Category: The Book

Categories
Soups The Book

162. Onion Soup Gratinée p.114

I can’t find a recipe for this soup online.

Typically onion soup is a socially acceptable excuse for sitting down to half a pound of melted cheese. Trying to maneuver those long strands of gooey cheese into ones mouth without getting it all over your front is a social bonding experience best shared with close friends. If you ask people what they like about onion soup they’ll probably say it’s the cheese. This recipe takes the radical position that the cheese is just getting in the way of a really good soup.

This recipe uses the Beef Stock from last time as its main ingredient, along with caramelized onions, vermouth, a bouquet garni, cognac, and Worchestershire sauce. It’s topped with toasted baguette slices, and a thin layer of grated Gruyère and Parmigiano-Reggiano, then popped under the broiler for a bit. The end result is a nice onion soup, but it’s lacking in the cheese department. I agree that sometimes the cheese can be overwhelming, but half the joy of onion soup is the melty strands of cheese that come up with every bite. The soup itself was a little heavy on the booze and Worchestershire sauce, and not as onion flavoured as I would have liked. As I mentioned last time, making the stock for the dish was a big pain, and didn’t have a great pay-off. It was a perfectly fine basis for the soup, but it was hardly better than the store bought stuff.

While I enjoyed my dinner, there are better onion soup recipes out there. My dining companion makes French onion soup often enough, it takes her twenty minutes, and tastes far better than this all day affair.

Categories
Basics The Book

161. Beef Stock p.928


The recipe

I can’t escape the conclusion that I’m a food snob. I take satisfaction in looking down on packaged and processed foods, and I give people points for making meals from scratch, double points if the ingredients come from an ethically superior source, and triple points if they grew the food themselves. The ultimate ridiculousness of snobbishness is that no one can live up to the standards they judge others by. I enjoy pickling my insides with Doritos, I pay outrageous prices for a tiny package of hummus that I could make at home for twelve cents, and I don’t find that organic vegetables taste better than their fertilizer drenched cousins. My ultimate sin though, is that I don’t make my own stock.

Stock making and apartment living aren’t an obvious combination. Making stock takes most of a day, so you’ll want to make up a big batch. That’s well and good if you’ve got a spare freezer in the basement, but our tiny freezer is spilling over with leftover ravioli, pesto ice cubes, and pork tenderloin that went on a crazy sale. There’s just no room for three liters of stock. The food network has filled hundreds of hours by having famous chefs repeat the refrain that the biggest reason the professionals’ food tastes better than home cooks’ is that they make their own stock (and use unconscionable amounts of butter). The sin that will get me kicked out of the food snobs annual picnic is that I don’t think that store bought broth is all that bad, in fact I like it. It’s convenient, perfectly servicable, and unless you’re using it as a gigantic component of your dish no one is going to be able to tell the difference. You usually have to reduce the salt in the rest of the recipe, because even “low sodium” broth isn’t all that low in sodium, other than that store bought broth is perfectly fine, and not at all a pain in the ass.

Making this stock was a pain in the ass. It’s not actually difficult, but it’s messy and takes six and a half hours. Your day starts with a trip to the butcher, who is happy to provide meaty beef and veal shanks, but thinks you’re an idiot when you ask him to saw them into one inch slices. He’s been making stock his whole life, and doesn’t think this step is necessary. He’s old and Italian, so he’s probably right. You then bike home with a plastic bag full of chopped up bones hanging from your handlebar, and dump them into a roasting pan along with some carrots and onions. Roast this mess, stirring occasionally for an hour at 450. Stop cursing Ruth Reichls name, because the house is starting to smell pretty good. Make a bouquet garni by tying parsley, thyme, and a bay leaf in cheesecloth. Start cursing Ruth again, because you’re going to be running the stock through a fine mesh sieve later on, and a bouquet garni is totally unnecessary. Transfer the roasted bones to a stockpot. In transferring them drop several meaty bones on the floor, this is interesting for the cat, but annoying for you. Deglaze the roasting pan, and transfer the scraped up brown bits to the stockpot along with celery, the bouquet garni, and water. Bring it to a boil, and spend half an hour skimming the nasty meat froth that rises to the surface. Disgust your girlfriend by sneaking up on her with the meat foam while she tries to read the paper. Let the stock reduce for 3 to 5 hours. Don’t leave the house, because that’s a fire hazard. Break up the monotony by skimming more foam every once in a while. Once you’ve got 8 cups of liquid left, fish out all the bits of bone and mushy vegetables, and get rid of them. Then try to set up a sieve over another big pot, and pour the stock through the sieve. Mess this up, and have the sieve fall into the filtered stock. Do it all again. Touch the hot stockpot and burn yourself. Swear for a while. Do a side to side comparison of your stock to Campbell’s low sodium beef broth, and realize that they’re really not that different. Swear some more.

