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cimoreneAs I mentioned a few weeks ago, Wax got a bee in her bonnet about cake in her second summer vacation (her vacation days were broken into two approximately-two-week stretches, and the last one was just a couple of weeks ago in August).
We did already like cake; this isn't a really sudden thing, but it's been some years since I used to bake cakes really regularly. In my 20s, I was more into it than she was, but we've both liked baking (and cooking, to a lesser extent) from childhood. We both were raised by moms who REALLY liked cooking and baking, and sort of made a hobby of it.
My mom had a whole bookcase full of cookbooks, and she used to want cookbooks for international cuisines for her major presents; she'd go through them noting the ones she wanted to try and the modifications she'd make next time right on the pages of the books. She had less time for it after my dad's accident in 2003. Wax's mom was more the type to read cooking magazines and rip pages out of them; she had files of index cards and folded up magazine and newspaper pages going back decades, until she transferred them all to her tablet about ten years ago. My mom looked down on, and raised me to look down on, store-bought cookies and cakes; Wax's mom didn't do THAT, but she seemed to bake just about every weekend and to always have something baked whenever anyone came over. My mom went through four or five bread machines during my childhood; when I was a teenager we never bought store-bought bread. She often set the bread machine to finish a loaf when the first people were coming home from school or work, and she modified a revolving list of five or ten different recipes for machine use. When I was 14 we had a Norwegian exchange student, and she was out with her friends most afternoons, but they swung by our house daily to eat half a loaf of homemade bread on their way to ride horses or go to soccer practice. Wax's mom bought a little sheep farm and moved out there to raise four kids in the late 70s and she had a giant Bosch mixer, the professional sized ones, because she used to bake all the bread for the family of six, a week at a time. I made my first cake alone at age 5 - I wanted to, and my mom coached me through all the steps, but she let me add the things to the mixer. I was making cookies on my own regularly as a teen. Wax's mom made a gluten-intolerant friend in recent years after she retired and moved out here to Pargas, and she got really into gluten-free baking and having her friends over to try her efforts. Her gluten-free cakes were incredible.
Wax and I really like the various cooking and baking shows produced by epicurious on Youtube, which has several series we really love:
But about a year ago, Wax accidentally discovered more ASMR-like videos by Japanese and Korean pastry chefs - presumably just by surfing to them, I guess. These are mesmerizing to watch and we completely love them. Wax's favorite of these is Joconde's baking, a beautifully-shot channel where she prepares everything without speaking, focusing on naturally-lit hands and cute pastel tools and implements, and the recipes are included as English captions. I also really love J'adore, which is quite similar (both are Korean, but if you surf related videos you'll quickly find Japanese and Chinese ones as well). This is what got us interested specifically in cake, anyway.
Wax first made the Apple Tosca Pie on her vacation, then the Triple Sec chocolate mousse pie with the crushed-cookie crust, then the boiled chocolate layer cake, tiramisu, and then this peanut butter lemon layer cake (we've only eaten 5/8ths of it in the last week because, while delicious, it's a bit dense and it feels like a bigger slice would replace dinner).
The cakes (and pies and tarts and things like that that pastry chefs would still make) that we want to try include:
We did already like cake; this isn't a really sudden thing, but it's been some years since I used to bake cakes really regularly. In my 20s, I was more into it than she was, but we've both liked baking (and cooking, to a lesser extent) from childhood. We both were raised by moms who REALLY liked cooking and baking, and sort of made a hobby of it.
My mom had a whole bookcase full of cookbooks, and she used to want cookbooks for international cuisines for her major presents; she'd go through them noting the ones she wanted to try and the modifications she'd make next time right on the pages of the books. She had less time for it after my dad's accident in 2003. Wax's mom was more the type to read cooking magazines and rip pages out of them; she had files of index cards and folded up magazine and newspaper pages going back decades, until she transferred them all to her tablet about ten years ago. My mom looked down on, and raised me to look down on, store-bought cookies and cakes; Wax's mom didn't do THAT, but she seemed to bake just about every weekend and to always have something baked whenever anyone came over. My mom went through four or five bread machines during my childhood; when I was a teenager we never bought store-bought bread. She often set the bread machine to finish a loaf when the first people were coming home from school or work, and she modified a revolving list of five or ten different recipes for machine use. When I was 14 we had a Norwegian exchange student, and she was out with her friends most afternoons, but they swung by our house daily to eat half a loaf of homemade bread on their way to ride horses or go to soccer practice. Wax's mom bought a little sheep farm and moved out there to raise four kids in the late 70s and she had a giant Bosch mixer, the professional sized ones, because she used to bake all the bread for the family of six, a week at a time. I made my first cake alone at age 5 - I wanted to, and my mom coached me through all the steps, but she let me add the things to the mixer. I was making cookies on my own regularly as a teen. Wax's mom made a gluten-intolerant friend in recent years after she retired and moved out here to Pargas, and she got really into gluten-free baking and having her friends over to try her efforts. Her gluten-free cakes were incredible.
