Chikoo (Sapodilla) Cake

Have you watched the Jungle Book movie yet? I heard some mixed reviews, but I have to say I really enjoyed it. It brought back childhood memories of intently waiting every Sunday morning for The Jungle Book animated series on national television and singing “Jungle jungle baat chali hai…” (that was the title song written by Gulzar for the Hindi version of the TV show) along with thousands of other kids watching the same TV show in their homes. It was a time before Cartoon Network, with only a limited number of cartoons on Indian TV. Mowgli and his friends always made those Sunday mornings special.

This nostalgia might have subconsciously triggered the urge to make a chikoo based dessert. Chikoo, or sapodilla is a very common fruit in India and many other tropical countries. When perfectly ripe, this brown fruit is deliciously sweet and soft. Although the fresh version is hard to come by in my part of the world, the Indian grocery stores carry a frozen version of it. I wouldn’t want to eat the defrosted mushy fruit as it, but it works great in milkshakes, smoothies and ice cream… and apparently cake! I mashed up the defrosted chikoo slices and used it in cake batter as I would use mashed bananas or pureed berries. If using fresh fruit, make sure to pick ripe ones, peel and remove seeds, then mash or puree the fruit. The cardamom in this recipe gives it more of an Indian flavor, and if you didn’t know what chikoo tastes like you might think this is just a cardamom spice cake. It still tastes good though :). The texture turned out more muffin  like, and that’s the route I’ll probably go with the next time I make it. I generally try to stay away from adding unnecessary sugar, but the cardamom glaze on this cake really helps the flavor, so I would highly recommend using it - maybe add an extra hour of workout to your week to balance it out! ;-)

Ingredients:

2 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

¾ cup dark brown sugar

2 eggs

⅔ cup vegetable/canola/light olive oil

4-5 chickoo fruits peeled, deseeded and pureed or mashed with a fork (about ⅓-½ cup) - add a little water if required

½ tsp cardamom powder

A small pinch of salt

⅓ cup chopped walnuts/cashews (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Prepare an 8” round baking pan by greasing the base and sides or lining with parchment paper.

Mix the flour, baking soda, salt and cardamom powder in a medium bowl.

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs and oil until combined. Add sugar, chikoo puree and whisk to break down any lumps in the sugar. Add the dry ingredients and fold with a spatula until everything is combined. This batter will be thick.

Pour the batter into prepared baking pan and smoothen out the top with a spatula. Bake for 35-40 minutes until toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Let the cake cool down for 10-15 minutes before removing it from the pan. Let it cool further on a wire rack.

Once the cake is out of the oven, make the glaze by mixing just enough milk/water with powdered sugar to make a runny paste. Add a pinch or two of cardamom powder and mix well. Drizzle the glaze over warm cake, slice and serve with a hot cup of tea or coffee!

~Gayatri

Find us on Facebook:

Pumpkin Chocolate Cake

For the past few years I’ve been trying to replicate a delicious and beautiful pumpkin chocolate cake with two distinct layers of pumpkin and chocolate. Unfortunately every time I ended up with one of the two layers being too dry. Recently I was able to track down the original recipe thanks to the person who introduced me to it in the first place. The big thing missing in my attempts in replicating the recipe was that I only mixed pumpkin puree in the pumpkin batter. This recipe made things simpler by mixing the puree in a big batch of batter and then adding cacao powder to only half the batter. The addition of cacao powder in the chocolate batter was balanced by the moisture of the pumpkin puree, and the result was two deliciously moist cakes fused together! With just a couple modifications to the recipe, I baked this cake for Thanksgiving dinner with friends.

Ingredients:

¾ cup butter at room temperature (1.5 sticks)

1¼ cup white granulated sugar

½ cup dark brown sugar

2 eggs

2½ cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 can (15 oz) pumpkin puree (not pie filling)

⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

¼ - ½ cup semisweet chocolate chips (optional)

Heat oven to 325 F. Grease two 6” pans and dust with flour (or line with parchment paper).  

 

In a large bowl, cream butter, sugars until light and fluffy. Add eggs and continue to beat.

