"Yes B'y, Mudder Cake" With Home-Made Caramel Frosting

I'm very much home. The words running through my head have turned to Newfanese.

I'll be honest, I made this cake in Montreal about a week before leaving, but I can't write about it now like a Montrealer. I'm half a country away and so I'm going to write about it in the words that are running through my head. I don't remember why I thought the words "Yes b'y, mudder," yesterday, but it seems that my mom did something shockin, and as my vowels got smaller in the front and rounder in the back and my skin got sticky from the island's damp air, those are the words I thought.

I made the cake on a whim one night after a decent dinner of leftovers and a disappointing red wine. A bit depressed at the thought of starting my evening in front of my computer, I procrastinated by making cake. If Irma Rombauer had been a Newfoundlander...well, much of her cookbook would be the same, except she'd be a little less self-confident, there would be a lot more recipes for salt fish and beef, more whipped cream pudding cakes with tinned pineapple (there are already a lot, including pineapple snow - a moulded cake with heavy cream, not whipped cream, thank god), and a whole lot fewer recipes for un-Newfoundlander-esque things like oysters, persimmons, peaches (except the tinned kind), and such foreign sounding things as tamale pie and antipasto. Honest to god I laughed a right sad laugh when I saw the persimmons at the grocery store here yesterday. they were hardly orange, more old and brown and sick-looking. If they were a dog, I would have put it down. Who would buy those poor persimmons, I haven't the foggiest.

All I have to say, though, is Jesus, Irma, your caramel sauce is some good.

Narn bit of corn syrup involved. And the cake was about the best cake I'd eaten in ages. I couldn't stop. There were no spices in it, and besides using a gluten-free flour blend instead of all-purpose, using half sugar and half agave nectar (which I thought would dry it out but it didn't) I didn't change a darn thing in the recipe.

All her sifting! I sifted until I was all sifted out: 1/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup agave nectar

Cream: 2 tbsp butter (that's it! Just 2. You could almost eat the whole cake it's so light...until you get to the next 2 ingredients) then add the sugar/agave mixture and mix for ages (about 2 minutes. You can't even drink caffeine in Newfoundland that quickly. The city doesn't believe in espresso). Beat in 1 egg yolk (at room temperature, of course).

Sift!!! Tree times (not a typo) 3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp bread flour (my gluten-free blend) or 2 cups cake flour. Don't add it to the egg mixture.

Sift!!! Just once more with1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt. That's a ton of salt. Not to a Newfoundlander who may have grown up on saltfish and saltbeef and saltpork, and Jesus, anything else you can salt, but in this cake it's a lot of salt. A delicious, perfect lot of salt. Do it.

Measure out 1/2 plus 2 tbsp milk. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture to the butter mixture, beat, then add 1/3 of the milk, beat, then half the remaining flour, beat, then half the milk, beat, then the remaining flour, beat, then the last of the milk. Only beat a fe seconds after each addition, says Irma. I agree, of course.

Then beat in 1/2 tsp almond extract or amaretto. The amaretto is my idea because a lot of people don't have almond extract (It's not as if there's tons of amaretto kicking around the average kitchen either, though, especially in Newfoundland, but there is a LOT of rum, and that's fine too. At the liquor store yesterday there were more rums than Canadian wines. A Newfoundlander wouldn't know a Canadian wine if it came out and sang the National Anthem. I had to laugh when I saw a shelf called "Local Wine" and there was Newfoundland blueberry wine sitting next to Pinnacle iced wine. "Local"...).

Now the fun part. I was NOT about to wash my beaters to whip up one little egg white. You've got to make sure you dry the beaters really well, because water and inhibit the riding of the white. So I decided to whisk it. People had been doing it forever, surely I could too. So I started and it was slow going. I switched hands and ways of holding the whisk about 10 times in the 5 or so minutes it actually took me to whisk the white. That's ridiculous. I tried to go quickly but I apparently am as bad at whisking as at kneading, but I can't blame my cold hands on this one.

