Blake Makes

Meet (Blake Baker) Paula. Growing up in a large family of 5 children, all girls, some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the counter and watching my mom cook or bake. While I was in college, my mom started catering. I would drive home on week-ends and help with events. After graduating with a degree in Elementary Education, I taught for several years but continued helping mom with catering jobs. I soon realized that my true passion was for food and cooking…(continued after the post).

The cupcake bug, has it bitten you yet? It’s gotten me good and I’ve got cupcake fever! I can’t look at a cake recipe anymore without trying to figure out how I could turn it into a cupcake. I’m not sure what makes cupcakes so appealing.

Maybe the appeal is that cupcakes are your own individual cake, or maybe it’s just that cupcakes are cute. Surfing through the food blog sphere I see that I’m not the only one that’s caught the fever. Recently, I even came across mini meatloaves baked in a muffin pan and topped with mashed potato “frosting”. Okay so I’m not quite ready to start experimenting with meat, but cake recipes are fair game.

When I came across this recipe from Bon Appétit for Banana Layer Cake with Caramel Cream, delirious with cupcake fever, I immediately wanted to make it into a cupcake. I liked the cake recipe and didn’t think I’d have a problem making it into cupcakes. I decided to go a different way with the frosting and make a traditional buttercream with a caramel drizzle. The caramel and banana sounded like a match made in heaven to me. All that was missing was chocolate, so I decided to throw some chocolate chips into the cake batter.

This recipe makes a large cake so you’ll get about 24 cupcakes. Reading through the recipe it sounded more complicated than it actually was. If you get all your ingredients prepped ahead, the cake batter comes together pretty quickly.

For those of you who’ve already been bitten by the bug, here’s one more cupcake make. As for everyone else, don’t blame me if you start wanting to make all your cakes into cupcakes!

Banana Cake (Bon Appétit January 2006 [adapted])

Cake Recipe:

• 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon (generous) fine sea salt
• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 1/2 cups sugar, divided
• 6 large eggs
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk
• 2 small ripe bananas, peeled, cut into 1/4-inch cubes (about 1 1/2 cups)
• 1 cup chocolate chips tossed in flour.
• Small amount of rum to brush on tops of cupcakes when cooled

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(Blake Bakes) And now for Blake Baker, Katie.

With the delightful warm weather here now all I’ve been able to think of lately is my favorite summer time dessert: fruit pies. I mean really, what says love better than a fresh fruit pie? That’s right — Nothin’! Well, okay…a portable version of a fruit pie might just be better. That’s where the hand pie comes in.

A distant, better looking cousin of the turnover, the hand pie houses it’s own portion of delicious fruit filling and top and bottom crust all in handy compact size. Perfect for sharing. Perfect for casual entertaining. And in my case, perfect for bribing a dozen middle-schoolers into listening to me while I teach them Confirmation prep at church. Haha. With these little beauties I’ll have no problem.

A sweet pie dough is used. With the addition of lemon and a bit of vanilla you can use less sugar and still get the same sweet taste to the dough. The sugar in the filling has been cut down considerably to provide a nice contrast between the sweet, flaky dough and the slightly tart juicy bite of the filling. A delicious treat for any pie lover. Especially for breakfast…

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(Blake Bakes) Hello there (this is Blake). Allow me to introduce Lara. She’s one of 19 new “Blake Bakers” we’ve invited to contribute to Blake Makes. Every Wednesday, Blake Makes will feature posts from the Blake Bakers about, you guessed it, baking, baked goods, baking techniques, etc. We think eventually the Blake Bakers will get their own blog (BlakeBakes.com), but for now, we’re happy to feature them right here. There’s what you need to know, so let me get out of the way and let Lara do her thing. Take it away, Lara!

I have a love-hate relationship with cake. Good cake – moist, without gobs of icing, and not too sweet – is great. Most cake, however, is not good cake. Unless they’re flourless, chocolate cakes often turn out too dry. I still remember one my sister made for my birthday years ago (she’s since made much more successful cakes). It was only edible soaked in milk or covered in whipped cream.

I’ve also had my cake failures. That’s why I was ecstatic the first time I made this recipe. It’s moist, it has dark chocolate icing, which is not too sweet, but the cake itself is a nutty flavor. And with three layers (or as many as you want) you get that perfect blend of icing and cake: just enough creamy chocolate with just enough nutty goodness.

I don’t even remember where I found this recipe anymore, but I love it. The only time consuming part (and this is only because I don’t have a food processor) is making the graham cracker crumbs. But I think you can also buy bags of graham cracker crumbs, which is probably the smarter approach.

What you’ll need to make the cake:

• 1 cup shortening
• 1 cup sugar
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 cups fine graham cracker crumbs
• 1 cup finely chopped nuts
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350

Blend the shortening, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Combine the crumbs, nuts, and baking powder and add to the shortening mixture alternately with the milk. Pour into three greased eight-inch layer cake pans one and one-fourth inches deep, bake thirty to thirty five minutes. Put together with chocolate cream frosting.

What you’ll need to make the chocolate cream frosting:

• 1 cup (6oz package) semisweet chocolate pieces
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 teaspoon instant coffee
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 4 egg yolks
• 1/2 cup butter

In the top of a double boiler heat the chocolate, water, coffee, and sugar. Stir occasionally until the mixture is smooth beat in the egg yolks one at a time and cook over boiling water three minutes, stirring constantly. Cool to lukewarm and beat in the butter bit by bit.

Lara grew up in northern California where the words “hella” and “tight” were avid members of her vocabulary. That quickly changed, however, as after starting at UCLA she was duly educated in proper SoCal etiquette. Being a dork, she majored in math, but being indecisive she also took a lot of writing classes, wrote for her school newspaper The Daily Bruin, and after graduating decided writing was what she wanted to pursue. She currently works as an editorial assistant at The Robb Report, where she writes about furniture, and hosts a blog, The Ladybug and the Lion, where she writes about whatever she wants. She also loves food. Her current favorites include beer, oysters, and authentic mexican.