Thomas' Birthday Cake

Thomas' birthday was two weeks ago, so of course I had to make a special cake for my hubs!  He asked for chocolate cake with mango filling, buttercream frosting and toasted coconut.  I thought white or yellow cake might go with the mango and coconut better than chocolate, but he wanted chocolate, and what the birthday boy wants, the birthday boy gets!  And let's face it, it's pretty hard to go wrong when chocolate is involved!

For the cake I turned to my good friend Fannie Farmer.

Chocolate Buttermilk Cake

1 2/3 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teasoppon salt

1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup milk + 1 tablespoon lemon juice)

1/2 cup oil

2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.

The recipe calls for buttermilk, but I don't normally have this on hand, so I do an easy substitution.  Just use one cup of milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice mixed in.  Allow it to sit for 10-15 minutes so the milk can go sour.  I do this first and then work on the rest of the recipe while I wait for chemistry to work its magic on the milk.

Mix all of the dry ingredients together.  Then add the milk, oil and vanilla.  Beat until smooth.

I used the same handy trick from Alton Brown for baking this cake as I did for Jayme's cake to make sure I could get it out of the pan easily.  Check out the details here.  Add the batter to the pan.  

Pop it into the oven for about 30 minutes (I rotated it halfway through).  Allow to cool a bit before removing from the pan, and allow it to cool completely before removing the paper.  Then do it all again to make the other layer!

Mango Buttercream Filling

I am sad to say that this was kind of a bust.  The flavor was good, but the texture wasn't quite what I wanted and it didn't have much structural integrity as I needed (big problem for the filling of a layer cake!).  Needless to say I was really disappointed, especially since I wanted Thomas' cake to be perfect (he's pretty much the most wonderful husband ever, so I think he deserves an awesome cake, don't you?).  But I wanted to get the cake done before Thomas got home from work and time wasn't going to allow me to try something else.  That being said, I'll give you the gist of what I did so you don't make the same mistake!  Isn't that considerate of me?  Yeah, I thought so, too.  You're welcome.

I used canned mangos to get about 1 cup of mango puree.  I went for canned instead of fresh mangos because mangoes can sometimes be a little fibrous and I wanted to avoid that texture.  I also strained the mangoes before pureeing.

I mixed the mango puree in with a half batch of my buttercream frosting (recipe to follow since I used it to cover the cake).  I think the root of the problem is that mango has a pretty high liquid content which I failed to account for.  I have since explored the interwebs a bit and have concluded that mixing mango with buttercream is simply not a good option for filling, but will try some other means to make a mango filling in the future.

Buttercream Frosting

This is pretty much a fail-safe recipe and you've seen it before, but here it is again, this time increased by half:

1 1/2 cups butter, room temperature 

6 cups powdered sugar 

3 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and vanilla. Blend the sugar in one cup at a time.  You may need to stop and scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl a few times to make sure it all gets thoroughly incorporated.  Beat in the milk and continue mixing until light and fluffy.

Toasted Coconut

1 bag sweetened shredded coconut

 

Set the oven to somewhere between 300 and 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Spread a thin layer of the coconut on a cookie sheet.  

You'll definitely want to use a Silpat or line the sheet with foil just in cake some of the coconut burns, because that would be really unfun to try and clean off later.  Place the coconut in the oven for about 2 minutes, then pull it out, toss it around and pop it back in for another 2 minutes.  It's burns easily, so don't walk away from this.  And make sure you have some extra on hand just in case you do burn some - I didn't even need to use the entire bag to make enough to cover the cake.

Putting it together

I still don't have a pretty serving platter, so I carefully placed one of the cakes on a cutting board.  Since the filling wasn't as firm as I wanted it to be I evened out the top of this cake.  

I also put some buttercream in a bag and snipped the corner off.  I piped it around the edges of the cake to create a dam to hold the mango filling on top of the cake.  Next I poured the mango filling on top of the cake, being very watchful of the edges.  

I soon realized the filling wouldn't be able to support the top layer of cake on its own, so I stuck some toothpicks in around the edges of the cake (sticking halfway up so they would go into the top layer) to support the entire structure.  I very carefully placed the top layer of cake on and then quickly frosted the entire thing so the buttercream could act as a glue to keep the mango in and the whole thing standing tall.  I took handfuls of the coconut and sprinkled it all over the cake and pressed it against the sides.  

Lastly I took some of the remaining buttercream and mixed in some food coloring so I could write on the cake.

Ta-da!

The whole thing tasted really good!

Happy Birthday, Thomas!

