A Month of Cakes

Yes, I still exist, and I am still baking my cakes. I’m four weeks behind. I don’t know how that happened, and it’s really just inexcusable. I don’t know what to say, other than to just get started with the many cake stories I have.

The cake from FOUR weeks ago (ugh) sounded promising: the Brownie Pudding Cake. According to the description, as this dessert bakes, “the cake rises to the top and leaves a layer of fudgy pudding below.” I was going to be at Randy’s, after traveling back to Princeton from Tim and Maureen’s wedding in Pittsburg (which was beautiful, by the way), and we were both looking forward to warm, chocolaty goodness on a relaxing day after a busy weekend.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get quite what we had hoped for. Instead of cake on top of a layer of pudding, we got a cake sitting in a pool of chocolate water. I was incredibly upset; I’ve had cakes come out not quite right, and I’ve had to take shortcuts here and there, but I have never had a cake totally fail. I read and re-read the recipe to assure myself I had done everything right. Then I ran a Hail Mary Google search on the off chance the recipe was available online and other bakers had run into the same difficulties. I was not disappointed. Thanks to the power of public comments, I read a plethora of tragic tales like my own involving this cake. Finally, I stumbled across a baker clearly much wiser than the rest of us, who revealed that the cake should be served with ice cream, and the “pudding” was more of a chocolate sauce to drizzle over the cake and ice cream combo. Curse this recipe’s misleading title. It should be called Brownie Sauce Cake, then, right?

The cake wasn’t totally awful; we didn’t have ice cream, so we just drizzled the sauce over our pieces of cake. It was rich and chocolaty and moist, but not quite the stunning dessert we had hoped for. I think this recipe is banished to the shelf with the Yule Log. Funnily, this chapter was about one of the Robinson daughter’s science fair projects, and Dr. R makes a statement that “the chemistry of cake is simple but not always fail proof.” I have always said that baking is more science and cooking is more art, and that’s why I excel at baking and should probably just give up on ever trying to cook. I’ve always liked baking, though, because, unlike science, it rarely fails. This cake was a somewhat cruel reminder that science is science, whether it involves agar plates, chemicals, and microorganisms or chocolate, eggs, and butter.

The following week’s cake was far more successful, and far more delicious: Tres Leches. I often see the Tres Leches cake on restaurant dessert menus, but didn’t really have a good concept of the physical manifestation of the cake. I now know that it’s pretty much exactly what the name implies: three types of milk. The cake part of a Tres Leches cake is a simple, thin, flat cake that appears rather unimpressive by itself. The magic comes from a combination of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, whole milk, and a touch of light rum, which is poured over the cake until the cake is saturated.

The recipe calls for 3 cups of this mixture, with a disclaimer that you might not need the entire amount. Looking at the thin little cake in front of me, I doubted I’d even need half. But that was one thirsty cake. I just kept pouring milk over it, and it kept absorbing. I went through 2.5 cups. I have no idea where it all went, but somehow that tiny little cake soaked up an exorbitant amount of liquid. The cake was then topped with whipped cream and chilled. Clearly not a cake for the lactose intolerant.

This cake was one highly anticipated pastry. The people at work were getting antsy and actually quite demanding because there hadn’t been cake in awhile. Also, we had several performances for dance over the last two weeks, and the girls in the small group I was rehearsing with discovered my cake project and were highly intrigued. The first question, of course, was why on earth would I do a silly thing like bake a cake every week for a year? I realized that I don’t really have a good answer to that. Either I have forgotten my original greater purpose, or it has evolved over the course of the project, or both. I think that now, having to bake a cake every week forces me to take some time alone with myself, to think or to not think, whichever it is I am needing that week. It also provides a guaranteed chance to make people smile. And making someone else smile is guaranteed to make you smile. And I need some reasons to smile right now. But I will reflect on this more later. Anyway, the second question, of course, was when would they get to partake in some of these baked goods? So the cake was well-traveled, and did not disappoint. It was fantastically moist (which I guess you would expect with 3 cups of milk in it…) without being overly heavy, and was just sweet enough. There were plenty of smiles all around. This one I will most definitely be making again.

I had the honor of baking for my dance group again the next week. It was the end of several weeks of late night rehearsals and the night before a weekend that would be full of performances, so as a reward and celebration, I whipped up the Caribbean Pineapple Corn Cake. The name alone hinted that it would be one of those cakes that made me question whether it should be served to people at all, and with a list of ingredients including creamed corn, crushed pineapple, and Monterey Jack cheese, I did experience a brief moment of hesitation as to whether I should take it to dance or just secretly suffer through it on my own. The moment was fleeting, though; after all the strange cakes I’ve made, my qualms with weird ingredients are shrinking. Remember the Tomato Cake.

So I took it to rehearsal, and it was fantastic. In fact, when I took the rest to work the next day, Bree said it might be her favorite so far. It definitely dances the line between cake and bread—it makes a lovely dessert for those with less fervent sweet teeth, but could also compliment barbeque and baked beans (and macaroni and cheese and collard greens… hmm… I’m in the mood for a good southern dinner just thinking about it.) The cake was super simple and is pot luck perfect, so I can see this one becoming a permanent part of my repertoire.

Finally, last week’s cake, which was probably the scariest on of the bunch. A gluten-free Garbanzo Cake, the main ingredient was chickpeas, which seemed a bit odd. While the ingredient list was short and the recipe looked simple enough, I had no idea what I was in store for me with the first step: remove the skins from the chickpeas. First of all, chickpeas have skins?! Who knew? The directions suggested rubbing the chickpeas between one’s palms to loosen and remove the skins. I gave it a go, and sure enough, chickpeas really do have skins. But the rub-between-palm method was not so successful, and I had to individual skin nearly two cans of chickpeas, a tedious task that left my kitchen covered in chickpea carnage.

Next, I had to food process the chickpeas, which turned them into essentially flour, which was simply mixed with the other ingredients and then the cake was baked. I invited Tim and Maureen over to partake, despite the fact that I was nervous the cake would taste like hummus, but when we tried it, there was no hint of chickpeas. It was moist and tasted like cinnamon and orange deliciousness. Skinning aside, it was kind of an interesting little science experiment. I actually know a lot of people who are gluten intolerant, so it’s nice to know I now have a cake I can contribute to events that they can eat, too.

I think that this chapter is my favorite in the book (I may have read ahead…), because I can relate to it so well. It’s entitled “Science Never Sleeps,” and describes Dr. R’s experience at a conference, and the competitive nature of science, the panic that you need to work faster, that someone else is working on the same thing at the same time and maybe doing it better, quicker, more efficiently. Publish or perish, they say, and I can only imagine the devastation one must feel reading his or her research published by someone else, before his or her results ever had the chance to see the light of day. I have to admit that, as little as I enjoy what I do, I am thankful that my field is much more cooperative than competitive. The Neisseria field is a web of collaborations and friendships, and conferences are full of not only great science, but great fun. There is little “scooping” that occurs. I have heard that it was not always so, and I am glad that I am here for this more positive, cooperative era.

 So concludes cakes for the month of May. Hopefully I’ll be more prompt in June.