Gâteau Breton

time for a bite...

This Gâteau Breton is another recipe by Rose Levy Beranbaum from Rose's Heavenly Cakes cookbook. One of the things I love about this cookbook is the variety of types of recipes. There are really complex cakes that take a couple of days to complete which I love, because sometimes I am just in the mood to bake something complicated and intensive that requires me to go out and find special ingredients or a new pan. But I also love that there are really straightforward - yet delicious - recipes, for which I am likely to already have all of the ingredients...and this is one of those. Simple, easy, yummy.

This dessert is sort of a cross between a shortbread, a cake, and is baked in a tart pan. As it bakes, the outer edge forms a flaky sort of a crust. The middle is lighter than a shortbread, but heavier than a cake and not too sweet. I recommend serving it with coffee and some whipped cream would be lovely too.

mise en place for the cake

the toasted almonds and some of the sugar...

are ground together

the butter and sugar are combined

and creamed for several minutes until nearly white in color

the eggs are added and beaten until fluffy to incorporate more air into the batter

the rum, vanilla, and almond mixture is added, then the flour mixture
is added in four parts

the finished batter is very stiff...

smooth the batter into the tart pan and brush with an egg wash

score the top with the tines of a fork

and voila, done!

it makes such a pretty presentation

lovely flaky crust

ready to serve

dense, but still flaky...delicious!

Bye for now...

Zesty Orange Streusel Coffee Cake

pretty coffee cake, just out of the oven

I wanted to make a coffee cake one Saturday morning but didn't have a tried and true recipe...so I adapted a couple of Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipes from Rose's Heavenly Cakes and made my own. Since it's an adaptation, I'll include my recipes below for the streusel filling and for the cake itself. I didn't make the full streusel filling recipe because I only needed it for filling and not to cover the top of a cake, so my measurements are approximate. Use more or less, to your liking (you don't need much more though!).

Streusel Filling ingredients (adapted from Cinnamon Crumb Topping, by Rose Levy Beranbaum)
approx. 70 grams (3/4 cup) walnut halves, finely chopped
2 T melted butter
approx. 50 grams (1/4 cup or so) total of light brown sugar and granulated sugar, use mostly brown sugar
30 grams (1/4 cup) all-purpose flour
1/2 t cinnamon
scant 1/4 t freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 t cardamom
drop of orange oil

Streusel instructions: melt the butter and stir in the sugars, spices, flour, and orange oil. Mix in the flour and the finely chopped walnuts. Set aside.

Zesty Orange Streusel Coffee Cake ingredients (adapted from Lemon Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cake, by Rose Levy Beranbaum)
2 large eggs PLUS 1 large egg yolk, at room temp
200 grams (3/4 c plus 1 T) plain, full fat, strained Greek yogurt (I used Fage), separate out approx. 1/4 cup which you'll use to mix with the eggs. I think you could also use sour cream instead of yogurt
1 3/4 t vanilla
1/2 t orange oil (I used Boyajian)

250 grams (2 c plus 3 T) all purpose flour
250 grams (1 1/4 c) granulated sugar
1 1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 salt
zest from 2 oranges
200 grams (14 T) unsalted butter, at room temp

Preheat oven to 350 and put the oven rack on the bottom third of the oven. Spray your 10 c bundt cake pan with a baking spray with flour (I love the Spectrum Organics brand). I use this Nordic Ware 'Heritage' pan. It is wonderful. It's heavy and the sharp edges make the most beautiful cakes...no frosting or other embellishment is needed.

Cake instructions (also adapted from Rose's sour cream cakes method - no alternating of mixing in the milk and flour - it's the best!):

In a small/medium bowl, mix together: eggs, egg yolk, 1/4 of the yogurt, vanilla, orange oil, set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, use the paddle attachment to combine the dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, orange zest. Add the softened butter and remaining yogurt. Mix on low until combined, scrape down, and then increase speed to med-high for 90 seconds to two minutes.

Add the egg-yogurt mixture in two parts, mixing on low until combined and then on med-high for about 30-40 seconds after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl when adding the eggs.

