Summer Bakin'

Once again, I am a month behind. I'm getting so close to the end, and I'm kind of looking forward to it. Time is short, money is tight (and so are belts, let's be honest). This project has been a truly wonderful experience, but I am ready to be able to bake at will, and not accrue a month's worth of blog debt.

So, let's go all the way back to the 4th of July. My sister was in town, so she, Chris, and I threw a party for the holiday (with help from everyone who came... I hang out with some talented chefs... or shoppers... we all have our gifts). Naturally, we had to have cake for the occasion, and while I had originally planned to use the week's cake, Chris and I made the mistake of looking through the summer issue of Taste of Home magazine and finding a feast's worth of recipes we wanted to make, including an awesome-looking red, white, and blue cake. I had to make it. The recipe called for a box white cake mix, which I snobbishly scoffed at, and broke out the white cake recipe from the beginning of the project (you know, THE white cake). I have no doubt it made this cake way better. Anyway, the red and blue are from strawberries and blueberries boiled to make a syrup and then mixed with gelatin and poured over the cake. Mine didn't turn out quite as tie-dyed as the magazine picture, but it got the point across. The frosting was plain and simple whipped cream. You'd actually be surprised how many people have never had real whipped cream. I get asked a lot, "What is this frosting?! It's so good!" It's kind of disappointing to have to say it's just a pint of whipping cream and some sugar. I should start making up something fancy so I sound impressive. But, short story long, this bonus cake was fun, delicious, and perfect for the 4th of July. Now on to the real stuff...

The weekend after the 4th of July called for a Fresh Raspberry (or Blueberry) Breakfast (or Dinner) cake. Clearly there's some wiggle room, so I turned it into Fresh Blackberry and Blueberry cake, since I had blueberries left over and blackberries were on sale (and delicious). It was super simple to make, one of those recipes you could make the old fashioned way with a spoon and some elbow grease. The end result was somewhat like a large, flat muffin: slightly sweet, moist, bready cake full of bright, juicy berries. I took it to Tim and Maureen's for Cake and Bones, which is becoming a Sunday evening tradition. We didn't eat it for dinner, but we did polish off a good portion of it.

The chapter for this cake is entitled "How to Not Go to Work," which made me laugh a lot. Dr. R outlines her week off, which really wasn't a week off at all, since she made a trip to lab and edited a graduate student's dissertation. But she did spend a lot of time doing the things we all put off for work: writing, laying in the hammock, spending time with her daughter, catching up with neighbors and friends. And of course baking. It's an amusing chapter, but makes a good point: "It's important at times to refrain from human do-ings to become human be-ings." I think we all forget that more than we should. Cake baking and Cake and Bones nights are good little reprieves at the end of what is always a full, busy week, which is why I'm certain Cake Day will live on long after the final recipe in this book is baked.

The next week's cake was a disappointment from the get-go: Downy Yellow Cake with Milk Chocolate Buttercream Frosting. Sounds delicious, right? Don't be fooled by adjectives. It's still just yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Which is my LEAST favorite cake combination in the entire world. It's so boring... what is yellow cake? It's not chocolate or vanilla or peanut butter or fruit; it's just... eggs. And chocolate frosting is not my favorite, and in general I feel there's always something off about the combination of flavors. But apparently it's the favorite combination of everyone else. There was much excitement and anticipation from the crowd, and much eye rolling from me. I think this soured my relationship with the cake a bit, because, while the cake was easy enough, the frosting spitefully dealt me fits.

I should have known the frosting would be trouble when it required 1 pound of milk chocolate and half a pound of dark chocolate. When I relayed my disbelief to Randy, he commented, "You know it's a good cake when you have to measure the chocolate in pounds." A valid point. But I was still skeptical. And rightly so. The frosting took forever to melt (I mean 1.5 pound of chocolate, right? See photo), and then wouldn't cool. To speed the cooling process, the recipe recommends putting it in the refrigerator and stirring every few minutes. The trick, though, is that you have to catch it exactly on time, or it over solidifies and becomes unspreadable. Which, of course, is what happened. So then I had to re-soften the frosting in the oven, but again, the window of time between too solid and too liquid is small, so naturally the frosting melted. A second round of cooling made it somewhat workable, but I wasn't thrilled with the result.

Tim, Maureen, Chris, and I all helped ourselves to fairly impressively sized pieces. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting happens to be Maureen's favorite, and she loved the cake, which made it worthwhile. I thought it was just ok. Better than a box or the store, but still just boring. This one goes in the "By request only" folder.

Finally, we have the cake from two weeks ago, Tangerine Cake with Brown Sugar Icing, which made up for the yellow cake debacle at least two-fold. It was a ridiculously easy throw-in-bowl-mix-and-bake kind of cake, with pecans and mandarin oranges, and fell solidly into the breakfast cake category. The frosting was nearly caramelized brown sugar, intensely sweet. It was a slightly strange combination of flavors, but it was magical. Maureen and I had had a particularly harrowing weekend, so we enjoyed our slices of cake with margaritas, and much of the stress soon subsided. I took the rest to work Monday, but our lab is small right now, so I had a lot left, and unfortunately for my waist, I made sure it was gone by the end of the week.

This chapter discusses the difference between a house and a home. A house is merely a physical building. A home is not about the physical space, but about emotional, spiritual, and psychological place, a place where one feels safe, happy, content, and is surrounded by family, friends, and loved ones. I have been thinking about this a lot recently as I get ready to graduate. I love living in Atlanta; to me, it feels like "home," and I am not excited to move away, particularly to a place with a less optimal location. But at the same time, there is something missing to make it feel complete. My family is 700 miles away, my significant other is 800, many of my friends have graduated and moved away or become less available. And I think that having those people close is a critical part. I think that, when I finally do have to move, being closer to my family and being with Randy will make any place, regardless of how "optimal" the location may be, feel like home. And of course, there's nothing like the smell of cookies or cake in the oven to make even the ugliest apartment feel more homey. Home is where the heart and the cake pans are. ;-)

I confess that I had to skip last week, because I had a wedding last weekend in Ohio followed immediately by a conference in Boston. Time and travel made it impossible to get any baking done. But my week was not devoid of cake... the priest at the wedding of my beautiful Little gave a fantastic homily using cake as a metaphor for marriage. There were silent giggles shared among those of us familiar with my cake story. And of course there was an amazing wedding cake, one I will contemplate adapting for the amateur baker. This weekend I am still away, so I will have to do two cakes in the upcoming week. But looking at the book... I only have two left. In one week, I will have baked my way through an entire year of cakes. I feel a little teary-eyed just thinking about it.