This tastes like tetra-packed beef broth from the store, only it takes a long time. Homemade does have more gelatin in it, so it has a richer mouth feel, but I’m sure blooming an eighth of a teaspoon of gelatin in store bough broth would nullify this difference. Final verdict, totally not worth it. I used it as the basis for French Onion Soup, which specifically calls for making this stock, and suggests that it won’t be nearly the same with store bought, but frankly the stock wasn’t amazing in the soup. Maybe there are beef stock recipes out there that will blow the cheap, readily available, and very convenient competition away, but this is not one of them.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

160. Cranberry Walnut Tart p.786


The recipe

Cooking is a learning process, and a lot of lessons just need to be learned the hard way. There are a host of excellent kitchen habits that food educators are desperate for us to get into, such as, reading the recipe all the way through, verifying that you have all the ingredients, doing things that can be done ahead ahead, getting your mise en place, and cleaning as you go. These are wonderful, labour saving, better for you in the long run, habits. Unfortunately it takes a fiasco for me to really internalize any of those teachings.

Today’s lesson was “Don’t assume, you’ll make an ass out of u and me”. I’d already learned the read the recipe all the way through lesson, so it was time to screw up the checking that you have all the ingredients you think you have step. I made a special trip to the grocery store to get the stuff for this tart, and picking up corn syrup wouldn’t have been a problem, but I took it on faith that somewhere in the depths of the pantry a sticky bottle of light corn syrup was waiting for me. I was wrong, in a two cook household you can never trust that the pantry fairies haven’t come along and wiped you out of cream of tartar. For the record, acceptable substitutions for 1 cup of light corn syrup are 1 cup of dark corn syrup, 1 cup of treacle, 1 cup of liquid glucose, 1 cup of honey, or 1 cup of granulated white sugar (increase the liquid in the recipe by 1/4 cup). You’ll notice that 1 cup of maple syrup is not on that list. I knew that I should really make a simple syrup as a stand in, and two seconds of googling would have turned me on to honey, but I went with maple syrup because I’d failed to heed the “do what can be done ahead ahead” lesson, and the guests were coming much sooner than I was ready for.

For this tart I baked off a batch of Sweet Pastry Dough, then whisked together eggs, brown sugar, maple syrup instead of corn syrup, butter, salt, and vanilla, then stirred in chopped walnuts and cranberries which i forgot to chop (I was frazzled). I baked it for half of the recommended 45 minutes because it was starting to burn.

Part of the filling boiled over the sides of the pan and onto the bottom of the oven, and some got between the crust and the tart pan. That left a lot less filling in the actual pie shell, so it began to dry out. Maybe if I’d chopped the cranberries as as I was supposed to they would have released more juice, and kept the caramel saucy. The pie was really sticky and thick, hard to cut, hard to eat, and didn’t taste all that great. The cranberry-walnut-caramel combination should have been a winner, and it might well have been if I’d followed the recipe properly. The people on Epicurious seem to like it well enough.

As a pie this really wasn’t great, but it worked out well as a life lesson. Today I learned that just because I’ve had an ingredient at some point doesn’t mean I still have it. I’ve also started to think about organizing the pantry so that it makes some kind of sense. In future, if the cook’s note at the bottom says that the recipe can me made a day in advance, I’ll consider availing myself of that. Sometimes it takes several painful repetitions for a lesson to sink in, but I’m begining to appreciate the fact that the Gods of pastry aren’t shy about smiting those who play fast and loose with the recipe. I always feel bad when I give a recipe a poor rating when it was at least partially my fault, but too bad, The Book doesn’t actually have feelings that I can hurt. I give my performance as a cook here 1/5 mushrooms, but the tart fares a bit better.

Categories
Poultry The Book

159. Duck Legs and Carrots p.398


The recipe is from Fergus “Nose To Tail” Henderson’s London restaurant, St. John.

