Taste Odyssey #4 - Chocolate Cavity Maker Cake

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-cavity-maker-cake/detail.aspx

This cake is ridiculously processed compared to the recipes I tend to favor, but the sound of it was too good to pass up.  I'm glad I bent my rules a little for this one because it is so decadent it ought to have a poetry reading at a salon.  I just checked and this is my first use of the word decadent, soon you will understand why.

Another experience in being a guy who is getting the hang of baking in this week's installment.  Did you know that a Bundt cake pan is the same thing as a fluted cake pan?  That makes one of us; definitely not this poor dimwitted chef who spent far too long scrutinizing every pan at Wal-Mart before fighting off my most base perfectionist desires and just grabbing the damn pan that looked pretty close to what I was looking for.  Turns out it was exactly what I was looking for, but now nobody else has to suffer as I have suffered.  Until they try to flour the pan.  See the first recipe entry for details on flouring if you want the refresher course, but let me tell you that flouring a fluted cake pan is a hell of an exercise.

Back to the ingredients.  You're in trouble with food sensitivities right out of the gate on this one.  Betty Crocker doesn't give a rat's ass if you can't handle your gluten; that xanthan gum is a potential landmine for some people.  It is way down on the ingredients list and it didn't hurt my wife either of the two times she had it, but you are warned.

Otherwise the list is fine - I chose Kahlua for the coffee liqueur and it was perfect.  Your sampler bottle is going to give you enough booze for roughly 1.8 of these cakes, luckily I had some extra mini-bottles around to top up the second attempt.

That brings me to another interesting point; I made this cake twice on two subsequent weekends but both times it was different and I think that both versions had their merits.  I made the first cake with mint chocolate chips, as I read that the mint really set it off.  Now, the alteration suggested using a package of crushed Andes mints, which I can't get in Canada.  I replaced them with mint Chipits and I have a hunch that these were a bit stronger than the Andes would have been (you can really taste the pack llama and Sherpa!).  If you don't mind a strong taste of mint I think the cake works really well as a chocolate mint cake, but it is going to overwhelm a little.

The second cake was straight semi-sweet chocolate chips and it was amazing.  That is all.  Look, it's all chocolate, you can't really mess that up, I'm just saying that I liked the mint as well.  Oh, you don't need to ice this beauty in any way, shape, or form, it's already rich enough without.  That being said?  I totally did that.  I defrosted the leftover icing from the Skor bar squares and put it to good use.  Sure you don't need to ice it, but you should WANT to.



One thing these photos do not properly convey is the sheer heft of the cake.  The batter is very thick and the cake comes out very heavy.  It's surprisingly moist and delicious, so clearly the additional weight is from the caloric content.

Taste Odyssey #1 - Carrot Cake w/Cream Cheese Icing

Recipe: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/canadas_best_carrot_cake_with_cream_cheese_icing.php

Some of my baking experiments are fueled through my wife's very delicate migraine sensibilities.  She's quite sensitive to certain foods and ingredients, so by making something that's all natural ingredients I am able to confidently provide the delicious without exacting a horrible price later on.

That was certainly the reasoning behind the carrot cake.  I'm not going to give great detail, yet, on what I have been doing, more illustrate the perils and any alterations that may have occurred along the way to the finish product.  Sadly I don't have a great picture of this carrot cake because it looked fantastic.

One thing I did not quite grasp from the outset was the concept of pan greasing and flouring, which is one of those baking terms that everybody expects you to know without actually telling you what it is.  Essentially, you grab a blob of butter, softened works really well obviously, and rub it all over the surface of the pan in question.  Then take a half cup of flour and shake it over the greased pan surface.  Next toss the flour all over the place like you're having a seizure, coat the whole thing, then dump the excess flour out.

My only thing about flouring is that I tend to leave a little too much in the pan, but I can safely say that a little extra here and there will not adversely affect anything coming out of the pan proper in my current experiences.

The recipe was pretty complicated for a first time baker, but going in with a cool head and some assistance from Cassie (my wife) it was very manageable.  She was a monster help because she shredded the carrots while I fiddled with the other stuff and helped me work the mixer.  Interestingly, this was the only recipe where I actually used our mixer, everything else has been stirred by hand.

This carrot cake recipe wins, hands down, versus most others I found because the others had raisins in them.  I don't mind a raisin but they do not belong in my baked goods.  They are like lazy man's sugar to me and if you are pro-raisin I do not mind telling you right now that this blog will disappoint, shock, dismay, and otherwise not acknowledge your stance.

As I recall, the cake was in for the whole 40 minutes, though I did check it 5 minutes ahead of schedule just to make sure it was good.  It definitely needed the full 40 to cook, which was fine since I made the icing in the meantime.  You could easily shave some time off by buying your own icing but prepared icing is chock full of chemicals and since I'm trying to stay natural here it was homemade or bust.  Besides that, the homemade was amazing and it was really, really simple to bake.

So that was the end of my first foray into baking.  Tune in next time when I start having actual pictures of the nonsense cookery I'm embarking on.