Spoon about 2/3 of the batter into the bundt pan, then create a 'well' into which you can spoon the filling. Spoon in the streusel filling in, and then gently spoon over the remaining batter. Smooth the batter with a small offset spatula being careful not to mix up the streusel mixture.

Bake for 45-50 minutes (mine was done at 48 minutes), until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in the pan, on a rack, for 8 minutes, then turn out onto your serving plate and let cool completely (or...if you're like me, eat while still warm).

The cake came out really well. It had a really light crumb and the filling was a delicious mix of nuts, sugar, and spices. I'll definitely make this one again. Enjoy!

ingredients for the streusel filling. Use whatever spices you like best.

mise en place for the cake

I used some of my homemade vanilla extract

the batter with the dry ingredients, plus butter and yogurt...

and now the egg-yogurt mixture added in...smooth!

about 2/3 of the batter is scooped into the pan

then the streusel filling is added

add the remaining batter...

and carefully smooth over the filling

I love the edges that this bundt pan creates

this is a little smooshed because I was too impatient to let it
cool completely before slicing...but tasted delicious!

Bye for now...

Heavenly Cake Baker: Lemon Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cake

The Heavenly Cake Baker club is over now, but I still frequently bake from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes cookbook. Her recipes are very straightforward and always delicious. She also has a great method (read: easy) for making cakes. You combine the dry ingredients, add the butter and part of the sour cream, beat for a couple of minutes to create air in the batter, then add the eggs and remainder of sour cream and then beat. So much easier than the old alternating the dry and wet ingredients, starting/ending with the dry.

So, back to this cake...although I am not a huge fan of poppyseeds, I've been wanting to try to make a poppyseed cake for a while, so who better to turn to than Rose? I have memories of my mother making some sort of lemon poppyseed pound cake when I was younger so maybe that is why I wanted to try this recipe? Well, regardless of the reason I felt compelled to bake it, this Lemon Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cake was fantastic.

Even though it had a lovely light lemony flavor (and I even added lemon oil, not called for in the recipe), I would probably add some freshly squeezed lemon juice next time to punch up the lemon flavor a bit. I would also cut back on the poppyseeds slightly. The recipe also called for lemon syrup to be brushed on after baking...which I skipped. So I would definitely make the syrup next time and this might also help with the lemon flavor.

mise en place

oops, I accidentally started by beating the butter...no worries, I'll just mix
the dry ingredients in another bowl and then add to my mixer bowl

here we go, the dry ingredients mixed and added back to the mixer bowl

in goes 1/2 c of the sour cream

the butter and most of the sour cream are mixed in and beaten for 90 seconds
and then the remaining wet ingredients are added

and done...into the pan!

so pretty and smells great

a slice for the chef

delicious!

Bye for now...

Heavenly Cake Baker: German Chocolate Cake (free choice)

This week's Heavenly Cake Baker cake was free choice. I haven't been baking much lately - a combination of it being super hot and humid, having an unusually busy summer and then being on vacation in Montreal (joy!) - so I thought I would choose a cake that my fellow HCBers made while I was away. I chose the German Chocolate Cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes. I've never made a German Chocolate cake before and this seemed pretty straightforward so I decided to give it a go.

The cake was dead easy to make and had a very unconventional way of mixing. Normally cakes have milk which is added to the creamed butter/sugar/eggs mixture in 3 or 4 parts alternating with flour. This cake has no milk. Instead, it calls for oil and extra egg whites. The eggs are separated and the egg whites are added at the end. Worked like a charm!

I decided to make cupcakes instead of a layer cake and they came out nice and moist. They were chocolaty, without being too chocolaty (which can also be delicious!) and the crumb was light and spongy. The light texture went well with the heavier coconut frosting. The frosting was good, but very thick and sweet and I could taste the evaporated milk quite clearly. On the one hand I thought I might not have cooked it down enough (because of the flavor coming through) but on the other hand I thought I cooked it too long (because it was so thick). I used a flake coconut (instead of shredded) but I think the larger flakes would have worked better on a large cake instead of the cupcakes. Next time I might try part shredded and part large flakes. Or I might just use a buttercream frosting instead. My husband had a plain cupcake with vanilla ice cream on top and declared it delicious!

mise en place for the chocolate cake

the cocoa is melted with boiling water and then the yolks and oil are mixed in...

until it's light, fluffy and almost resembles a buttercream frosting

then the flour is added and you get this thick sticky batter.
Finally the egg whites are added (no photo) and you get a very thin, liquidy batter!

finished cupcakes...light and moist

mise en place for the coconut frosting

evaporated milk, sugar and egg yolks get cooked, then coconut and pecans are added

my husband said: "it looks like pasta"

voila!

delicious

Bye for now...

