Tag: vanilla

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Cakes The Book

202. Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting p.726


The recipe courtesy of The Ulterior Epicure

Sometimes the stars just don’t align, and the baking Gods abandon you for a day. I’ve learned a lot about cooking and baking through this project, and I’ve gotten to a point where I rarely make the boneheaded mistakes that plagued my early experiments, but there’s always room to regress. Today’s flub up was ignoring the instruction to “butter and flour cake pans, knocking out excess flour”. Every single baked good in the book calls for this step, and it’s become such a familiar phrase that I think I literally didn’t see it when reading the recipe. Sure something felt wrong while I poured the cake batter into the pans, but I was working on three other things at the time and didn’t give it much thought. The finished product suffered as a result, but I’m going to rate it anyway.

This is a pretty straightforward cake, but it does have quite a few ingredients. Beyond the basic cake stuff (flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt, vegetable oil, eggs, sugar) the cake mixes in a healthy dose of grated carrot, cinnamon, crushed pineapple, sweetened flaked coconut, walnuts, and raisins. The raisins were optional, and I opted against. The cakes are split into two 9 inch round cake pans and banked for ~40 minutes. Once cooled they’re stacked and frosted with whipped cream cheese, butter, vanilla, and icing sugar.

The Good: The cake tasted great. It had excellent carrot flavour and the cream cheese frosting wasn’t too sweet or too heavy, and set the cake off nicely. I like walnuts in a carrot cake, and this one was no exception. The frosting had a great texture, going on easily, and holding its shape quite well, as you’ll read below the underlying cake had some serious structural issues, but if I had to try to ice something with the texture of a jello salad again, this would be a pretty good frosting option.

The Bad: My main issues with the cake were with the enormous almost goupy crumb of the cake, and its total lack of structural integrity. The recipe describes it as an unusually moist cake, but I think my mishaps turned a moist cake into a barely solid cake. Without the butter and flour in the pans, the cakes stuck. The first cake I tried to unmould fell to pieces, with the baked-on bits staying firmly in the pan, and most of the extremely moist and soft innards flying through the cooling rack I was trying to unmould onto. I tried to free up the bottoms, but the cake was just tearing while it was still warm. Instead of cooling the cakes on racks, I left them in their pans, and was able to get an offset spatula in to free them up once they’d cooled. This probably means that the cakes steamed as they cooled, instead of crisping up on the outside. I can’t know how the cooling in the pan affected the texture of the cake, or how the rough extraction from their pans affected the overall integrity of the cake. As it was, the cake was nearly impossible to cut, it was as malleable as an angel food cake, and the slices crumbled as I tried to serve them. Even chilled the next day getting a piece out as a whole was a challenge. The soft and goopy frosting added more to the structural integrity than the cake itself. The pineapple was added to this dish to make it extra moist, and it did its job. At least with my mixed up cooking instructions that extra moisture probably made a bad situation worse. More importantly, it didn’t taste all that good. I don’t think carrot and pineapple are a natural pairing, and I just found it out of place.

The Verdict: A lot of what went wrong with this cake was totally my fault, but things like the over-large crumb, and not so nice addition of pineapple were certainly problems with the recipe. Looking beyond the serious textural issues, the cake did taste very good. It wasn’t my absolute favorite carrot cake, but it did a good job of delivering carrot flavour in a cream cheese icing package. I suspect that baking this in a 13×9 pan instead of trying to make it a layered cake would make the textural issues much less important, and it would be just as delicious. The cake that I produced was not fit to serve to guests, and the cake I made is the cake I have to rate, but I think I’m going to give this recipe another chance in the next couple of months, and I might decide to revise the rating upwards then.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

184. Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies p.688

The recipe

You know who I have an irrational dislike for? Katharine Hepburn. I know she’s one of the best respected and beloved actresses of all time, and the Oscar winningest lady ever, but she just drives me nuts. Admittedly I haven’t seen much of her work, but one film is all it took. In Bringing Up Baby she plays the lighthearted and carefree Susan Vance who drives the films comedy of errors with her impetuous, irresponsible, behaviour that we’re meant to take as cute and endearing. Every line she delivers just gets on my last nerve. Obviously this is some personal damage of mine, as the rest of the world seems to think it’s a pretty good film. Katharine Hepburn is a lot better in her more dramatic roles, but even there her upper class New-England accent chips away at my soul. I’m also a Star Trek fan, and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) who bears a strong resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, seems to have used Hepburn as the model for her character. Janeway has all the weird vocal ticks, the grandiose delivery of her lines, and the obstinate bullheadedness of so many of Hepburn’s characters. I can’t stand Janeway, and it turns out that she’s just a pale imitation of the grating irritation that Ms. Hepburn could bring to the screen. All that to say, I was predisposed to dislike Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, which are apparently her once-secret family recipe.

