HCB: Sicilian Pistachio Cake

I love cookbooks. I have a massive selection of cookbooks—over 100 (on the last inventory). I’m one of those “PEOPLE” that mosey over to the local bookstore, pick up about ten books, sit at the café and drink tons of overpriced coffee, look through them, mark them, and then run back home to order them on Amazon.

“Hi, my name is Monica, and I’m a cookbook-a-holic.”

So, when I picked up Rose’s latest book, Heavenly Cake, I thought it must be good; I had The Cake Bible from ages ago.  And as I sat there browsing, I opened it up and landed on this specific recipe.

Background information: I love nuts (the eating kind, not the people kind). I mean all kinds of nuts: walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, cashews, peanuts, etc. I don’t think there is a nut that I don’t like.  

Pistachios? Well, pistachios are my holy grail.

I would live on them, except for the fact that they are EXPENSIVE little suckers. We splurge at least once a month, buy a big bag (2–3 pounds), and keep a tight leash on our consumption (we want to make them last as long as possible).

When I saw this in the book, I bought it immediately. Rose’s, so that you know, I paid the inflated price of $40 at the bookstore!

You had me at “Sicilian Pistachios.”

When I joined the HCB group, I looked over their already-baked cake list and hoped they had not gotten to this one. And Yeah! For me, they had not. I requested it with Marie and bang! There it was, in the calendar.

Now, I had to wait.

I had planned to order the pistachios from Rose’s recommended supplier. But last week, we had family visiting, and between feeding and hosting over 20 people, this planned task fell down the list, and before I knew it, it was too late to do so. So, I went to the local Middle Eastern markets and was not satisfied with their selections, which were in-shell pistachios. I knew I needed to blanch them beforehand, which would be an extra step, and I did not want to be sitting there opening them one by one, too. I arrived at Whole Foods and found a bag of shell pistachios from California – Score!

I knew the cake was easy to make, so I was not worried about time. But I had to do the extra step of blanching my pistachios beforehand, so on Saturday, I started early. Have you ever blanched nuts? TWO WORDS: Nasty business. It took forever to clean them up, and once that was done, I put them aside to let them dry up for up to 3 hours, as recommended.

We went house shopping.

I returned six hours later, with no new house on the horizon and still-moist pistachios.

Since I knew I needed to pulse them with the sugar, I was afraid that if there were even a bit of wetness, I would end up with a paste. So, I decided to pop them in the oven and give them a quick toast.  Problem solved.

Then I sat down and selected the greenest of the bunch to top the cake. The others went with the sugar in the food processor for a quick mix-up.

The cake batter took less than 10 minutes to put together. After weeks of light, airy cakes, this dense texture was a nice surprise. It really needed to be spread out and smoothed with a spatula in my baking pan, which was encircled with my brand-new cake strip. Major bowl/spatula-licking action took place afterward.

Mine took 45 minutes to bake to a golden brown. It rested for 10 minutes and then popped out of the pan flippy-floppy onto the rack to cool off.

And onward to tackle the Golden Neoclassic Buttercream.

I went into this step a bit apprehensively. Buttercream and I have a love-hate relationship (sort of like piping). So, I took a couple of deep breaths, read the instructions one.more.time, and carried on.

I used light corn syrup because I was too lazy to hunt for golden syrup. I also used lime juice instead of lemon because that is what I had at hand (please refer to the lazy factor above). I also ensured I had all the ingredients lined up and ready.

And even with all that prep work, I messed up on the hot syrup.

By the time I realized it, I was too late. I was pouring my previously beat yolks in a steady stream with my handheld mixer and noted that I was making cotton candy.

Uh-oh.

My syrup had reached the “hardball stage” while cooking, so I had bits of hard sugar specks in my buttercream.

Do I start over? 

I would have, except that I had two eggs left.

I decided to keep on and see the results with the butter incorporated, and if it were too much of an issue, I would redo it.

After beating the butter in, it came together as it should (with my hard sugar specks), and I decided it was good enough. Instead of pistachio essence, I added almond extract and omitted the vanilla the recipe calls for.

It tasted scrumptious.

Before I frosted the cake, I placed the buttercream in the refrigerator to cool it, then spent 15 minutes trying to get as smooth a surface as possible. It went back in the refrigerator while I diced up my pistachio stash for the topping. All the while thinking, "NEXT TIME, ORDER THE SLIVER PISTACHIOS AHEAD OF TIME!"