In a separate bowl combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon. Add the dry mixture to the creamed mixture alternately with pumpkin.

Divide the batter in half. Mix in cocoa powder in half the batter and beat until just combined. Mix in chocolate chips in the chocolate batter.

Add half of the chocolate batter to each pan. Top each one with half of the pumpkin batter. Smoothen out the top and bake for ~60 minutes, checking for doneness after ~45 minutes. If using a larger pan, the baking time will be reduced as the cake height will be lower  and it will bake faster.

Let the cake cool down for 15-20 minutes before removing from the pan. Sift a mixture of cocoa and powdered sugar on top. I made two little maple leaf cutouts and put them on the cake before adding the cocoa and sugar. Then lifted them up and piped an outline with melted chocolate. Alternately, top with dark chocolate ganache (Click here for ganache recipe).
 

~Gayatri

Note: To get a flat cake top instead of a dome, follow these instructions.

Find us on Facebook:

Delicious dessert for the cold days - pumpkin chocolate cake!http://cooksofcakeandkindness.blogspot.com/2015/12/pumpkin-chocolate-cake.html
Posted by The Cooks of Cake and Kindness on Monday, December 14, 2015

Chocolate Brownie Cake with Ganache Frosting

What treat would you make for a chocoholic? Chocolate brownies? Chocolate cake? How about both combined!? This dessert is rich and chocolatey like brownies, yet soft and light like a cake. I topped it with a dark chocolate ganache to give it an even higher degree of chocolatiness (pretty sure I’m making up a word here) to celebrate a chocolate-loving friend’s birthday.

Cake recipe adapted from: Williams-Sonoma

Ingredients:

8 Tbs. (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 cup sugar

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 tsp. vanilla extract

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

4 oz. good-quality semisweet or bittersweet chocolate (70%+ cacao is best), chopped

 

For ganache:

½ cup heavy whipping cream

4 oz dark chocolate, chopped (or chocolate chips)

 

Preheat an oven to 350°F. Line an 8-inch round cake pan with parchment paper.

 

Mix In a large bowl, beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until well blended. Add the flour slowly and continue to beat.

 

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, or in the microwave heating for 30-60 seconds at a time on 40% power, stirring each time until chocolate is melted. Add the melted chocolate to the batter and beat gently until just combined.

 

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until for 20 to 25 minutes until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool down a little before taking it out of the pan and decorating with ganache.

 

To make the ganache, add the dark chocolate to whipping cream in a saucepan and heat over low heat (stirring occasionally) until the chocolate is melted. Take it off the heat and stir to combine the cream and chocolate well. Let it cool down and thicken a little before pouring it over the cake. Spread with a spatula to the edges of the cake (you may cover the sides too). Let the ganache cool down further and then pipe decorations like a simple border using a star-tip. Drizzle melted white chocolate to make a pretty presentation.

 

Cut slices and enjoy as is, or à la mode.

 

~Gayatri

Find us on Facebook:

Get your chocolate fix with this chocolate brownie cake!http://cooksofcakeandkindness.blogspot.com/2015/10/chocolate-brownie-cake-with-ganache.html

Posted by The Cooks of Cake and Kindness on Tuesday, October 27, 2015

An Engineer's Guide to Baking Even Cake Layers (Celebrating 100 posts of Kindness!)

Happy 100th post to The Cooks of Cake and Kindness! Fellow readers, it has been a pleasure sharing our culinary experiences with you. Thank you for reading, supporting us here and on Facebook, and for trying out our recipes and giving us feedback. Here’s a delicious cake to celebrate this milestone!

 

Figure 1: Vanilla cake  with strawberries and beets; Cream cheese frosting dyed with beet juice;

Topped with sliced strawberries and chocolate lace

 

Given the title of the post and the “figure” notation, you might have noticed that this is not one of our typical recipe posts. Today we will share a technique instead of a recipe, along with the science behind it.  

