to the heating element. The trick is just to use a lower temp and give it a little longer.


Here is what they looked like the second time around:

I never made buerre noisette before so the first try got a little burnt:

So I tried again:

Ahh, Much better! No burnt smell.

After a couple hours it looked like this:

Mis en Place:

My food-processor is parve so I had to make the crust in the blender. It worked fine actually, the blade just does not reach everything and creates a whirlpool effect in the middle. You have to keep taking it off and banging it to get the blade to process it all.

I had a little trouble figuring out how to push the crust up the sides. In the end I used the coffee canister. There must be a better way...

Pumpkin and sugar:

Mix mix...

Here the little guys are in their metallic undies and water bath ready for a nice toast:

Chava likes Cheesecake too.

Out of the oven:

Burnt object number 3... the caramel:

The caramel was still tolerable, delicious in fact. However, I may save the rest of it for some candy apples instead of putting the rest of it on the cheesecake. After doing two batches of toasted pecans I did not feel like making another batch for the top.

The cheesecake itself was out of this world! The buerre noisette really did add something and the texture really does change after a night in the fridge (we just had to try one of these when it first came out of the oven.)

The next cake I will make will be the carrot cake, G-d willing.

Sourdough Challah

ב''ה

 I did this by feel mostly. Here are the proportions I used:

1 1/2 cup sourdough starter
4 cups bread flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tblsp walnut oil
1/4 cup canola oil
1 cup Warm water


You can see the starter on top.

I left it out to rise overnight.

Shaped challas and bilkeluch then gave it a good 3 1/2 hour rise.

לכבוד שׁבת קודש!

Rose's Heavenly Cakes - Catalan Salt Pinch Cake

ב''ה

Mis en place:

The Ez Man was with me for moral support:

Preparing the pan...

What it looked like when I started mixing.

...and after mixing. It took me about 45 minutes and really rose up. At first I tried to use the Tablespoon measure but the egg mixture kept slipping out of it. I then switched to a 1/4 cup measure and that seemed to work much better, it still took quite a while for all the eggs to get used up.

When I read that I would have to stick my hand in the batter to pinch the flour morsels I decided to use Wondra flour to see if that helped. It slipped straight through the sifter, I do not think I really had to sift it.

The Wondra dissolved almost immediately into the batter, I did not have to mix very much.

The batter before baking...

Woah! It climbed at least an inch over the edge of this 2 inch spring-form. I did not expect it to climb that high. I wonder how hight it would have climbed had the parchemt been even higher. Maybe it was because I spent so long mixing in the egg yolks or maybe it was because of the Wondra.

The flavor was really nice almondy and light. I do think that the Almond Shama Chiffon with the Ammereto syrup had a more, to use a Rose adjective, "luscious" flavor. I did forget to put in the lemon zest and I think it would have been better with it. Also, I used pre-ground almonds and did not bother to put them in the food processor. This was a mistake as there were recognizable little bits of almond still. This was a very nice cake and I would definitely make it again.