Tuesdays With Dorie – Lots-Of-Ways Banana Cake
There were lots of ways to eat this banana cake. I chose to cut the cake into chunks, freeze it, and then use it to cool my Mountain Dew for a tropical flavor treat.
Okay, that’s actually incorrect.
I slathered a bit of home-whipped, mildly sweetened/almond-flavored cream in between the layers and called it a day. Banana cake is generally sweet enough for me that I don’t need something on top of it to make it sweeter.
Actually, I just dumped two tubs of buttercream frosting (one vanilla, one chocolate) that would have gone pretty well with this. I had frozen these ages ago. They tasted just as good defrosted, but I don’t have room in my freezer for tubs of anything. If those had still existed, they probably would have found their way onto this cake.
By the way, I am posting this FROM THE DISTANT PAST. I am currently on vacation, but a vacation isn’t going to be the thing that stops me from my 2+ year streak of baking every TWD recipe.
I didn’t even realized I’d hit the 2-year-mark until right this moment. LET US CELEBRATE.
Celebration complete.
Also, here’s an update on Wedding Cupcakes. I made cupcakes for an office party using a bunch of test materials that Rachel bought online. We don’t like the red jewels on the cupcakes, and the pearls just seem to disappear in the frosting, but we do like the red glitter (which matches our wedding colors). Here’s a picture, with the required mess (and your first look at Rachel’s hand) included.
So that’s that. We’ve pretty much decided on the recipes we like for the chocolate and vanilla cakes (for chocolate we’re modifying Dorie’s choco-cupcake recipe just a tad). Next up: more practice with frosting techniques, and cupcake freezing tests.
So that’s it. If this posts as it’s supposed to, you guys won’t even realize that I’m gone. But you know what? I’M REALLY GOING TO MISS YOU.
Tuesdays With Dorie – Brrrrr-ownies
These brownies turned out excellently in every way – flavor, density. Heck, I even managed to properly bake them so that they weren’t goop. With the overload of Peppermint, these seem more like a Christmasy thing, although they’re definitely a bit more “refreshing” and a bit less cloying than straight-chocolate brownies.
On a side note, I think I have Rachel convinced to allow me to make the cupcakes for our wedding. I’ve experimented with a number of recipes in the past few months, and it’s amazing what a plastic bag and some honest-to-god icing tips can do to take “ugly food” and make it downright presentable.
Tuesdays With Dorie – Tarte Noire
Pretty straightforward, and the perfect thing to throw together after a holiday weekend – tart crusts and chocolate ganache. Delicious, too (even though Rachel says it tastes “like Hershey’s syrup in a graham cracker crust,” which has so many wrong things about it that I can’t even think straight).
Tuesdays With Dorie – Rum-Drenched Vanilla Cake
As a teetotaler, I hesitated at the idea of rum-drenched cake. I did cut back a bit on the rum in the recipe, and the cake is still delicious so there is that.
Bang, zoom, to the moon!
Tuesdays With Dorie – Dressy Chocolate Loafcake
So it’s a chocolate cake in the shape of a loaf of bread, sandwiching cherry jam, and covered in a sour-cream-based chocolate icing. Mine doesn’t look dressy because I’m sloppy, lazy, and awful. But I made it, I ate some, and it was good.
There.
Tuesdays With Dorie – Raisin Swirl Bread
I’d say that given all the complications in making this bread, this didn’t turn out too badly. I froze the dough for a good forty-five minutes (that’s an extra fifteen minutes) and it still wasn’t solid enough to roll. As a result, I didn’t really end up with a Swirl Bread as much as I ended up with a CHUNK OF MISCELLANEOUS GARBAGE.
It tasted all right. Not my thing, but then raisin bread never is.
Tuesdays With Dorie – Tender Shortcakes
I’m not 100% sure how these can be tender. It’s not a chunk of meat, and it’s not love for Elvis. It’s a cake.
It’s pretty good. As you can see, my sloppy presentation this week is related to cutting the cake in half. I filled it with raspberries and blueberries but you couldn’t really taste them between the buttery cake and the homemade whipped cream.
I decided to freeze the other eight and save them for rainy days. I hope it rains a lot soon.
Tuesdays With Dorie – White Chocolate Brownies
These are not brownies, right? There’s no chocolate (white chocolate is not chocolate). The consistency and flavor of this lean more towards a “white chocolate razzleberry cake,” so that’s what I’ll call this.
Still super-delicious. I would recommend bringing this to a picnic or funeral.
Tuesdays With Dorie – Banana Coconut Ice Cream Pie
When I heard this was with chocolate ice cream (which is objectively the worst flavor of ice cream), I thought it would be bad news. When I saw that the crust was made up of coconut, butter, and crumbled up cookies (I used Pecan Sandies), I thought it sounded ridiculous. When I tasted the dang ol’ pie?
BLAM. Flavor explosion. It shouldn’t work on so many levels, but it works on all of those levels. The crust solidifies and becomes crunchy; the cloying, awful sweetness of the chocolate ice cream is offset by the far different cloying, awful sweetness of the bananas. Whatever. Whatevs. It works. Pecan sandies.
I won’t spoil the finale of LOST for anybody (although presumably everybody who cares has probably already seen it), but I will say that I found it a beautiful end to a great journey, and I find it very hard to find fault at all with the episode. Of course, I’ve never really cared about the answers to mysteries, so take that for what it is.
I’m not going to get a chance to watch the 24 finale until Saturday, so watch your spoiler-filled mouths or I will go Jack Bauer on you and leave your banana-coconut-ice-cream-pie-filled bowels scattered all over the ground of a Manhattan warehouse.
Tuesdays With Dorie – Apple Apple Bread Pudding
The first apple stands for the main ingredient: apples. The second apple is a typo.
I was not super-pleased with my first few bread puddings, which were delicious but crunchy. This one is just perfect – the consistency is like store-bought, the flavor is like homemade. Very pleased with myself.
I started making this at 8:30 after I got home from the gym. It is 12:30 and I’ve had two bowls. I hope you’re happy about what I’ve done for you, Internet.
As for me, I’m currently deep in the middle of reading “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” The DC Comics Universe will never be the same!!! (unless you were raised on post-Crisis comics, in which case nothing seems all too different).
Let’s have a moment of silence for those that we’ve lost this year, or those that we will soon lose: “Lost.” “24.” The awful “Heroes.” “Scrubs.” “Better Off Ted.” Ronnie James Dio. Russell Hantz.