Biscuits with Blueberry Compote

Yesterday morning I wanted something a little different for breakfast, so I decided to make biscuits.  I also remembered I had some blueberries in the freezer and wanted to make something with them to put on the biscuits to make things a little more special.

For the biscuits I went to my Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  These were so easy and quick to make it's almost silly, and they were oh so good.

Baking Powder Drop Biscuits

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup cold butter (original recipe calls for vegetable shortening, but I prefer butter)
1 cup milk

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.  Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a bowl. 

Then cut the butter in using a pastry cutter or two knives.  For this step it helps if you chop the butter into small chunks before adding it to the dry ingredients. 

 You don't want to create a paste, just kind of a coarse texture where the butter is broken into small pieces. 

Then add the milk all at once and stir until just combined. 

You can see that the dough isn't perfectly smooth and there are visible chunks of butter.  That's what makes the biscuits so tender!  Drop by large spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet.  I used my trusty Silpats to make sure they wouldn't stick to the cookie sheet at all.

Bake for about 10 minutes.  Done!  Makes around a dozen biscuits.

While the biscuits were baking I got started on a blueberry compote that I whipped up on the fly and turned out great.

Blueberry Compote

2 cups frozen blueberries, divided
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons orange juice
generous dash nutmeg
generous dash cinnamon

Put 1 cup of the blueberries (no need to thaw), the water, sugar, juice  and spices into a small pot over medium heat. 

Be sure to keep an eye on this and stir periodically as it boils to keep anything from burning.  After around 5 minutes I smashed the berries a bit with the spoon I was stirring with to thicken it a little. 

Continue heating and stirring for another 5 minutes and then add the rest of the blueberries.  Keep heating and stirring that for another 5 to 10 minutes.  That's it!

Now put a biscuit on a plate, cut it in half and ladle in some of that blueberry goodness.

Mmmm, delectable.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Raisin Cookies

This recipe is an old one but a good one.  They are the cookies that my mom would make when my brother and I were growing up (and still makes them now).  They have also become my standby I-need-to-bake-something-for-this baked good.

These cookies are no fuss, reliably turn out tasty and are always a crowd pleaser (unless you're a certain one of my friends who has "texture issues" with raisins in cookies in which case I will bastardize the recipe and leave the raisins out even though I think they really make the cookies, but I digress).

According to the recipe that my mom has, this is a Mrs. Field's recipe, but I don't really have any way of confirming it since it was copied down by a friend of hers over 20 years ago.

Here's what you'll need to make my Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Raisin Cookies:

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar

2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour
3 cups oatmeal
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder

1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups raisins

Before you start making the cookie dough, turn your oven on so it can preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Put the butter and sugars into a large mixing bowl and then cream them together.  

I like to crack my eggs into a glass before adding them so I can be sure that no shell has fallen in.  After I do that, I can add the eggs and vanilla and mix well.

At this point most recipes tell you to mix all the dry ingredients together before gradually adding them to the wet.  But I have tried this recipe by doing that and also by just dumping them all into the mixing bowl at once and quite frankly, for this recipe you cannot tell the difference.  So save yourself another dirty bowl and go ahead and add the flour, oatmeal, salt, baking soda and baking powder to your wet ingredients and mix until combined.

Add the chocolate chips and raisins; I like to do one and then the other.  I like my cookies loaded, so if you like more cookie and less chocolatey/raisiny goodness, go ahead and add less.  I don't know why you would, but it's your kitchen and you can do whatever you want.  And I'll do whatever I want, and I want a lot.

Go ahead and eat some dough, you know you want to!

Drop spoonfuls of the cookie dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet.  I like to use my cookie dough scoop largely because it gives me consistently sized cookies. 

And I like to use my Silpats on my cookie sheets because it prevents any sticking.  It also makes the cookies bake more evenly in my runs-kind-of-hot-especially-in-one-corner-but-mostly-from-the-bottom-so-it's-easy-to-burn-stuff-on-the-bottom-before-it's-cooked-on-the-top oven.  I have noticed that the Silpats create a cookie that puffs up more instead of spreading out a bit, so if you want your cookie flatter, smoosh them down a bit if you're using one.  And if you'r not using one just be forewarned that your cookie will be a little flatter, but no less delicious and will still come off the cookie sheet with ease.

Now pop those suckers in the oven.  Mine were done in 6 minutes, but your baking time may very depending on your oven.  I also like my cookies to be nice and chewy, so if you want it crisper bake it longer.

 Nice and gooey

This recipe yields about 5 dozen cookies, and while that sounds like a lot, they don't last long in our house or at parties.  So hurry up and grab a glass of milk while the cookies are warm before your family eats them all without you!