I decided that the directions to whip until "stiff but not dry" were going to have to deal with me being exhausted of whipping. So I quit and hoped it was enough. It stayed in place when I removed the whisk, so that was a good sign, I figured. the nice thing about not using a handheld beater was the air stayed in the white better. It didn't collapse. My energy had made it stronger than electricity, I told myself. Maybe Irma's hubris is rubbing off on me? Nope, I'm still a right useless whisker.

Fold the white gently into the rest of the batter. This is where hand-whisking is great because I wasn't so worried about wrecking my cake through collapsing egg whites.

I greased the 8" cake pan liked I'd never greased before (I had to use aluminum because the bottom of my cake pan is trashed). I think I used a good 1 1/2 tbsp of butter because the rest of the cake had so little. Poured in the batter. 350 Fahrenheit for 25 minutes. Done. Beautiful. Some good, wha?


Caramel while that was going on...

Another Ridiculous Cake: Almond Angel Food Cake With Amaretto Cinnamon Figs and Honey Amaretto Cream

It was my friend's birthday and she made a joke that someone should make her a cake. I never joke about cake.

So I needed to find a recipe for a cake that was large, but traveled well. So layers were out, and icing would be tricky. I've always thought of angel food cake as nothing special, but Bonnie Stern proved me wrong. Add some toasted ground almonds and lemon zest as well as some amaretto and vanilla flavours, soak some figs in cinnamon syrup and add a tangy crème fraiche...and voila, the food of angels. Not something you buy in a grocery store. The texture is soft and light without being all air. It's practically without fat (it would be completely without fat except for the addition of the ground almonds and my use of a high-fat yogurt for the small drizzle of cream) and it's completely, amazingly delicious. Almost enough to make me want to convert to something. If it promised this cake as a reward (in writing) I'd consider it. Probably more likely that if someONE promised me this cake (again, in writing, or the form of a ring or band) I'd go along with him too.

Ingredients:
1 cup cake and pastry flour (I used Première Moisson, which is all-purpose but works very well for baked goods)
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar, divided (I used real, granulated sugar here to get the right texture. I was worried cane sugar would be too coarse)
1/4 cup almonds, toasted and ground (without skin. You can use sliced or whole and just grind them after you toast them in a small skillet or saucepan over medium heat until they start to turn golden brown and aromatic)
1 1/2 cups egg whites (the recipe says "about 12" so I just used 12. Not a great idea sometimes, but it worked. I hate fussing with egg whites since they don't like to be fussed with once separated from their yellow brothers)
1 tsp cream of tartar (a whole teaspoon! I've never in my life used a whole teaspoon at once!)
a pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 tsp lemon peel (I assume this is the same as zest?)

Amaretto Cinnamon Figs
3 cups water
2/3 cup honey or sugar (cane sugar is fine here since it melts. Honey is better)
2 cinnamon sticks
1/4 cup amaretto (or orange liqueur or orange juice concentrate, but why would you use those unless you don't drink alcohol and don't want to get stuck with finding something to do with the rest of the bottle? I think you can get a little taster bottle of Disaronno at the liquor store. The alcohol gets cooked off anyway)
1 1/2 cups dried figs, stems removed - just twist them off (you could also use dried, sulphur-free apricots - the darker ones - and the cooking time will be less in that case)
1 tbsp lemon juice (or to taste)

Amaretto Cream:
1/2 cup thick, unflavoured yogurt, strained through a fine-mesh sieve lined with a cheese cloth or paper towels...or just a thick yogurt. Low-fat if you want, but the higher fat ones are generally creamier (pinehedge!). I personally hate the zero fat Greek-style yogurt from Liberté but you could use that if you so chose to keep the fat down. Come on, though, it's an angel food cake. Reducing the fat even more is like overkill, and killing is hardly angelic. MORE killing is even less so)
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp amaretto (or orange liqueur or orange juice concentrate. I have a feeling you could also just use a tiny bit of almond extract)

So this takes an age, but it's SO worth it. It's elaborate and a little difficult, but the end result is heavenly, so to speak. You can do it.