My dining companion and I adore duck, and eat it often, so a new preparation is always exciting for us. I really like the thinking behind this recipe. It takes an underused part of the duck, and brings out its absolute best. Incidentally duck legs are a wonderful bargain, they’re exceedingly flavorful and they’re nicely inexpensive. Duck breasts and fattened livers are worth their weight in gold, but that means that there are a lot of legs hanging around, and there’s only so much demand for duck confit. There’s loads of duck produced in Quebec, so it’s always easy to find.

In this recipe duck legs are trimmed of excess fat, and that fat is rendered in a skillet. The legs are seasoned with salt and pepper, and browned in batches. Most of the fat is then discarded from the skillet and a mixture of chopped leeks, onions, and garlic are softened. A truckload of sliced carrots are then added to the pan and cooked for a few minutes. The veg is then seasoned with salt and pepper, and spread in the bottom of a roasting pan. A bouquet garni of parsley, rosemary, and bay leaves is added to the veg, along with a jalapeño. The duck breasts are then nestled on top of the carrots, and chicken stock is added until it covers most of the legs, but the skin is left exposed to the direct heat of the oven. The dish is then baked at 400 for an hour and half-ish. The duck and carrots are served with the defatted juices on the side.

I was really pleased with what this preparation did for the duck. The meat was falling off the bone tender, and perfectly braised, while the all important skin was cracklingly crisp. The meat gave up some of its goodness to the surrounding liquid, but it has flavour to spare, and it benefited from the arromatic infusion. I would happily eat this duck again and again, but I’d leave the carrots off the plate. Carrots braised for an hour and a half are well in to mushy territory, and there were a lot of them. Everyone at dinner was going back for seconds on the potatoes and Brussels sprouts, but the bowl of carrots was mostly ignored. It actually tasted pretty good, but the texture was just not appealing. I’d leave the carrots in the kitchen when you make this, and turn them into the basis for a lovely carrot soup the next day. The duck legs, and accompanying pan juices were an excellent centerpiece to the meal, and the carrots were a worthy sacrifice, in this case the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.

I liked this dish on a lot of levels, first off, the flavour was fantastic, the duck meat was heightened by the arromatic infusion, and the skin had the almost but not quite too rich quality of bacon. The meat was fork tender, and the skin perfectly crisp. I also loved the concept here, it’s a really simple and smart way to bring out the best of duck, with tender meat and crispy skin, all in one go. If the vegetables had been less done, it would have been a conceptual trifecta, and a perfect little symbiotic ecosystem. As it was I wasn’t quite sure what to do with fourteen carrots and two leeks worth of mush, and I didn’t think of making soup at the time. I turned some of it into a middling pasta sauce. As a standalone the duck and pan juices would earn about 4.5 mushrooms, but the carrots are dragging the rating for the whole dish down.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

158. Perciatelli with Sausage Ragù and Meatballs p.222

I can’t find the recipe for this one online, but you can easily fake it. Last time I gave you the recipe for the life changingly good meatballs used in this recipe and they’re by far the most important part.

I mentioned that I’d be putting those meatballs up against one of the boys’ version of a Sicilian meatball. In the end we did have a meatball battle, but I have no time for looking backwards, so I chose a recipe from the book I hadn’t made yet as my contender. I went with Meatballs in Tomato Sauce, which were very traditional, and basic. There was some mention in the comments that currants, pine nuts, and sweet spices might not be appealing meatball ingredients to everyone, and the battle proved this out. I quite liked his take on the Sicilian meatball, and it was my pick for the battle winner. I’m not sure who won, or who actually voted, or whether anyone was keeping track, but my simple meatballs gathered their share of votes. The reasons given were mostly that people didn’t like some flavour in the Sicilian meatballs though. To each their own.

In this recipe the Sicilian meatballs, and sweet Italian sausages are browned in a large pot. The meat is removed and onions are softened in the remaining oil, then garlic is added and cooked for a couple of minutes. Red wine, a bay leaf, tomato paste and purée are added to the pot, and the meat is nestled back in. The ragù is left to simmer for an hour and a half. Five minutes before serving, frozen green peas are stirred in. The meat is then removed, and some of the sauce is tossed with cooked perciatelli or ridged penne and served. The Book says that traditionally the pasta would be served as a first course, and the sausage and meatballs as a second, but in this recipe the meat is piled on the pasta and served.

