Heavenly Cake - Marble Velvet Cake

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Link to my peanut ingots post.

A fairly classic marble cake with a terrific soft texture.

The batter.

The cake.

Some braided round (and raisin) challot I made for the sukkot holiday.

Heavenly Cake - Karmel Cake

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Link to my lava cakes.

The idea behind this cake is pretty simple really. Caramel with cake batter. It was very good although the flavor was a bit subtle. Goes down right with a cup of coffee. It definitely would have been much better with muscavado brown sugar. I wonder how this would taste with regular white sugar caramel?

This was the first time I used a sugar thermometer. It has always been difficult for me to tell how caramelized brown sugar is. I doubled the recipe so it took a good half hour or so to really get to the right temperature.

Some of the candies that formed in the bottom of the caramel.

The caramel. I actually made this parve, so I used soy milk and margarine.

The batter.

I got some tunneling so I am thinking it might have to do with doubling the baking powder. I should have used a little less. Since I doubled the recipe and baked it all in a 2" pan I probably should have followed the rule of decreasing the baking powder the larger the cake is.

Heavenly Cake - Ginger Cheesecake

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Delicious Ginger Cheesecake!

Homemade gingerbread crumbled up.

Ginger Juice. Now that I know how to get this stuff out of the root I think I'll make some lemon-zest ginger ice cream...

Batter.

I have found that I prefer cup cakes when making cheesecake. It makes the whole thing easier for a number of reasons.

I gave these about 20 minutes in the toaster.

Cake Bible - Chocolate Lover's Angel Food Cake

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My Pineapple Cakes can be found here.

My wife requested a sponge cake from the cake bible, so I took a break from Heavenly Cakes for a week to make something for her. I had 14 egg whites in the freezer. Now, according to Jewish custom, you can not store eggs (or onions) that are already open without putting a little bit of oil on them. I was worried that this would stop the egg whites from whipping properly. However, the amount that I used was only a little, which is all you need to fulfill this, and they still whipped up nicely. I will say however, that the 40 minutes given in the recipe for the cake was not quite enough to bake the cake completely and it would have benefited from another few minutes baking.

Folding...

Not the toaster...

Since the Jewish New Year is coming up this Wednesday night (Thursday and Friday) and the custom is to bake round challas I though I would post another videoI found on braiding them. This time with three variations 6, 4 and ball-type.

May it be a good and sweet new beginning. 

Heavenly Cake - Deep Chocolate Rosebuds

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I am deeply passionate about these 'rose buds.' Maybe it was because I was out of baking for so long, maybe it was because I had not had a really good chocolate cake in a while, maybe it was Paris... Whatever the reason, these cupcakes were absolutely moist, delicious and gooey.

Ganache.

The batter had a marvelously delicate color and wonderful texture.

Ready to toast.

Toast em' up!

Lovely quasi-volcano cakes. Every one loved them!

Someone is holding me back from baking...

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and her name is Naomi Qamar:

You can read my chiffonlet post here.

Heavenly Cake - No Bake Cheesecake as well as the 'retardation' of retardation.'

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This fabulous cheesecake really is light as feather. Well done Rose, you really captured something nice here. This recipe seems rather unique what with the custard, italian merringue and whipped cream cheese. I did end up making some modifications because of our pantries limitations. First I used regular cream cheese instead of cream fraiche. Then, I only used 1/3 the amount of whipped cream cheese. At the end I decided to add an extra egg white to the merringue. I learned my lesson before when Rose includes random lemon juice ingredients. Unless you are expecting the dessert to have a lemon flavor, leave it out! There are already two other lemon cheesecakes in Rose's heavenly cakes and another was not what we were looking for.

I wondered if the butter really got incorperated nicely since it still seemed very crumbly but the crust turned out great! This, even though I mixed in the melted butter by hand to the already processed graham crackers.

Custard.

Old enough to actualy be of real help! :)

Merringue.

This time we had real Kolatin and the cakes set nicely.

And now for another little rant. Namely, with all the fancy baking books preaching on how much better bread tastes if you retard your dough what they fail to mention is that if you don't your bread (in this case pizza) will still be better than any thing you can get in a store. What is more, even if you don't let your dough rise, your homemade pizza dough can still taste better than store bought. I found this out the other night when my wife was out and, pressed for time, I made what we now call 'Silly Pizza' for dinner. I used 1 part corn meal to 3 parts AP flour a dash of salt and a dash of yeast. However, I was pressed for time and did not really let the yeast rise before throwing it in the oven. It was fabulous! Delicious! Better than anything you can by in the store.

Just a little something I made to break our fast on today.