Directions:
 1. Step one is to make a pan. Yes, make a pan. If you don't own an angel food cake pan or a 10 inch (4L tube pan) that is. I used an aluminum 8 inch cake pan and some aluminum foil.

The aluminum part is important because it's a whole lot easier to remove the cake from the pan if you can tear the pan apart. It's kind of like a quasi-removable bottom. I toyed with the idea of doing two 8 inch cakes and then putting a frosting between the layers, but that doesn't travel well. If you wanted to do this, cut the baking time down to 18-25 minutes, or there about. Check it and be brave.

2. Toast the almonds and grind them in a blender or food processor or coffee grinder. Or just chop very finely. Add it to the flour and 3/4 of a cup of the sugar in a medium bowl and sift together. The almonds won't sift incredibly well, but don't worry. 

3. Separate the egg whites from the yolks. Put on some music while you do this to keep yourself entertained...Put the egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt in a large heatproof bowl (not aluminum) and don't get any water or yolk in the bowl. That will stop the whites from rising as much. To save the yolks from the garbage, add 4 1/2 teaspoons of sugar to them in a freezer-safe container, shake the container to mix, and put it in the freezer. Now you have lots of yolks for your next dessert. You can also do this with a certain quantity of salt if you want the yolks for savoury dishes such as mayonnaise. They'll also keep in the fridge for 2 days but 12 yolks in two days? There goes your heart. You can also freeze the egg yolk mixture in ice cube trays and then transfer to a freezer bag to have them in small quantities instead of struggling with a block of egg yolks the next time you want 2 yolks for a custard.

4. Set up a double boiler and bring a saucepan of water to a simmer. Place the bowl of egg whites on top and stir until they're warm (3-5 minutes). No need to stir for the entire time, just don't let them cook on you. So don't forget about them. Apparently if the egg whites are warm (at least room temperature) they'll triple in size. Cold whites won't do such a good job of expanding. Please, please, please, don't forget about them and let them cook. You just separated 12 eggs. You don't want to do that again. In fact, by now, you probably want to invest in an egg separator or use horrible liquid egg white products.

5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

6. When the whites are warm start beating them on low speed until they're opaque (if you beat on high they get too much air too fast and they're more unstable). Turn the mixer to medium and slowly beat in the 3/4 cups of sugar. Beat until the elusive soft peaks stage. Then beat in the almond extract and vanilla extract. Now get the bowl off the heat! You've come this far. No messing it up now!

7. Sprinkle the flour mixture over the egg whites as you fold it in. You can do this in 3 stages (add 1/3rd flour, fold; add 1/2 remaining flour, fold; add remaining flour, fold) but I like the pouring it in with one hand as you fold with the other because it keeps the flour separate. You can use a dry measuring cup to pour the flour if the bowl is heavy.

 8. Fold in the lemon peel (zest). Now you've got to work fast since the egg whites aren't getting any fluffier.

9. Gently spoon (I poured...gently) batter into the pan you created (or had) and lightly smooth the top before sticking it in the oven for 40-45 minutes. The recipe says check it with a cake tester to make sure it's done...does this mean a toothpick? I've never made an angel food cake before so maybe a cake tester is a fancy gizmo that I don't own. The mythical "cake tester" should come out clean and dry. Sure sounds like a toothpick to me. I don't know...so I went with the other indication: when the cake springs back when gently touched.

10. Now a little bit of a scary part. Turn the cake upside down on a rack and let it cool for an hour. I had to cut down the sides of the aluminum foil. I was not about the have the centre of my cake fall out onto a rack. So I put a towel under the bottom of my cooling rack and placed the rack directly on top of the cake. Then a deep breath...and flip! Phew! Leave it in the pan for now unless you know it's going to come off easily and you don't need to travel with the cake. I just wrapped it up in its own aluminum foil and traveled with it as it was after cooling.

11. Now you have a plain white fluffy cake, but what are you going to put on that cake? Bring the water, honey and cinnamon to a boil in a large saucepan (large is better than medium since there will be more surface area and the figs will spread out more evenly). When it comes to a boil add the amaretto, reduce the heat to medium and cook for 5 minutes.

