The Food Club

The napkins set the tone:

 

Bacon wrapped tater tots with cheddar cheese:

 

Bacon and cheese stuffed mushrooms (top).
Bacon wrapped bratwurst (bottom).

 

Bacon wrapped teriyaki chicken:

 

Bacon wrapped shrimp dusted with chili (we all thought they looked like cicadas):

Bacon potato mushroom dip:

 

German potato salad:

 

BLT Cups (cups made of bacon!):

 

Pudding cups:

 

Bacon wrapped goat cheese in pastry:

 

Bagel bombs:

 

Mr. Pig the centerpiece says goodbye

So I thought to myself, “David, what good is a free Friday evening? Going out and having fun? Hahahaha, surely you jest. Instead it was baking.”

Pride was coming up, so a rainbow cake struck me as appropriate. Also, it takes an obscene amount of work. So I started baking multiple layers of cake.

I decided not to do a mixed cake, so I figured I would instead due a multilayered cakes with multiple rounds. I figured I’d do two rounds of each color just in case because if one round went bad, you would need a back up to keep the cake from being ruined.

 

 

 

 

 

Ew, those cakes look ugly. And not terribly rainbow-y. This is the result of something known as the Maillard Reaction. And those of you that don’t want to read that link, it’s basically “When you cook something it gets browner.” Mixing some colors in while the cake is browning will get some weird looks. But fear not color-purists, pleasant visual stimulation remains inside as you can see below.

I cut the cake tops off, to make perfectly layered rounds, and wow, you can see the differentiation from the Malliard’ed outside of the cake and the pure vibrant colors inside. These aren’t going to be part of the cake, but they look cool.

 

 

 

 

For those of you wondering what to do with cake tops, well, I use them to munch on to taste the cake but also to create a bunch of cake crumbs which we will save for later.

 

 

 

Once I was done, I started frosting the cakes… wait, did I say cakes? Yes, I did. Because remember how I said I wanted to do 2 of each cake layer incase one didn’t come out correctly? Surprise! They all came out perfectly T.T:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yup, two cakes. Each with a slightly different frosting. One was a Vanilla Bean Brandy and the other was a Green Tea Latte cake. I personally liked the Green Tea better, but most people liked the vanilla more. Oh well, more for me.

Of course, the real test is in the cut, how do they look then?

It plates really really well. And tasted great. Keen eyes will notice that Purple was on the top in one cake and Red was on the top in the others. Yet a further differentiation between the two.

 

Special thanks to Will for helping me make these cakes. He saved me an obscene amount of time that Friday night.

 

So, we had the office potluck, and I was debating cooking some kind of super vegetable dish, or making a cake. I eventually settled on a cake, because it takes 10 minutes to make a salad and 4 hours to do a cake right. So hating all free time I have ever, clearly I choose to make a cake.

After some experiments with the ganache, I wanted to contrast it with a chocolate brandy buttercream, so I experimented a bit and this was the result:

 

Bleh, these cutting lines are terrible. Note to future self: Don’t let co-workers cut the cake if you want the cake to look good.

 

 

 

Maybe we can fix this by doing a few cuts ourselves:

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, much better. Look at those clean lines. The colors shine through and there’s a minimal mess. This is how you cute a cake. I recommend serrated knives, a cool cake, and heating the knife with warm water (and then drying the knife). Also, pre-cut your cake, because jeebus do hungry people mangle the thing. Don’t give them the opportunity!

This cake was rather tasty though. A blue velvet (which had a vanilla flavor), a classic yellow cake, a single row of vanilla bean brandy buttercream, and a rich chocolate brandy buttercream. I might use chocolate liquor in the future on the butter cream though. Time will tell 🙂 .

 

 

So, after my last shot with ganache on Will’s cake, I thought “hey, people make whole cakes frosted with that, let’s make a crap ton of ganache and see where it goes!

 

 

 

 

 

So with the ganache done, I figured I’d frost a buttercake with the stuff and then add some hazel nuts on top to add some variant texture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was the result. My friend HEAVILY recommended if I attempt an all ganache cake again I use butter in the recipe to make it look glossier and prettier. I might attempt it again some time in the future (and put the hazelnuts on the side of the cake rather than the top), but overall, this might just have been too much danged chocolate for anyone to eat. Likely, I might just do a ganache coating and some frosting layers of not ganache.

And sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the layers this time, but they were terrible anyways. Not a thing of beauty at all. I used extra ganache to smooth out the inconsistencies.

So, my friend Will was celebrating him completing his Masters and turning 27. Given both of these things, I said “you must have a cake, as this is two kinds of parties that cake is present at. What kind of cake do you like?”

Will: “Chocolate is good, but I like fruit.”
David:

Thus, Will’s cake was born. Anyone who knows Will, knows he adores werewolves. So this is what I came up with:

 

 

 

 

 

 

After I made the caramel cake, my friend James HEAVILY suggested I use some form of brandy or at least alcohol in my buttercream. So I added fresh raspberries as well as raspberry liquor. Also, the wolf in the moon was the result of cake crumbs from the chocolate cake.

Cutting into the cake was a joy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what is that extra dark stuff that you can vaguely see inside the cake? What is it you ask?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why, it’s only Chocolate Ganache. Thus making this cake incredibly tasty and incredibly rich. A chocolate cake with raspberry buttercream and chocolate ganache 🙂 . Happy birthday and big congrats Will!

So, my work wife was leaving work for Bosnia. Which made David incredibly sad. So, my response was to bake her a goodbye cake. I was torn between a mocha cake and a caramel cake. After talking it over with her, we settled on caramel because while some people might love a a mocha cake, others would dislike it. Caramel would be a winner overall.

Here was the final result:

Not my prettiest work of art, but it got me back into cake making. I used a trader joe’s caramel sauce to make the butter cream then drizzled some on the top for decoration. If I were to do that again, I’d make scoring lines for the caramel to rest on top of rather then running all over.

 

It was so tasty, even the office diabetic had a slice and was devoured by my office:

Not bad for my my first foray back into caking in years.