Heavenly Cake - Individual Pineapple Upside-Down Cakes (Tu-Bishvat Cake)

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Delicous Tu-Be'shvat Cakes!


Tu Be'shvat is when the very first leaves will start to sprout from trees (חנטה) even though it is well before spring (when they will bloom and flower.)

כי-תצור אל-עיר ימים רבים להלחם עליה לתפשה, לא-תשחית את-עצה לנדח עליו גרזן, כי ממנו תאכל, ואתו לא תכרת; כי האדם עץ השדה, לבא מפניך במצור
–דברים פרק  כ,יט 


"When you lay siege to a city many days, to war with it, to conquer it, do not cut down it's (fruit) trees by placing an axe. From them you shall eat, and do not cut it down; for is the tree a man, that you should lay siege upon it too?"
-Deuteronomy 20:19


From this verse we learn not to be wasteful and throw away good food (or good anything) for no reason.


The last part of the verse can also be translated:
"For man is compared to a tree, therefore do not lay siege to the trees!"


Man is compared to a tree, to bear fruit and give pleasure and beauty to ones fellow beings. If every one were like more like a tree, the world would me more like a garden/orchard (of Eden.)

Mis en Place:

I still do not have a thermometer so I may have overdone the caramel a little. Or maybe it just has an intense flavor. How do you know when something already caramel color, like turbinado sugar, has caramelized?

Get the cherries and pineapple ready.

Dry ingredients.

Ready to toast.

We're toast!

I did not have time to make the pineapple syrup. Too bad, it would have gone together nicely. This cake is a winner!

Heavenly Cake - Chocolate Tweed Angel Food Cake

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Mis en Place:

A whole lot of egg whites!

After Mixing, Almost to the top!

Fold in the flour and Chocolate and spread some on sides of pan etc.

Hang upside down...

Get the whipped cream ready. I had to use parve cream as the pan would not fit in my toaster.

It was beautiful...

Decapitate thrice.

Spread on the whipped cream. As you can see I also spread some around the middle vacancy.

Shayna had a great time throwing on the mini-chips. :)

Final thoughts? This cake would have been wonderful on its own without the whipped cream. The whipped cream seemed a bit heavy in contrast with the angel food. However, maybe that's just the parve cream talking...

Heavenly Cake - Torta de las Tres Leches

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This cake was delicious but somewhat of a flop for me because I could not find kosher condensed milk.

Mis en place:

The crux of my mistake. I found this substitute for condensed milk online:

2 eggs

1 c. brown sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

2 tbsp. flour

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

I did not have a 9x3 pan and my toaster would probably not like it anyways so I divided the batter. For the round cake I added an extra egg and a little extra sugar since the first cake came out a little low. It seems I did not mix the round cake batter completely as there were a couple of flour spots.

Scraped off the tops and got the them saran-wrap ready.

The milk bubbled over in my little pot at first so I had to use the big one. How was one to know when it cooked down by half. I had to guess. This was not the problem however. I then realized that I did not actually want to pour raw eggs on to my cakes so I put the condensed milk substitute and the cream into the pot to heat up, hopefully to above 150 where any bad guys in the eggs might be obliterated. Unfortunately, this produced a curdling effect. I sighed, oh well, and poured the sickly sweet viscous goop on my lovely  prepared saran-wrapped cakes.

The recipe said that the cakes would absorb all of it. Um, that was not happening. At any rate I wrapped them up and stuck them in the fridge.

The next day I tried the cake. Mmmmm. It was delicious! It was like sponge cake with yummy pudding on top. After  realizing the only the top of the cake got penetrated by the goop, I decided to take the goop off, flip the cake upside down and transfer the goop to the other side.

This decided it. The next day the round cake became nice an moist on both sides while the taller pound-cake shaped cake type concept did not get fully moist in the middle. Next time, perhaps, I will find a different condensed milk substitute. While I loved this cake Chavi was the only one who ventured to try it (the picture below is of the pound-cake-type concept before the oh-so-moistening flip and goop maneuver.)

Outrageous Bris Cake!

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I just had to share this link!

A huge gaudy cake with lots of outrageous fruits and swirls topped with a real live baby!!

It must be a Russian thing...

http://www.collive.com/show_news.rtx?id=7275

Heavenly Cake - Chocolate Streusel Coffee Cake

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My kids called this 'Smile Cake' because the streusel sort of looks like a smile.

Mis en Place:

Just a gratuitous picture of the 'Ez Man.'

Streusel and flour mixtures:

Cream the butter. This a small amount to mix and gave me a hard time with the hand beater.

Tuck the streusel good night under a fluffy blanket of yummy batter.

Fantastic. So delicious! Will definitely be making this again. The bottom 1/8 of the cake was a little underdone. I'm not sure how to know when this is done as the toothpick came out clean.

Heavenly Cake - Whipped Cream (Cup) Cake(s)

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Ok, so one of them came out looking like the elephant-man, nu. It still tasted good. It seems as if they had some kind of volcanic reaction. I blame global warming.

Ruthi got quite excited about these:

I forgot to put in the sugar until these were already in the pan. I had to scoop it all out again and remix with the sugar. In the end these were not too sweet anyways. I thought this would go really well with a chocolate frosting (which I did not have time to make...)