Then add the figs and cook about another 30-35 minutes, stirring every few minutes to saturate the figs. When they're soft and tender add the lemon juice to taste (I liked more than a tbsp) and cook for one more minute. You're not going to serve the cinnamon sticks but leave them in there for now to let them keep infusing the syrup. If the syrup is too thick add more hot water.

12. For the drizzle, combine the strained or unstrained yogurt with the honey and amaretto.

13. The assembly: Peel the aluminum foil and aluminum pan off your cake or somehow remove it from the pan. A removable bottom is a good thing, but so are scissors. Turn the cake upright on a plate or serving platter. See how it's already sinking in the middle? Be careful with weighing it down and saturating it with liquid.

14. Place the figs in a pattern you like (I liked it kind of like a flower, but I'm not that artsy I think, and it was all I could come up with), and let some of the syrup drizzle down the sides. If you get too much of it in the middle the cake will collapse, so be careful not to weigh it down with the syrup or the figs.

15. Then spoon the amaretto cream over top. You can use a squeeze bottle but who has one of those? Just don't pour it or, again, the cake may collapse, and that would be a disaster. You made it to the end! Take a picture. Then dig in to an angelic dessert.

Sweet Chestnut Torte with Butterscotch Frosting and Blueberry Syrup

I brought a can of chestnut purée home from Montreal to Newfoundland along with my sezchuan peppercorns and dried Anaheim, New Mexico and bird's eye chili peppers (these things are still hard to come by here, though at least the peppercorns may soon be available at Food For Thought on Duckworth Street. Ask and ye shall receive) and I was set on using all of them...not all in this one recipe, thank goodness...oh dear.

I mainly wanted to make this recipe because I had tried it in Montreal and failed rather miserably. It involves egg whites and I certainly don't get along with those. Especially from eggs that had frozen a little in my fridge. They didn't want to rise very much and when the cake came out, it immediately deflated. It was a crushing defeat.

It's a beautiful recipe, though, from Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts. The chestnut purée is a traditional French ingredient, incredibly low in calories and with almost zero fat, often served on its own, direct from the can, sweetened, or with a dollop of cream. It is simple, refined and elegant (not if served DIRECTLY from the can to your plate in a restaurant). By adding it to a cake, you cut a lot of the fat and flour since the purée is moist but thick. Kind of like adding applesauce or fruit purées, but a much more savoury and unique flavour that you don't necessarily want to cover up with cocoa powder or chocolate. I did remember from making the cake before that it was still kind of bland, even with a little thick yogurt on the side, so a fruit sauce would do it well. Then I remembered that frostings should be rich and sticky (I rarely forget this) and fruit just wouldn't cut it. So I made a butterscotch frosting from the Joy of Cooking and made a quick blueberry syrup to garnish. Fruit + butterscotch + chestnuts = Heaven. Only problem is that the cake only keeps for 2 days max, but you can put it in the freezer and I kind of find that the freezing makes it deliciously denser and the butterscotch flavours jump out even more. No need to defrost or heat anything.

Sweet Chestnut Torte
1 cup chestnut purée (sweetened purée is what the recipe calls for, but if all you can find is unsweetened, or you prefer, you can just add sugar or a sugar substitute as long as you keep a similar consistency)
2 egg yolks
brandy
vanilla
1/4 cup flour
4 egg whites
cream of tartar
sugar

That's honestly all the ingredients. So simple. This works best with a springform 8-inch pan but any kind of deep cake pan works fine. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper. It will make your cake life easier. For your other life, you're on your own.

1. Combine the chestnut purée, egg yolks, brandy and vanilla and then mix in the flour. Yeah, Medrich didn't get around to saying how hard this one little step is...the purée is ridiculously thick that you can't whisk it, but it gets clumpy if you just use a spoon. It's also too thick for a blender, so a food processor or your hands are really your best options. A handheld mixer might almost do, but it might be frustrating.