The Problem

Figure 2: Chocolate cake with tall dome

 

Most cakes will rise into a dome shape as they bake, and it’s wonderful to see a beautiful dome when baking cupcakes. However when baking a sheet cake or any cake that needs frosting, it’s not the most ideal characteristic. Especially when making a layered cake, you’d want to have nice flat cake layers. Unless the cake comes out flat from the oven, you’ll have to trim the tops to get even layers. Even though it’s fun to munch on the top that is cut off, or turn it into these delicious cake truffles, it is a pain to cut evenly, and it also makes frosting a little bit challenging with all those loose crumbs. So how can you ensure nice level cakes straight from the oven?

The Science

To get to that answer, let’s first understand the physics behind that dome. You’ve mixed your baking powder and/or baking soda well with the flour and your batter is nice and even in the pan. We also expect the oven temperature to be fairly even in the horizontal plane (especially if the cake pan is centered horizontally). There’s one thing that is not being controlled though - the temperature of the pan surface.

As the pan heats up, it transmits that heat to the batter immediately adjacent to the surface. Hence the batter near the edges of is pan gets hotter than the center, until it all reaches equilibrium eventually. That leads to the batter at the edges to bake quickly and set faster while the batter in the center continues to bake at a slower rate, giving more time for the baking powder, soda, eggs etc. to do what they’re supposed to - help the cake rise and become nice and fluffy. While that happens, the edges that are already done baking keep getting harder and harder. Moist insides with crispy edges may be divine for cookies and brownies, but not so much for cakes.

 

 

Figure 3: The science behind uneven cakes

What we want is for that moist fluffy texture of the cake center to extend to the edges instead of having those hard edges and a dome in the middle. That means we have to figure out a way to dissipate the heat evenly, and not let the pan surface heat up quicker than the batter in the center.

 

The Solution

There’s actually a pretty simple remedy that results in flat, evenly baked cakes every single time. That means no more trimming hard edges or the dome!

 

All you need is some thick cotton fabric (that you don’t care too much about), and a couple safety pins. The idea is to attach wet strips of fabric to the outside edge of the baking pan so that the pan edges don’t heat up as quickly. There are some fancy ones that you can buy, but a homemade fix with the cotton fabric (maybe even old pillowcases) comes at hardly any cost. Simply fold the thick cotton fabric lengthwise until the height matches the height of the baking pan.

 

Wet these fabric strips and wring them out just enough so that they’re not dripping. Attach the wet strips to the outside of the pan. Use safety pins to attach the strips to each other such that they are snug enough to not fall off.

Figure 4: Baking pans with and without wet sleeve, ready to be transferred to the oven

 

Bake the cake with the strips on. You can take them off after 25-30 minutes if you want to - by that time they’ve done their job. We have baked leaving the strips on for the entire time, and also taking them out after a half hour. The difference is that the latter gives a nice golden brown crust (without it being hard), which is best for cakes that may not be frosted or only frosted on top.

It takes a couple extra minutes before you start baking to get these strips on, but saves a lot of trouble later, and you get cakes that are nice and soft not just in the middle, but all the way to the edges.

 

 

Figure 5: Cakes baked with and without wet sleeve.

Figure 5 shows photographs of mini cakes baked in 4” diameter pans, where the cake baked without the sleeve has a dome on top and the cake baked with the sleeve is flat on top. The dome phenomenon is much more prominent in larger baking pans (as seen in Figure 2), as the heat dissipation is more uneven. But, with this trick up your sleeve, now you can (more) easily construct creations like this! 

 

Figure 6: 100th blog post celebration cake

Happy baking!

~Gayatri & Karla

Like us on Facebook:

An Engineer's Guide to Baking Even Cake Layers!If you've ever wondered how to bake nice and flat cake layers without a...
Posted by The Cooks of Cake and Kindness on Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Celebrating 5 years of deliciousness

The Cooks of Cake and Kindness turns 5 today! In human years, that’s pretty young...but in blog years, that’s, like, FOREVER.

Actually, time has flown, and it really doesn’t seem like that much time has passed since the inception of our blog and that first post. In the ensuing years, we have both earned our PhDs and accepted jobs in the same group at Cummins, Inc., and sit right next to each other at work, sharing a (cubicle) wall just like the good old grad school days. Karla has gotten married, bought a house, and had a son (and has another baby on the way). Gayatri has become “Tita G” (translation: Aunt G) to Karla’s son.

