Sunday, April 25, 2010

Lime/Lemon layer cake with White Chocolate Ganache

My momma turned SIXTY this week, and as the only family representative I wanted to make her a cake she'd love. She's a bit persnickety when it comes to cake, so chocolate was out. Thank god - I'm quite sick of it myself. I found this recipe on teh internets, and it really did look like something she'd like, because of the fruit flavour and the tang of the lemon curd. But I needed to adapt it a bit, because I'm not comfy with buttercream yet, and the day temperature being between 35 and 45 C it really wasn't the best idea. I decided to experiment and made a half cake, scaling down to three eggs, as a farewell cake for my last day at work, and while I was in the supermarket getting ingredients I was hit by the idea for the white chocolate ganache. Now, I've never made one before, and at the time I just made it like ordinary chocolate ganache. Later I found out that it's much more complicated and I stuck to my original recipe. I saved her a piece of the trial cake and it was met with some face crinkling because of the sweetness of the ganache - but then the lemon curd kicked in and she got her happy face. Nailed it!


Saturday, April 10, 2010

Best. Yellow. Cake. Ever.

All this frantic fancy baking - I was craving something nice and simple. Just, plain cake, you know? Vanilla, and moist, and crusty, and not too sweet; no complicated flavours, no brouhaha to prepare. Just cake. So I scooted over to smitten kitchen, and found these recipes.The second of which I then adapted. I shall babble no more and send you straight to the best cake ever.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Honey Wheatgerm cookies

Somewhere along the way, one of the Tuesdays with Dorie was these. And I really wanted to make them. Only the original recipe called for lemon, and I didn't have any. I did find wheatgerm at the fancy market so was very happy, and decided to make them just plain honey cookies instead of honey lemon ones. When I ate them though I realised, yummy thought they were, they would really have improved with the lemon!


Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Chocolate Tart

Ello! No I have not been neglecting you, I just didn't have the camera one week I cooked a lot and then I didn't cook much! However, here is the next in the birthday series, Chocolate Tart, from Deb of course. I must admit I was a tad skeptical, since I made a ton of the tart dough the previous week for a lemon tart and it was just too sweet, and a titch crunchy for my taste - I like em flaky and powdery. However, possibly because of the dark chocolate in the tart and the cup of sugar in the lemon tart, it worked fine.