an attempt to keep up with the baking

an update on the past several days! on thursday, v and i made dinner for some of v's friends (or, more accurately, v made tinadtad, a filipino dish, and i made this really unhealthy-looking chocolate cake). specifically, the cream cheese turtle cake on epicurious.com.

though this particular cake uses a cake mix (in general i disapprove of doctored cake mixes), i was at work and happened to be hungry, and the picture (see the link above) looked far too good to pass up. this is a chocolate cake with cream cheese swirled through it, with nuts sprinkled on top and both chocolate and caramel drizzled on top. i assume you can see why it had such appeal. :) as it turns out, the cake was pretty good, although you could tell that it was made with a cake mix. it seems like it would be great (although messy) for a kid's birthday, and takes little brainpower to make. it's best warm out of the oven, when it's nice and gooey, but not too gooey.

i also spent thursday evening making luis' birthday cheesecake, also a recipe from epicurious: the mango-pineapple-lime cheesecake. absolutely screams "luis," doesn't it? making the crust was a pain because i was crushing fairly hard gingersnaps without a food processor (this is one of the few times where i think it's ok to use a food processor to make the crust for something. graham cracker crusts made of food processed crackers are never as good as the ones made by hand. it has to do with the crumbs being too fine or something). it went into the oven shortly after our dinner guests left, and baked for what seemed like an eternity - we cleaned up the apartment in the meantime. having not had a 10" springform on hand, i bought a disposable casserole dish - the aluminum/foil ones. thus the cheesecake was about 4 1/2" tall, explaining why it took somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 hours to bake. it took so long that i had forgotten that it was in the oven, remembering only before i was about to go to sleep. heh. it probably STILL could have baked a little longer, but i judged it to be done (basically, i wanted to go to sleep).

the cheesecake (eaten two days later, on saturday) was pretty good. for me (and mary) the best part was the crust. mmm, butter and gingersnap crumbs. i like it so much that it might become the crust i use instead of graham crackers. the cheesecake was pretty good - creamy and on the light side, but wasn't firm enough, in my opinion. i wonder if it would have gotten firmer had i baked it longer - i suppose we'll never know, since i have no desire to make a cheesecake that tall, ever again. more entertaining was lighting the candles on the cake. i had bought these really skinny (1 mm in diameter or so) candles at a party store (with luis, in fact) and decided to use them on this cake. i stuck all 20 candles in the middle of the cake and proceeded to light them. shortly thereafter we realized why people don't usually do this: you end up with a massive flame in the middle of the cake. i rushed over to the living room with a cake, and then we sang happy birthday rather fast. all's well that ends well, though.

finally, friday afternoon i left work early to go home and clean my room before luis arrived. i had been wanting to make banana cream pie for a few weeks now, and finally got around to it that afternoon, in a nice leisurely fashion. the crust, according to the recipe, took 8 hours to soften - something about the combination of mashed banana and sugar (plus graham crackers and butter) made it really hard. and, in fact, it was really hard. i suppose it didn't help that i brushed the crust with chocolate after it cooled; when we went to ate the pie about 6 hours later, it was hard as anything. but good.... the filling of the pie was supposed to be sliced bananas layered with vanilla pudding, but i tasted the pudding as i cooked it and wasn't impressed, and accordingly, added 3 mashed bananas to it. unfortunately, the custard was slightly grainy - i inevitably err on the side of too short a cooking time, leaving the custard runny, and wanted to try cooking it longer - but the addition of the mashed banana was quite good. the pie, despite the longer cooking time for the custard, stayed messy like nothing else. i topped it with whipped cream and we ate the filling out of the crust. later, we pried the crust out of the pyrex pan and it turned out to be quite good. perhaps i'll try a nonstick pan next time. here's the recipe; incidentally, i didn't have cornstarch so i used about a third cup of flour. that may also have contributed to the graininess problem.

and finally, saturday i ended the week's baking with some sticky buns and french toast. it was intended to be breakfast for our houseguests (luis and mary's friend eamon), but they were both late, so it was breakfast for mika, matt, mary, v and i. hmph. we enjoyed it very much without our guests... mmm, maybe i'll have pancakes for dinner tonight. anyway, the sticky buns were somewhat failed - the caramel started dripping onto the oven and burned, so we took 'em out before they were done. they were also absolutely enormous, even though i put in the normal amount of yeast - they filled the entire 9x13 pan and were each as big as your (well, my hand at least) hand.

next up: i haven't decided what to bake this week. i'm going to make some brownies, cookies, and granola for care packages this week. on thursday, i'm making moroccan food: chicken tagine and vegetable tagine. i kind of want carrot cake, but it doesn't seem like the right dessert for either tagine. however, i might make it anyway, depending on how much i want carrot cake. :)