Daring Bakers: CAKE!!!

This month's Daring Bakers challenge was a caramel cake. So Jen and I (mostly her) decided to make a night of it. An afternoon of baking and a night with friends to eat it. Sounds great, don't it?

Like last time, we're going to do a tandem blog with Jennifer in italics. I'll start, but I'm going to start by telling to story of cake in animated .gif rather than words. I'll add some words later and let Jen take it from there...

I may have had a lot of fun with this image documentation from ingredients to cake.



--


My favorite part was the Macgyver action I had to do in our baking. First thing's first: Jen's mixer didn't so much work when we plugged it in, so it took a lot of arm strength and about 4 or 5 different mixing tools, from forks to spoons to hand-beaters to silicone spatulas...but that was just the start of it. Having nothing to strain the browned butter (Jen's colander had very large wholes), I took a piece of foil and put it in and poked it. It worked surprisingly well! Also with the butter: I didn't want to wait for it to cool, so I made a cold-water bath in order to cool it quickly so we could get to the cake.

There were a few other moments like that, but those are the two that stick out.

Anyway, Jen, take it away! (again, Jen is italic, I am normal.)

I was very worried about making this cake and recipe work. I thought we might screw up the caramel sauce-- don't ask me how, but if there's anyone who can screw up a concoction of sugar and water, it'd be me. I always get apprehensive when in the kitchen. Printed, the recipe was six pages!

I had confidence that we could do it, I just didn't have confidence that I could do it without burning myself. I ducked down below the stove when I poured in the water to avoid burning.

For prep for this month's challenge, I knew we'd need round cake pans, a thermometer, and a sifter. Bought the first two, didn't have time to grab the sifter. Thanks to Rhea and her sifter, our team of two turned into a trio. Also thinking ahead, because this cake was unlike our last challenge (crackers), it seemed like a prime opportunity to throw a social night. And thus, "Cake and Cocktails" was born. While buying more sugar, I also bought $50 of mixers from Pathmark-- cranberry juice, grenadine, seltzer, tonic water, etc.

You know what happened when we were actually baking. Had to go get more confectioner's sugar, the hand mixer broke... I think that was the only real surprise. Mixing entirely by hand is a pain! (And how is it that my mom's hand mixer still works after twenty years and mine breaks after one or two?)

Because she probably didn't buy her's for $5...and pain? I was VERY sore the next day! I did the bulk of the mixing, though Jen certainly took over when I got fatigued...and then I went back to doing it once rested...and so on and so forth.

It's interesting that for a "Cake and Cocktails" night, most people went for the cake and asked for milk. (I think it's safe to say we had a success on our hands.) Heck, instead of sitting in the living room, we moved chairs into the kitchen to sit closer to the cake. I still have caramel sauce in my fridge, and leftover heavy cream. Last weekend, I used both to make a rather incredible ice cream sundae. Still wondering what else I can do with all the caramel. It's kind of a smoky wonderful flavor compared to the jarred caramel you find in stores.

There's always more ice cream!

If we have the time, I'd like to go back and make the caramel candies. (And also figure out how to make caramel decorations for the cake-- our experiments w/ the sauce were more of a mess than anything else. The cake looked decent, but it could have looked amazing if only the caramel would hold shape!)

And there you have it!

Until next month!