The recipe starts by melting together butter with 2 ounces of chocolate in a double boiler, then stirring in sugar, eggs and vanilla. A quarter cup of flour and a bit of salt are then barely mixed in. A cup of chopped walnuts and folded into the batter, and everything goes into 325 oven for about 40 minutes.

This is a very simple brownie recipe, unfortunately I thought they were awful. As the recipe promised the brownies were gooey-soft, which some people are really into, but it’s not my ideal texture. There were way too many nuts, which further weakened the integrity of these very soft brownies. They were hard to pick up without risking catastrophic brownie structural failure. My main complaint was that they hardly tasted like chocolate. 2 ounces was just enough to give the brownies a chocolate appearance, without any chocolate taste at all. Really they just tasted like sugar and walnuts.

Unfortunately the gold standard for judging a brownie recipe is the ubiquitous boxed mix. Those boxed brownies are not bad, but any recipe you’re going to make yourself ought to be able to beat the pants off them. Katharine Hepburn’s brownies have conclusively failed that test. If you’re going to make brownies from The Book I’d suggest the Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies on page 689. I’ve made them a bunch of times, but haven’t blogged them because I’ve just replaced the three chocolates the recipe calls for with all semi-sweet. They’re seriously fantastic brownies, and they’d just destroy Katharine Hepburn’s mockery of a brownie in a head to head competition.

Interestingly both Teena and Adam have made these brownies and given them grades of A- and A respectively. There are rave reviews for these things all over the internet, but they’re just not for me. These brownies just give me one more thing to dislike about Katharine Hepburn.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

172. Brown Sugar-Ginger Crisps p.665


The recipe

I made these cookies in the middle of a cookie-baking frenzy, I was buying ingredients for about five different types, with a couple of backup shopping lists in case I couldn’t find all the stuff for the first tier cookies. Somehow the crystallized ginger that this recipe called for never made it into the basket. I discovered this once I was home and ready to start baking, and just not at all interested in going out to hunt down crystallized ginger. I’m an industrious guy, I figured I could crystallize my very own ginger. I looked up a few recipes on the web (The Book doesn’t have one) and it didn’t seem too difficult, although the recipes were very inconsistent. Some called for boiling chopped ginger in a sugar syrup for about 20 minutes, some asked you to boil the ginger in syrup for an hour, let it steep in the sryrup for a day, boil it for another hour, and to repeat this process every day for a week. Since I was interested in using this ginger for cookies that very afternoon I went for a middle ground and chopped the ginger very finely, and boiled it in a concentrated syrup for 2 hours. It was no where near as good as the store bought kind, quite ugly, and very hard, but it basically tasted like candied ginger. No one else was much interested in my crystallized gingers, but they were my little treat, I loved them with a cup of coffee in the afternoon.

The ginger did a serviceable job in these cookies. They’re a fairly standard cookie base of butter, brown sugar, egg yolk, and vanilla creamed together, crystalized and ground ginger mixed in, and a mixture of flour, baking powder, and salt gently stirred in. They came out as very thin and crisp cookies, studded with the ginger chunks. “Real” crystallized ginger is soft and pliable, whereas my improvised version was quite tough. On the first day they were baked they had a nice crispy exterior with a chewier interior. The recipe says they keep at room temperature for a week, but I found that they lost their crispness overnight. I really would have preferred the chewiness of the professionally produced product in the cookies. Other than that they were nice, they didn’t blow me away, and I probably wouldn’t have asked for a recipe if they’d been served to me, but they were perfectly good.