Heavenly Cake Baker: Tiramisù (free choice)

It's free choice this week in the Heavenly Cake Baker club. I was debating between the Red Velvet Cake on page 83 of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes and Tiramisù on page 267. Tiramisù won out in the end as it seemed like more of a challenge.

I must confess that I cheated a bit this week and deviated from the recipe in the book to (mostly) follow a recipe I'd made once before. While baking, I went back and forth between the two but the final cake, in the end, leaned more toward the more familiar recipe and not the book. I hope I won't be kicked out of the club!

To start with, I got totally flummoxed when reading RLB's instructions for the ladyfingers because she instructs you to pipe the fingers but also to pipe out an 8" disk...but the disk is never called for in the tiramisù recipe. It wasn't until much, much later that I realized the disk instructions were for the recipe on the previous pages. D'oh!

The recipe I (mostly) used called for ladyfingers for the top and bottom layers and a sponge cake as the middle layer (another reason I kept wondering where to incorporate the ladyfinger disk). As you can see from the pictures below, my ladyfingers were pretty much a disaster. Next time I will definitely either use RLB's ladyfinger recipe or the sponge cake recipe (which said it could also be used to pipe the ladyfingers).

I'm not sure exactly what went wrong with my ladyfingers. I think I may have over-beaten my eggs, egg yolks and sugar mixture, but everything seemed fine until just before I started filling the pastry bags...then the batter just collapsed before my eyes. Sad.

mise en place for the ladyfingers

beating the eggs and sugar

I can tell disaster is coming; after adding the flour and butter, the batter is already collapsing

as you can see I had a hard time getting a light dusting of powdered sugar!
the first set wasn't great but they weren't too horribly bad

the second set was a complete disaster

they look okay from afar and were actually very light inside...but

...they were so sad and FLAT up close

The sponge cake, on the other hand, was fantastic. It was easy to pull together, it didn't collapse on me and it baked in less than 10 minutes. It was spongy and moist (it would roll up nicely for a roulade!). It was a bit sticky on the top, but otherwise was very easy to work with after it was baked. I picked it up, flipped it over - both dry and wet - and it never tore.

mise en place for the sponge cake

egg whites and sugar are whipped to a stiff peak

gorgeous!

dry ingredients are added to the egg yolk, sugar, vanilla and water mixture

after the whipped egg whites are folded in, it's baked in a sheet pan

less than 10 minutes later - done!

mise en place for the pastry cream

making the pastry cream...whisk whisk whisk until it boils

the mascarpone has been added to the pastry cream which is set over an ice bath to cool

the final ingredients: cream to lighten the pastry cream; super strong coffee and Kahlua to soak the layers;
and cocoa/powdered sugar to decorate

adding the whipped cream to the mascarpone pastry cream

almost incorporated - smells delicious!

the first layer of cookies are soaked with the coffee/Kahlua and
covered with the mascarpone pastry cream

the sponge cake layer is up next; it's given a good soaking

I had lots of extra cookies and more sponge cake than I needed for the large serving dish I was using so I made a second dish (what I'm going to do with TWO dishes of tiramisù though, I don't know). However, at this point I started thinking that I was going to run out of the cream filling by the time I got to the top so I whipped up some more heavy cream, added a few splashes of the coffee/Kahlua mixture for a bit of flavor and then incorporated it back into the mascarpone pastry cream mixture. It diluted the delicious pastry cream flavor a little, but definitely made it go further.

the final layer is made up of ladyfingers and then topped with more cream

all done...looks great

now I just need 20 people to serve this to!

after setting up for about an hour, I sliced into it; I think it will be even better tomorrow after the
flavors have more time to meld

delicious!

Bye for now...