I took the cake out and sprinkled my slivered pistachios all over it. Was it as brilliantly green and spectacular as Matthew’s? No, but I was totally satisfied with it.

And so was everyone else.

Tom: “Much denser than the previous cakes; I like their nutty texture. This one stays here; no sharing!"

Sister: “I like the flavor, but it’s too dry for my taste.”

Mom: “It’s so good. I love the flavor and texture; it's perfect as a coffee cake, and I'm afraid I must disagree with your sister; it’s not dry at all, at least not my piece. You are giving me some to take home, right?”

Me: I really like this cake. I love the pistachio flavor, even though I would have loved it to be a bit more pronounced. Next time, I’m going to use pistachio flour and see if that would change the flavor or texture and give it a bigger pistachio punch.

This one goes on regular rotation for future baking.

And if you love pistachios as much as I do and cannot wait to bake this cake, you can find the full recipe here

HCB: Lemon Poppy Seed-Sour Cream Cake

After last week scrumptious cake, I was not sure about the next one.  For the past 5 days, I been helping my sister with her business and basically been putting 14 hour work days.  I can not even see straight.  I was not even sure it would be safe of me to be around anything that required measuring and handling a hot oven.

I’m exhausted folks.  

By noon, today I was feeling antsy, because I remember that Tom had invited some friends over to watch the US vs Canada Gold medal hockey game and I had promise to served something sweet.

There went my vegetation plans.

I got home, read the recipe again and realized that I could have this cake done and over with in less than 1 hour. Plus, for once I actually had all that I needed in my kitchen, including the poppy seeds! 
I figure that Tom’s friends would love to have a cake that had opium in it. Side note: Don’t panic, the seeds contain very low levels of opiates, the most this cake can do to you is give you a sugar high.

And oh boy did it ever!

The cake was simple to make.  And yes, if you are wondering about repeating myself, yes, I am, about how simple Rose’s cakes are made… (Come back next week and see if I’m singing the same tune).  Or maybe I’m getting good at my prepping ahead of time, that when it comes to the actual mixing, it goes pretty effortless and fast.

Dry ingredients of sugar, flour, baking power, soda, the lemon zest (I added some lime zest as well) and 50 grams (1/3 cup) of poppy seeds.  And here I stopped and was WOW, FIFTY grams? I had to read the measurements again.  Really? That many?

My bottle was for only 35 grams!  What do I do now?

I bit the bullet and only put 35 grams in.  Hey, its not like anyone is going to count right?

Mixed it up for the required 30 second in the KA and then incorporate the butter, and the eggs, which have been previously whisked with the vanilla and sour cream.

Batter DONE!

I did not have a fancy pan, and I seriously thought of doing cupcakes, just to change it up.  But my tired mind was shutting down at this point with thoughts of having to subtract and add in order to figure out the ration of batter to cupcakes and all that, so I went with my boring, old bundt cake pan.

Place it in the oven, clicked the timer in the iPhone and went upstairs to catch up on Project Runway on my DVR.

And promptly fell sleep.

And no, I did not burn the cake.

Because, at 40 minutes my timer was beeping and I woke up to the house smelling all lemo-ny and delicious.

And when the cake came out of the oven, all of those smells seem to intensify.

Good things were coming.  Tom, started to shout from the living room “its it ready yet!?!”

I made the necessary holes all over the top, drenched it with the syrup, waited another 10 minutes and then did the flipy-floppy and on to the platter it went.

Another good dousing of syrup and ta-da!

The cake lasted un-touched 20 minutes, before Tom pounced on it, before his friends even arrived!

Verdict(s):

Tom: “I’m not taking this one to work, because It’s not going to survive the night”

Me: I like it and love the taste of the lemon and tartest of the sour cream. The books description that “it’s buttery and tender” its spot on. I thought I was going to be short on poppy seeds. But to be honest, I thought it was way to much to begin with in the first place. And in some cases it overpower the cake. Next time I’m actually going to reduce the poppy seeds (or do it without) and up the lemon zest.

And congratulations Canada on your win!

Full recipe can be found here

HCB: Whipped Cream Cake

I’m not a great fan of ice cream.  I like it, if its there I will eat it, depending on the flavor that’s being offered, because you know I can be fickle with my choices as well. Plus, ice creams now a days are just so over-the-top sweet.  What ever happen to mild balance flavor, creamy soft ice creams?