A strange thing about these ginger cookies is that they weren’t particularly gingery. Beyond the crystallized ginger there’s only 1/4 teaspoon of ground ginger in the recipe. If I made them again I’d up that to 1 teaspoon, many of the Epicurious posters suggest that it improves the cookies dramatically. As written this recipe makes a nice buttery cookie, with a hint of ginger flavour and chewy bites of crystallized ginger. It’s possible that I missed out on what this recipe had to offer with my sub-standard ginger, as they were I liked them well enough, but wouldn’t go out of my way to make them again.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

171. Mexican Tea Cakes p.673


The recipe

While there’s nothing particularly Mexican about these tea cakes, they’re an international favorite for good reason. I’ve always heard these cookies called Russian Tea Cakes, and they mostly seem to be made by older eastern European women at bake sales and Christmas fairs. As children, these were the cookies that we ignored on the big cookie platter, preferring the triple chocolate and jam puddle options. Conveniently the adults in the room weren’t too interested in those ultra sweet and sticky confections, and seemed to prefer the tea cakes. I didn’t get it, the nuts made them taste suspiciously healthy, and they were far too dry. Now nut based cookies are some of my favorites, and I realize what a joy dry cookies are with tea or coffee.

The cookies take a little bit of forethought, but they’re well worth it. You start by making the dough (cream together butter and confectioners sugar, add vanilla, flour, finely chopped pecans, and salt, mix until just combined), and refrigerating it for 6 hours. You then roll the dough into balls, and bake. The hot cookies go directly from the baking sheet to a bowl  of confectioners sugar. The heat of the cookies melts the sugar and ices them for you. Once the cookies have had a chance to cool they go back to the sugar bowl to get a final layer of powdered sugar.

By far the best thing about these cookies is that they keep forever. The recipe says they keep at room temperature for up to three weeks, but I kept mine for more than a month and the last one was almost as good as the first. The pecans are both the prominent flavour and texture of these cookies, and that’s a very good thing. They’re quite dry and a bit crumbly, but their sugar coating keeps them from completely drying out or becoming brittle.

Before making this recipe I’d never realized how cookies like this got so evenly glazed, the hot cookies in sugar method was a real revelation for me. I’m adding these cookies to my repertoire. They’re delicious but not at all showy, can be made well in advance, they work year round, and they  fill out a cookie tray nicely. Having cookies like these in your arsenal is a very smart move.

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
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.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

144. Coffee Coffee Cake with Espresso Glaze p.644


The recipe

I brought this cake to a brunch at a friend’s last spring. I’m going to have a difficult time giving it a fair rating, because I had horrible seasonal allergies and couldn’t taste anything. I barely remember the brunch, and had to leave after about an hour. My head was so muddled that I’d forgotten my camera, and had to borrow the hosts. He sent me the photos recently, and I’ve been trying to piece this dish back together. The recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch section, but it could certainly work for a dinner party.

I should say to anyone reading this that actually attended the brunch, that even though I was feeling awful and sneezing with abandon, I was scrupulous about leaving the room to sneeze, and washing my hands thoroughly before touching your food. I really hate to cook when I’m sick, and definitely worry about contaminating people. I’m not sure how paranoid that actually is though. People who work in restaurants go to work sick all the time, it’s not something we like to think about, but it’s true. If Anthony Bourdain is to be believed they also go to work high, blood splattered, and vomiting, and we’re generally all right. I have a lot of faith in the awesomeness of the human immune system, and the abilities of heat to kill off the nasty stuff that’s gotten into our food. That doesn’t mean I’m willing to take a chance with someone else’s health though.

The recipe followed a fairly standard cake method, mix the dry ingredients, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, in a bowl, then cream butter and sugar in another bowl, add eggs, and vanilla. Then, add the dry ingredients, and sour cream, in alternate batches to the wet ingredients. You then separate 1/3 of the mixture, and add barely dissolved instant espresso to it. You then layer the light and dark batters in a buttered bundt pan and bake for about an hour. Once the cake is unmolded and cooled, you cover it with an espresso glaze made with instant espresso powder, strong brewed coffee (I used a shot of espresso), and confectioners sugar.