I was quite pleased with the sauce, especially because it was infused with the flavours of the meatballs and sausages. The sauce was rich and wonderfully aromatic, and the red wine helped it surpass a standard spaghetti sauce. I like peas in pasta sauces, especially when the pasta’s shape lets them hide inside, and in such a deeply flavoured slow simmered dish their bright freshness was especially welcome. For all the goodness of the sauce, the highlight was really the meatballs, the sausages were entirely forgettable. I used bog standard grocery store Italian sausages, which are always fine, and sometimes pretty darn good, but maybe using a better quality product would have been worth it in this case. I wasn’t happy with the lewd appearance the sausages and meatballs gave the dish, and it’s hard to cut up a sausage when it’s sitting on a pile of pasta. If I used sausage again I’d definitely slice it ahead of time, and toss it with the pasta. I know I’ve said it enough at this point, but by far the best part of the recipe was the meatballs, and it was hard to care about any of the rest of it when they were on the plate.

I was altogether happy with this dish. I especially liked that the cinnamon from the meatballs perfused the tomato sauce. In Quebec cinnamon in spaghetti sauce is very very common, and I grew up on it. It doesn’t appear to be all that popular in the English speaking bits of North America, so I’m pleased to see that this winner of a flavour combination made it into The Book somewhere. Between making the meatballs and simmering the sauce this recipe takes forever, but it’s ideal for chilly days with pouring rain, or snowstorms. This ragù was wonderfuly warming and comforting, if I’d been out skiing all day this is exactly the dish I’d want waiting for me when I got home.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

157. Sicilian Meatballs p.222


I can’t find a recipe for these meatballs online, but I can’t stand to think that the internet will go without it for another day.

3/4 cup fine fresh bread crumbs from Italian bread (crusts discarded)
1/4 cup whole milk
1/2 cup (2 3/4 oz) whole almonds with skin, toasted
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 pound ground beef chuck
1/2 cup finely grated pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano
1/4 cup dried currants
1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 large egg

Stir together bread crumbs and milk in a medium bowl.
Pulse almonds with sugar in a food processor until finely ground. Add to bread crumb mixture, along with remaining ingredients, and mix with your hands until just combined.
Roll mixture into 1-inch meatballs and transfer to a plate. Refrigerate if not cooking immediately.

These meatballs are a component of the Perciatelli with Sausage Ragù and Meatballs recipe I’ll be writing up next. In that preparation they’re browned in a pan, and then slowly simmered with a tomato sauce. I’m sure they would be excellent baked on their own, or as a component of any other recipe calling for meatballs. They are without a doubt the best meatballs I’ve ever had.

Everything about the recipe is spot on. The flavour was just perfect, there was something ethereal about the combination of the sweet cinnamon and currents with the beef and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The ground almonds grounded the flavour with an earthy body. They had a lovely fine grained texture, interspersed with chunks of pine nut and currant. They were delicate, but managed to hold together.

I’m going to Toronto with the boys this weekend, and I’m going head to head with one of them in a Sicilian meatball battle. He’ll be using the recipe from The Bon Appétit Cookbook, and I’ll go with this one. Whose cuisine will reign supreme? I like my chances, his recipe doesn’t call for almonds or cinnamon, which really made the dish for me.

I’ve you’ve ever loved a meatball, you owe it to yourself to try these. I barely noticed the rest of my dinner with these on the plate.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

156. Dry-Cooked String Beans p.523


I couldn’t find a recipe for this one online.

I was in a frying mood the night I made these beans and the onion rings. The combination of a fried appetizer, and a fried main course was just a little too much. This stir fry was more than greasy enough all by itself.

In this dish trimmed green beans are deep fried in a wok for 30 seconds, then drained. You then drain off most of the oil, and build a stir fry starting with garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, then add ground pork. Once the pork is browned the beans go back in to reheat. A mixture of sugar, salt, soy sauce, sake, and sesame oil is then poured over top along with a handful of scallion greens and stirred to coat. Put this on a bed of sticky rice and you’ve got dinner.

The stir fry itself was totally delicious, it was an excellent balance of ingredients, just spicy enough, and wonderfully complex and arromatic. However, the stir fried beans were a bit weird and greasy. I trimmed the ends of the beans, so there was an open tube down the middle of them. Some of those tubes filled with oil during frying, and made the dish much greasier than I would have liked. It’s possible that my oil temperature dropped too far, and the pressure of escaping steam wasn’t enough to keep the oil out. If so, more oil, or smaller batches of beans would have taken care of the problem. The recipe says that the point of the deep frying is to lock in the coulour of the beans, but blanching, and shocking them would have done the same thing. The exterior of the beans took on a funny wrinkled texture, but they remained firm and crisp, and nicely green.