Now that we aren’t being distracted by tedious graduate research and studies, we’ve been able to blog more actively. From a low of only 4 recipes posts in 2012 (admittedly a busy year with thesis defenses, graduations, a wedding, and relocations), this year we have more than septupled that amount - and the year isn’t even half over yet! We have also received our very first “we’re gonna get paid to bake!” order - for a baby shower cake!

To celebrate this milestone birthday, The Cooks of Cake and Kindness has launched a Facebook page! And, of course, any mention of “birthday” wouldn’t be complete without cake!

Vanilla chocolate chip cake:

Base cake recipe

Add-ins: mini chocolate chips

Vanilla buttercream:

½ cup unsalted butter at room temperature

¼ cup vegetable shortening (can use butter instead, I used shortening to get more stable buttercream)

1.5 cups confectioners sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 Tbsp milk/whipping cream (if required)

Whip all ingredients for the buttercream until light and fluffy. If you refrigerate the buttercream to use later, add some milk/whipping cream and whip frosting until soft.

We’d like to thank our readers for the support, and promise to keep bringing more recipes to you in the coming years. If you’re on Facebook, check out our page and maybe even toss us a cookie! i.e. give us a “like” :-) Thanks for reading, and happy baking!

~ Gayatri & Karla

Mixed Berry Cake

I love using fruit for baking cakes - it gives a wonderfully refreshing taste. Generally I add chopped fruit to the batter, but for this cake I used pureed berries (a lot of them!), and it really helped enhance the flavor as well as add moisture.

This recipe is good for a 9 or 10” round pan, or 2 small (8x4) loaves. I used 1 (8x8) square pan and one little 3” round one for the leftover batter. The cake rises quite a bit so I ended up with fairly tall cakes with a nice crispy crust while the berries helped keep the cake moist.

Ingredients:

3 cups flour (I used 1 cup wheat, 2 cups all purpose flour)

1.5 cups sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

pinch of salt

1-1.5 cups crushed/pureed berries (I used frozen strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries which were completely thawed before pureeing in food processor, leaving some chunks in)

1 cup oil (I used canola)

3 eggs

Heat oven to 350 F. Grease and flour baking pan(s).

Mix all the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs and oil. Add this to the dry ingredients. Add the pureed berries and mix until well combined (don’t over beat - using a spatula would suffice).

Pour the lovely purple batter into prepared baking pans and bake in preheated oven for 45 minutes to an hour (depending on your pan size, oven type etc) until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Let the cake cool completely before removing from pan.

~Gayatri

Note: If you don’t like to bite into the seeds, don't use the raspberries. However, they were quite soft after baking and I didn’t mind them at all.

Red, White, and Blue Collar Cake

Memorial day is coming up next week, so we had a “Red, White, Blue Food Day” at work today. Since its not very easy to come up with blue colored savory food, we ended up with all desserts (I’m not complaining!). Karla made a delicious cheesecake, while I baked a blueberry & strawberry cake with a white chocolate whipped frosting and a white chocolate collar. This cake turned out to be a bit of a learning experience for me. Here are a few things I realized:

1. Sprinkles blot a whole lot easier on whipped frosting than they do on buttercream, so don’t put them on too much ahead of time.
2. If you’re not leaving the cake out for too long before cutting, the white chocolate can be a little hard to cut into depending on how thick it is. Milk chocolate cuts through way more easily, so I’ll probably stick to making milk chocolate borders in the future (similar to this one) with designs made using white chocolate.
3. Factor in frosting thickness while measuring dimensions for the chocolate collar, or just measure after frosting the cake.
   
   

This cake recipe is adaptable to any add-ins like nuts, chocolate chips, other fruit etc. It goes well with the whipped cream frosting (recipe below), as well as buttercreams and ganaches. The texture of the cake is soft and moist, and is perfect for making a layered cake. This long post might make it seem like it’s a daunting task to make this collar cake, but the individual steps are quite simple. I baked the cakes the previous day so they were cooled and ready to be frosted the next day. Not only does this aid the cooling/setting time, it also keeps the total mess level down and helps keep your sanity!