I did eat a piece of this cake, but I have no idea what it tasted like. The bitterness of the coffee was the only flavour that managed to cut through the fuzzy sock coating my tongue. Since it’s from The Book, I’m willing to to out on a limb and say that it was probably too sweet. It had a very appealing texture though, moist, with a big fluffly crumb. My dining companion remembers this cake fondly, and it was well received at the brunch. Most of it had disappeared by the time I crawled home to bed. Since people praised it at the time, and brought it up weeks later, it can’t have been bad. The recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch section, but it could certainly work for a dinner party. If I didn’t have so many other recipes to get to, I’d make it again, just to find out what it was really like.

I’ll give it an estimated rating of

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

132. Blueberry Muffins p.641


The recipe

My dining companion has been doing a lot of driving for work over the past few months, and I’ve been looking for little treats that travel well to send along with her. These muffins looked like they’d fit the bill, and I was pleased to discover that they’re not just portable, they’re tasty. They’ve got another of Ruth’s seemingly unnecessary streusel toppings, but that’s not such a bad thing.

The recipe follows the standard muffin method, mix the wet stuff together, mix the dry stuff together, add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, and mix until it’s barely combined. In this case the wet stuff is played by melted butter, whole milk, egg, egg yolk, and vanilla, while the roles of the dry stuff are capably portrayed by flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Once the muffin mixture is together, the blueberries are delicately folded in, and the batter is divided into muffin cups. It then gets topped with a shortbread like mixture of flour, butter, and sugar. The muffins bake at 375 for 18 – 20 minutes.

The muffins were very simply flavoured, rich and moist, with a carefully balanced sweetness that enhanced the blueberries. I like to give credit where credit is due, and this is one baked good where The Book got the sugar right. The topping was less successful, the recipe says to bake the muffins ’till they’re golden and crisp, but they were cooked through, and smelling done before the topping changed colour. If I’d waited any longer the undersides would have burned. I think there was just too much topping, so it was left a bit raw looking. It tasted quite good, but wasn’t as visually appealing as I would have liked.

This recipe gets nearly everything right, good texture, clean flavours, satisfying richness, and a wallop of blueberry essence. Unfortunately the undercooked topping takes away from the effect. I’d certainly make these again, but I’d use half the topping, or omit it entirely. It did lend a nice contrasting texture, but the “studies in white, number 6” vibe didn’t do it for me. Overall quite a nice muffin though.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

128. Streusel-Sour Cream Coffee Cakes p.645


Unfortunately there’s no recipe online.

The Book has a deep and abiding affection for streusel-toppings. I suspect that if the cooks at the Gourmet test kitchen leave their batter alone for too long, they’ll find that Ruth Reichl has snuck in and covered it in streusel. I don’t particularly have anything against streusel toppings, they add a nice textural contrast, but they tend to be very sweet. If the underlying baked good didn’t already have 30% more sugar than it needed, that could be a nice addition, but here it struck me as trying to gild the already candied lily.

The recipe starts by blending brown and white sugar with flour, salt, and butter. The streusel topping is made by separating out some of this mixture and working in cinnamon, additional butter, more brown sugar, and chopped pecans. A mixture of sour cream, egg, egg yolk, vanilla, baking soda, and orange zest is incorporated with the remainder of the flour-sugars-butter mixture, then divided up into 18 muffin cups, topped with the streusel, and baked.

There are a lot of things I liked about this recipe, but as is often the case The Book went overboard on the sugar (1 3/4 cups of sugar to 2 1/2 cups of flour). The cakes were rich, dense, and moist, with a soft slightly elastic texture. The orange zest in the cakes was an excellent touch. The topping was double extra sweet, but I really liked the complexity the pecans and molasses in the brown sugar brought to the cakes. I wish that the recipe had less sugar, and more nuts. Keeping the nuts out of the cake batter highlighted them and broke up the uniformity of the muffin. Unfortunately the streusel topping had a habit of falling off. Next time I’d be more careful about pushing the topping down into the batter.

This recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch chapter, but these cakes might work better with afternoon coffee, or as a dessert. They were a bit much for breakfast. I brought these over to a pot-luck brunch, to positive reviews, but they didn’t really do it for me. The next day I had one with an unsweetened espresso, and found I liked them much better. The concept and flavours are solid, and the bitter coffee provided some much needed contrast.