I’d happily make an adapted version of this recipe, but I think the deep fried green beans are better left behind. There are lots of recipes for dry-cooked beans out there, so I’ll presume it’s a well respected technique, and suggesting that they kind of suck is probably insulting someone’s Grandmother’s cooking, but they just weren’t my bag. The rest of the dish was excellent, and simply replacing the frying for a blanching would probably solve my only criticism of the recipe. If it had been less oily, it would have earned 4.5 mushrooms, but as it is, I can’t give it more than three.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

155. Fried Onion Rings p.552


I can’t find the recipe for this one online.

Way back in the beginning of The Project, I mentioned that I’ve been a little gun shy about deep frying in my kitchen ever since I put some very wet potato wedges into a pot of massively overheated oil and turned my stove into a fireball. I try to do most of my frying outside on the barbecue’s side burner instead. The thought of raining fiery death upon the downstairs neighbors innocently sitting on their balconies hardly bothers me at all. It has the additional advantage of not stinking up the whole house. I take as many of my stinky cooking projects outside as I can, the hipsters next door may not appreciate it, but keeping my dining companion happy is much more important.

I’ve never made onion rings before, but I’ve eaten my fair share. I like rings with a thin crisp coating of batter, that stays attached to the onion that it doesn’t slither out along with your first bite. The batter should be flavourful on it’s own, but not excessively seasoned. Simplicity is a good thing, but these rings may have been a bit too simple. The recipe calls for sliced onions to be dipped in milk, and dredged in flour and salt, then fried at 370F for a couple of minutes. They passed the thin, crisp, and well attached to the onions test, but they were a little lacking in the flavour department.

I appreciate the minimalism of the recipe, lots of other onion rings recipes call for eggs, baking soda, cornmeal, bread crumbs, and other nonsense. A simple mixture of flour, salt, and a liquid should be quite sufficient. I would have preferred the liquid to be beer however. Using milk is nice, because you don’t have to wait for the beer to go flat before using the batter, but beer tastes so much better, and onion rings just don’t say dairy to me. I would have also preferred a little more salt mixed into the flour. Obviously you can add salt later, but it’s better when it’s in the batter. In fact, a batter would have been nice too. In this version you dip the onions in milk, dredge them in flour, dip them in milk again, then once more into the flour. It was a bit of an operation to do the double dredge, and it made a mess. Just mixing up a batter of the right consistency and sticking the rings in there wouldn’t be any harder, and it would be a lot faster.

I love that this recipe is in the vegetables section of the book. Finally my nine-year-old self’s “Eat your vegetables”, “But mom, onion rings are a vegetable” logic is getting the respect it deserves. For a first attempt at making my own rings, I was reasonably pleased with these, they were golden, crisp, and quite tasty. These aren’t the ultimate rings, but refining my perfect recipe is going to be a fun process.

Categories
Cakes The Book

154. Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting p.726


The recipe

As I mentioned yesterday I’m not a huge fan of icing on cakes. As a result, my icing skills suck. I’m far more likely to bake a cake, and sprinkle it with powdered sugar, or cocoa than make icing. If I do decide to top a cake, I prefer to use flavoured whipped cream. I’d probably only make two or three iced cakes before this one, and unfortunately it shows. I have a real incentive to get better, and get better quickly, though. A good friend has asked me to bake his wedding cake in August. That means I need to go on a crash course in icing, piping, and decorating. I’m planning on making one of the wedding cakes from the book for the event, and I’ll have to do a couple of trial runs before the big day. I imagine this cake as the first humiliating defeat in a sports movie, after a musical montage I’ll be churning out lovely confections, then I’ll really dig deep, and defy expectations to turn out a picture perfect wedding cake.

This particular frosting is make with a mixture of mild and semisweet chocolates, sour cream, and vanilla. The chocolate is melted in a double boiler, and the sour cream and vanilla are whisked in.