Oh yeah, that’s called GELATO.

And if there is a type of food I will fight you over is Gelato.  When I lived in in the northern part of Italy.  I found the most creamiest, soft gelato that existed.  For them it’s all about using full fat creams and mild flavors when making any gelato. And the results is a little piece of heaven in a cup.  And while I love most of the gelato flavors, my favorite was always the “Fior di Latte” (FYOR dee LAH-tay) - which is literally translated to “flower of milk”.  The ingredient is cream, yummy cream, period.  Whipped and then cooled into this wonderfully subtle ice cold, soft natural sweet cream flavor. 

I adore it.

And you may wonder why I'm talking about Gelato when the title of this post is Cake.  I know, I know, but my rambling has a point.

This week the HCB group gave us a free choice. We could choose any cake that has been baked before by the group or that you have past up.  Having come into the baking group a bit late, I have missed quite a bit cakes on the list. So this was hard - so very, very hard… SIDE NOTE here: I move to remove the “Free Choices” in the future because it’s just too hard to choose.

After much deliveration, I narrow it down to two contenders the Chocolate Streussel Coffee Cake and the Whipped Cream Cake.  I was so torn, that by Thursday, I convince myself, I will do both of them!  Plenty of the other bakers have done it. I’m super-baker! Why the hell not? I can do this. 

Umh, yeah, nope, did not happen.  Because life happens that is why, and suddenly I was too busy to even think straight or care about baking.  So, I contemplated passing this one by, until Tom gave me the guilt trip and asked what I was baking this week?  And when I showed him where I was stuck on the choices, he told me "let me clarify it for you" and pointed to the Whipped Cream Cake.

Score for me. Because, it was the easiest one to do, and the one that I can share the actual recipe with everyone since Rose’s has it posted in her blog here.

The recipe calls for 40% high-butterfat heavy cream, I was able to find 38% in an Asian market (no joke), I figure that being off by 2 was good enough.

And the steps were pretty straight forward.  I measure everything and put it in order to be used, then I started to whipped the cream in the Kitchen Aid and had one of these internal dialogues filled with doubts “will it double?, "I need to make sure to gradually increase it, careful, careful”, "does it look like the book said?".  All that internal talking (and constant re-reading of the receipe) paid off because not only did it double up, but those stiff peaks were a sight to see.

Then in the eggs went. And my crispy white batter turned into a soft buttery cream color (my eggs are bought from the local Hispanic market, and I swear the yolks on these eggs are a bright yellow-orange color that its to die for, and the flavor, lets not even talk about that!).  So I’m creaming and sure enough it turned into a homemade mayonnaise consistency that Rose said it would. The sugar went in next, and then I folded the dry ingredients, with a balloon whisk.

And I panic a bit at this point, because it seems to curdle on me for a bit and I was like “oh, oh...” so, I speed up the process of folding the rest of the dry and dumped the whole thing in the pan, making sure I smoothed the top well and into the oven it went. I may or may not have made the sign of the cross, to you know ask the power above to bless it and not deflate or something, I just did not have it in me for a do over.

The next 25 minutes waiting for the cake, where spent riveted to the TV watching some of the Olympic Games.  Has anyone been caught up in the curling competition too?  There is something oddly relaxing about seeing that stone glide across that smooth surface.

At the 25 minutes mark, the house started to smell delicious. I checked the cake, but it was not done yet.  Another 10 minutes of that  bake goodness and out it came.

And it was perfection in a pan. Light color, with a hit of a crack all around and soon it started to shrink from the side of the pan, like it was suppose to.

I let it cool off for 10 more minutes and then flipped it and at that moment that cake won the gold medal for the smoothes unmolding to date.

I took Rose’s advice and simply dusted it with some powdered sugar.

And remember the gelato story? 

Well this cake, when done took me back to eating that creamy, soft gelato. When I took that first bite, I was transported to my days in Italy.  Under an umbrella in the middle of a piazza, eating a scoop of “Fior di Latte” and watching those good-looking Italian men.  It was light, not sweet. Just perfect! Like eating whipped cream from a spoon, this cake just melts in your mouth.  It was amazing.

My grandmother was right.  Sometimes LESS is MORE.

Tom’s verdict was less poetic. He took a bite, gobbled it up and then cut another piece, ran to the refrigerator and topped that slice with some of the leftover Orange Curd from the True Genoise cake. 

Yes, people we are still eating that curd!