Wax and I really like the various cooking and baking shows produced by epicurious on Youtube, which has several series we really love:
- Price Points, where an expert in a particular ingredient is given a bunch of samples and gets to guess how much they cost;
- Four Levels, where a beginner home chef, an intermediate home chef, and a professional chef all make their spin on one dish and then a food scientist reviews all their work and explains stuff;
- and Pro Chef vs Home Cook, where a pro chef and a home cook are assigned the same dish and they both go shopping for all the ingredients for their way of making it, and then they swap ingredients. Then the food scientist coaches the home cook through how to make the pro chef's spin on the dish with their ingredients, and the pro chef does something super creative with the home cook's ingredients to make something new and fancy. They're all really nice and positive about all the chefs in all of these series, even when their efforts are hilarious or straight-up bizarre, which makes it pretty fun to watch.
But about a year ago, Wax accidentally discovered more ASMR-like videos by Japanese and Korean pastry chefs - presumably just by surfing to them, I guess. These are mesmerizing to watch and we completely love them. Wax's favorite of these is Joconde's baking, a beautifully-shot channel where she prepares everything without speaking, focusing on naturally-lit hands and cute pastel tools and implements, and the recipes are included as English captions. I also really love J'adore, which is quite similar (both are Korean, but if you surf related videos you'll quickly find Japanese and Chinese ones as well). This is what got us interested specifically in cake, anyway.
Wax first made the Apple Tosca Pie on her vacation, then the Triple Sec chocolate mousse pie with the crushed-cookie crust, then the boiled chocolate layer cake, tiramisu, and then this peanut butter lemon layer cake (we've only eaten 5/8ths of it in the last week because, while delicious, it's a bit dense and it feels like a bigger slice would replace dinner).
The cakes (and pies and tarts and things like that that pastry chefs would still make) that we want to try include:
- perfecting the lemon-peanut butter combo, perhaps with peanut butter in the frosting
- a matcha layer cake - this recipe looks like a good starting point, although not sure about the frosting
- a matcha chiffon cake, maybe this one? In a bundt pan probably. If you make a matcha cake in a bundt pan, and it comes out all rounded and green, and then you garnish it with strawberries or raspberries, it'll look like a Swedish princess cake! I really want to do this because I love the look of the princess cake but I hate marzipan. I have a green princess cake pincushion.
- Wax wants to actually learn how to make prinsesstårta - she likes marzipan. We need a good cooking thermometer first.
- lemon pound cake (one without peanut butter as well)
- Helen Rennie's Earl Grey Chiffon Cake (YouTube)
- Maple Macadamia Cake
- From that listicle of bundt cake recipes in my earlier post: cranberry-orange bundt cake, apple-cream cheese bundt cake, coconut pound cake (with lime glaze), olive oil cake, almond apricot coffee cake, citrus-raspberry coffee cake, and raspberry moscow mule pound cake
- lemon poppyseed cake (the recipe in the listicle was a bad one, but maybe my lemon poppyseed muffin recipe will work)
- pistachio cake - a recipe from scratch, unlike the one in the listicle
- margarita cake - a recipe from scratch, unlike the one in the listicle. Maybe this?
- A good pineapple coconut cake from scratch, unlike the one in the listicle
- A good chocolate raspberry layer cake with raspberry filling
- A good coffee layer cake (without chocolate), probably with hazelnut
- German's chocolate cake. We've made that from scratch before... the frosting is a pain. I love it, but at home in the US we always bought the frosting.
- A nice cinnamon swirl crumble-topped coffee cake. I haven't had that in ages.
- A confetti cake. I haven't had one since I was a kid, and it just looks so fun.
- Maybe an orange chocolate cake? I love orange chocolate chip muffins. I don't think chocolate chips is really the way to go with the cake though. Maybe with Grand Marnier. I don't mean a sacher cake or anything else that's coated in solid chocolate here, though. Slightly lower levels of decadence, please.
- A layer cake with a good amaretto flavor - maybe this almond amaretto layer cake. There are recipes for chocolate amaretto cakes too.
- Chocolate Amaretto Espresso Mousse Cake
- A maple bundt cake like this one with walnuts maybe
- lemon meringue pie
- a way to combine pistachio, amaretto and coffee in one cake or pie - maybe a mousse cake?
(no subject)
Date: 19 Sep 2022 07:52 am (UTC)Our oven was down for the count for a couple of months so I haven't baked much lately, but I did make no-bake biscuits (okay, cookies) that usually use oats but I swapped in cornflakes for something different. They were pretty good but, horror of horrors, too chocolatey! I didn't think that was possible!
(no subject)
Date: 19 Sep 2022 01:33 pm (UTC)