HCB: Designer Chocolate Baby Grands

And I’m back!  This week’s HCB choice was baby cakes… CHOCOLATE baby cakes and covered with my favorite piano glaze – which I love to do and was introduce to the technique back with the Chocolate Apricot Roll and then again with the Bernachon Palets D’Or Gateau.

These cakes were pretty easy to put together and they are a marriage in chocolate heaven!

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TWD: Lots-of-Ways Banana Cake

It’s funny how sometimes both of my baking groups (Heavenly Cake Bakers and Tuesday with Dorie) are in synch and totally random pick a recipe that shares a common ingredient.  Sometimes the recipes are so close that I have to make an executive decision and choose which one I want to bake more.  No sense in having 2 cakes in the house, especially when I try to get rid of it as fast as I can in the first place – no temptation in sight!

This past weekend Tuesday with Dorie choice won.  Thank you to Kimberly from Only Creative Opportunities who made the choice.

And what a choice it was.

This cake was very simple to make (the best kind) and as Dorie explains very flexible. Since you pretty much can replace any of the ingredients with what you have at hand – which in my mind means one thing:

No trip to the supermarket to find an ingredient that I ran out and forgot to put on my shopping list.

Have I mentioned how I hate to go to the supermarket?

No? Well now you know – your welcome.

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Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake

As most food blogger out there, we collect recipes from all over.  We print them out, we bookmark them, we tear them out of food magazines, we earmark them with post it on cookbooks and soon, before you know it, we have a cooking TO DO list.

Mine is pretty long, and pretty overdue.

I had this recipe in my list for quite a while now.  I found it via Leite’s Culinaria website a couple of months back and printed it and saved it for that moment in time where I would totally have the nerve to tackle it.

Anyhow…

At first the recipe scared me; it had yeast and needs kneading, and the use of a rolling pin!   Three things that I’m not good at using or doing.  I made bread before – it was a traumatic experience and decided to stick to things that I’m good at, like cake and complicated savory dishes. Anything that has yeast in it has a life on its own and I’m a control freak so that is not a good combination - I know how to choose my battles, and bread is a higher power – so I stay away.

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