The frosting starts out very liquidy, and sets up quite firmly. There’s a narrow window when the icing is firm enough to stay on the cake, but soft enough to spread nicely. Since I’m not an experienced froster it took me approximately forever to get the layers covered, and to put on a crumb coating. I didn’t know what a crumb coating was until I read the how to decorate a cake page next to this recipe (p.727). It’s a smart idea, you put a thin layer of icing on the cake to seal in the crumbs before trying to do the pretty exterior layer. By the time I was ready to ice the cake for real, my frosting was setting up. I didn’t really notice, and just started trying to get the frosting on the cake. It was chunky, thick and highly uncooperative. Then I read the little cook’s note after the recipe which suggested just warming it on the double boiler again. This helped a lot, but I had to rewarm it several times over the course of my icing. All in all I did a pretty poor job, and it probably didn’t have very much to do with the frosting itself.

There’s a huge amount of technique in decorating a cake, and I just need more experience to get there. When I first started cooking, I was befuddled by people who could chop things quickly and easily, but I worked at it for a while, learned to hold my knife properly, and started using a rock-chop technique it became obvious. I’m hoping to master the offset spatula in the same way.

The frosting tasted just fine, but it really didn’t move me. It was hardly sweet, which was a nice change from many other icings, but it was a bit too sour cream tangy. A few reviews of this icing suggest that using really top quality chocolate is important. I used perfectly good thank-you-very-much chocolate, but nothing crazy, maybe it would have made a difference.

I liked this frosting more than most, but mostly for the pitfalls it avoided. I found it a bit hard to work with, but if you’re a quick icer the cooling and setting up problems I had might not be an issue. It got the job done, but I won’t rush to make it again.

Categories
Cakes The Book

153. Golden Cake with Chocolate-Sour Cream Frosting p.725


The recipe

This cake and its frosting are separate recipes, so I’ll only be tackling the cake in this post. That’s fine by me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I’m not really a frosting person. For me, the icing is just getting in the way of the cake. There are icings I like more (buttercream) and icings I like less (glacé, royal icing, penuche), but they’re never the part of the cake I look forward to, and they can often detract from an otherwise lovely dessert. Thankfully there are enough people who feel exactly the opposite way that a my-icing-for-your-cake trade can sometimes be arranged.

I have very little pastry experience, and my dessert terminology is a little vague. Are the terms frosting and icing interchangable? or do they refer to distinct classes of cake topping? Wikipedia redirects a search for frosting to their icing page, and their dictionary definitions don’t appear to be too different. If any of you know if there’s a difference, please enlighten me.

Even if the frosting doesn’t do much for me tastewise, I do appreciate it’s structural role. A giant layer cake would be nothing without it, and I do love a layer cake. They’re the quintessential birthday cake, big enough to serve a crowd, and they look great with candles stuck in the top. A stacked cake like this can make an occasion. Beyond just admiring it when it comes out, watching the host try to serve it is a spectator sport. Will the first piece come out neatly? Will the layers stay together? Can your host flop a slice onto a serving plate with anything approaching grace? Your aunt is watching her weight, just how thin a slice is it possible to cut? We didn’t put any candles on this particular cake, but it didn’t taste quite right without the little bits of wax melted into the top.

The main difference between this cake and a standard yellow cake is the addition of sour cream. You start by sifting together the dry ingredients, flour, baking power, baking soda, and salt, in a bowl. You then cream the butter and sugar in another, followed by eggs beaten in one at a time, and the vanilla. It’s nice of The Book to provide hand mixer instructions, but the Kitchenaid is sitting there on the counter, and there was no way I wasn’t going to use it. The flour mixture then goes in with alternating additions of sour cream. The batter is divided into two round cake pans, baked, and cooled. When it’s time to assemble the cake, you cut off the rounded top of at least one of the cakes, and then divide each of the cakes into halves. They’re then stacked with icing between the layers, and covered with the rest of the icing.

I was quite pleased with the cake part of this cake, I’ll get to the icing next time, but the cake itself was lovely. Sour cream does good things for baked goods, it keeps them exceptionally moist, and adds just a bit of a tang to counter all the sweetness. It was a fairly dense cake with a soft springy texture. It’s a good choice for a big stacked cake like this, it was easy to cut and serve, and stood up to some rough treatment during icing.

If I was looking for a birthday cake for a casual gathering, I’d happily make this again. It’s a bit of a workhorse of a cake, solid, and reliable. Because I’m not all that competent in the pastry department, those are attributes that really appeal to me. I’m working my way up to precious little confections, but even after I’ve mastered them, I’ll keep coming back to crowd pleasing cakes like this.