2. Now the egg whites. Beat them on medium-high speed with the cream of tartar to the ambiguous level of "soft peaks". Then slowly add the sugar and beat at high speed until the egg whites are "stiff but not dry". Hmm...after so many mousses I still feel like a fool. I still am never sure if I do this step correctly...it's not like if you ate the egg whites they would taste like dry goods, but they're certainly not like a fluid anymore. Oh I don't know.

3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit

4. Fold a scoop of the egg whites into the chestnuts. Again, HARD! The chestnuts are pretty dense and the whites are not. How are you possibly supposed to keep any air in the whites when they're being suffocated under layers of chestnut cement? I think next time I will sweeten my purée with honey instead of sugar to make it creamier and easier to mix. Maybe the can I bought is more dense than other cans? American cans? No, they're all imported, so who knows why it didn't work as well? I've made my own before but it's a lot of work.

5. Fold in the remaining whites. A little easier now that the first 1/4 is in. Scrape the batter into the pan and use a spatula to smooth down the top. This cake does not rise anymore, so how you put it into the oven is how you hope to take it out.

6. Bake 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out with just a few moist crumbs, says Medrich. How many is a few? This was a hard call. Know your oven is all the advice I can offer. Just know you're probably just as uncertain as I was. When the cake is cool, remove it from the pan and peel the parchment paper off the bottom. Then flip it back into the pan to add the icing. If your torte collapses like mine tend to do, there's no need to be careful when you're flipping it over. There is nothing delicate about the egg whites anymore. Like a flower that bloomed and now is on the down-swing. Circle of cake-life and all. It makes me feel better about the results if I think of them as inevitable. Such is life.

This serves 10 people, apparently, with a grand total of 1.5 grams of fat per serving. What kind of cake does that? That's why it needed the icing below:

Butterscotch Frosting (milk-free, optional vegan recipe)
4 tbsp butter, margarine or vegan margarine
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/8 tsp salt
2/3 cup almond milk (or soy milk, or regular milk, or 1/3 cup evaporated milk)
2-2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2-1 tsp vanilla or rum

First, you need to evaporate your milk. Almond milk does not come in convenient cans like evaporated cow's milk, but it's simple to make. Just heat your 2/3 cup of any type of milk in a saucepan over medium heat until it reduces by half. Almond and soy milk won't curdle like regular milk if you put it at a higher temperature, so really you could bump up the heat to make this go faster if you watch it carefully and stir to make sure it doesn't burn. You want to end up with 1/3 cup.

Then combine the milk with the butter (or margarine), salt and brown sugar in the top of a double boiler. I use a stainless steel bowl set over a pot of boiling water. Just make sure the bottom of your bowl doesn't touch the surface of the water, and only have the water at a simmer, not a rapid boil. You just want to get everything melted and stirred together until it's smooth. This step is beautiful.

Remove the bowl from the heat and let it cool for 5 minutes before beating in 2 cups of powdered sugar and the vanilla. My icing seemed too thin, so I added more powdered sugar until it seemed right. You should actually first set your bowl in a pan of ice water and beat without adding more sugar for awhile, just to see if it isn't thickening because it's still too hot. That way you can maybe save yourself multiple heart attacks from all the sugar in the icing. One is enough, thanks.

I wasn't sure if this was going to be one of those icings that gets grainy and hardens on top. Those are gross. I poured it on the cooled cake right away. It's actually a nice icing, not hardening and all, and even after sitting for a day before it was served, it held up decently. It kind of slid off the cake because it was still a bit runny, but more powdered sugar would have been a bad idea, so I left it at that.

Quick blueberry Syrup
My parents have about 5 open jars of jam and jellies and fruit-based sauces in the fridge that will never be used. So I took the remains of a wild blueberry spread, heated it in the microwave for 20 seconds and drizzled it over the iced cake. It wasn't exactly artful but it looked interesting, and you can't really undo a drizzle anyway. The mildly tart wild blueberry flavour was really good at cutting through the sweetness of the frosting. Mmm...delicious cake.