Ingredients

For each cake layer (Multiply quantities by number of cake layers that you want - I made 2 layers)

1¼ cups all purpose flour

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

pinch of salt

¾-1 cup sugar (1 cup if you like it really sweet, ¾ cup if you don't - I settle somewhere in between)

1 stick of butter (½ cup) at room temperature

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ cup of buttermilk (If you don’t have buttermilk, see note below)

Add-ins

½ cup blueberries

½ cup chopped strawberries (sweeten with powdered sugar if they’re sour)

White chocolate whipped frosting

1 cup white chocolate chips

1.25 cups heavy whipping cream

Chocolate collar

~1-1.5 cups white chocolate chips

Red, blue food coloring

1 Tbsp milk/dark chocolate chips

Baking the cake

Heat oven to 350 F. Butter an 8x8" square (or 9" round) baking pan (for each layer) and dust it with flour.

In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. 

In a larger bowl, beat together sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and beat till you get a smooth pale yellow paste. Add vanilla essence and mix well. 

Add half of the flour mixture and half of the buttermilk. Beat for a few seconds on low speed until just combined. Repeat with remaining flour mixture, buttermilk. 

Fold in the berries using a spatula. 

Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for ~35 minutes until toothpick inserted at the center comes out clean.

Let the cake cool down to room temperature before taking it out of the pan. Let it chill in the refrigerator before frosting.

White chocolate whipped frosting

Mix ½ cup of whipping cream with 1 cup of white chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl. Heat in short bursts (~30 seconds) in the microwave on low power (I used power 4). Mix well every time and continue to heat until the chocolate is melted. This step can be done in a double boiler as well.

Chill the chocolate + cream mixture in the fridge for at least a couple hours.

Add rest of the whipping cream to the chilled mixture and whip it with a whisk (electric or by hand) until it is fluffy and forms soft peaks.

Cake assembly and chocolate collar

Frosting the cake

If your cake layers are not flat, trim the tops to get even layers. Look out for a post coming soon on how to bake even cake layers.

Top one of the cake layers with whipped frosting and spread it evenly to the edges (you can adjust quantity based on how thick you want the layer to be). Place the 2nd layer on top and cover the entire cake with a thin layer of frosting (This is a crumb coat - it is not as critical if you haven’t cut the top/edges of the cake, but does make frosting easier). Place the cake in the fridge to chill for 15-20 minutes. Then apply a thicker layer of frosting at the top and sides and smoothen it out with a spatula. Chill the frosted cake until you’re ready to attach the chocolate collar. 

Chocolate collar

Measure the length and height of the frosted cake (circumference and height for round cake), and cut out 4 pieces of parchment paper with those dimensions. I measured before frosting the cake and forgot to account for the frosting thickness, hence ended up with the edges not matching (Lesson learned!!).

Melt the white chocolate and transfer 1-2 Tbsp each in two small bowls. Mix in a few drops of red coloring in one and blue in the other. White chocolate seizes easily so don’t add a lot at once. Transfer to individual plastic zip-top bags, and cut the tip off to use for piping. Melt milk/dark chocolate and put it in another bag for piping.

Make the bunting pattern using milk/dark chocolate for the string and red, blue chocolate for the pennants. You could make any other pattern as well! Let these set for a few minutes in the fridge.

Once set, spread white chocolate on one of the strips and carefully lift it and attach it to one side of the cake. Hold it for a few seconds until it attaches. Repeat with rest of the strips. Once set (only takes a couple minutes), carefully peel off the parchment paper.

Finishing touches

If you’re left with gaps at the edges like I did, pipe in some more frosting or white chocolate to fill those. Add more frosting on top if the collar is taller. Add some sprinkles to make it look pretty!

Refrigerate the cake until ready to serve (actually works best if you take it out a half hour before cutting). 

~Gayatri 

Note:

You can use milk instead of buttermilk in the cake batter, but buttermilk gives better taste and texture. Buttermilk is quite easy to make - add ~1 Tbsp vinegar or lemon juice to each cup of milk, mix it a little and let it sit for about 5 minutes until it curdles. If using plain milk in the cake recipe, add a little more baking powder and baking soda.