My turn with Stella Parks recipe for Milk Chocolate Scones, I added some toasted pecan pieces. I sucked at cutting them, decided to make some smaller. Yours are prettier, more puffed but these taste good. Recipe said to be generous sprinkling turbinado sugar; was I too generous? I’ll have to see what my “eaters” think.
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I love this recipe.
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@rstuart - you have NO IDEA how happy this makes me! I wondered about browning the butter but couldn’t be bothered.
I made her chocolate crunchy bark today and it was delicious! I do appreciate that all her recipes are well-salted.
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I have to admit that browning the butter is always worth it for me! This recipe was another one that caught my eye
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Todays procrastibaking project is the rhubarb and cream cheese buns from Mooncakes and Milk Bread. These use the milk bread dough, topped with cream cheese/sugar/egg/vanilla, a few slices of rhubarb and pearl sugar. Delicious as is, but I’d probably slice the rhubarb even thinner, toss with sugar and shingle it on top, as it really spread out as they baked. These apparently freeze well but we’ll see how many are left for that.
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Oh those are next on my list. Beautiful. By the way Milk Bread and Mooncakes got the James Beard Award for best baking book 2022.
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I just made these, too! I doubled and baked in a 9x13. Took quite awhile to be done, but are delicious!
From posts I’ve seen on Facebook it looks like lots of the recipes in Milk Bread and Mooncakes contain pork, or maybe those are the ones folks are drawn to. 
Are there enough vegetarian recipes to make it a www worthwhile purchase for a vegetarian?
There are 10 pork recipes in the index, and 17 meat recipes altogether. There are so many recipes without meat! Eat your books has 112 recipes listed for the book. https://www.eatyourbooks.com/library/198873/mooncakes-and-milk-bread-sweet
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I decided not to do a 10" tier on my wedding cake after it was already baked and have been keeping the layers in my freezer. I used 4 of the layers in a birthday cake for my mother in law this past weekend.
If I had used all 5 layers it would have been much too tall, I learned my lesson from the wedding cake XD. The chopsticks are to keep the lid from crushing the top.
First it went to a small dinner party and came back having experienced quite the accident on the car ride home. They did tell me that the professional chef that was at the party was very impressed by the cake and asked if I was a professional baker, I don’t know how much of that was just polite flattery but I’ll take it.
I decided to practice a bit of cake repair just to see if I could in a low stakes situation.
Here it is mid surgery, prognosis was poor. A layer was lost.
Here it is finished, I was pretty pleased with the results. My mother in law served it at another party yesterday and it was still fresh tasting and good.
I’m getting way better at using the acrylics, my top was so smooth. The key is to put quite a lot of frosting on top of the cake and also cover the acrylic in frosting before putting it on. Then press down pretty firmly and squeeze a lot of the frosting off the top.
I also learned that I really hate corrugated cardboard cake boards compared to foam boards. Frosting gets into the raw edge, the corrugations under the grease proof layer make my scraper leave uneven indents on the sides if I rest the bottom against the board. After I use up all my cardboard cake boards, I’m switching over. But this will probably be the last layer cake I do for a while, I don’t think there are any more family birthdays. I’m excited for fruit filled summer baking.
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Love the surgery play-by-play photos! Wonderful results, you should be pleased!
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I honestly thought you are a professional baker / cake decorator.
I would love to know more about the cake repair surgery: did you discard a layer, restack, then re-do the frosting? In the picture of the accident, the frosting looked very squished.
ps: I would love to know more about the accident too! Did someone sit on it? Was there a food fight?
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Aww that’s nice of you to say 
it makes me feel good about all the effort I put into layer cakes. I’m definitely not a pro, I’ve learned it all from YouTube and chowhounders and now hungryonioners.
The accident was probably a slide off the backseat of the car. I heard it all second hand and didn’t want to ask specifically in case too many questions made my MIL feel like I was mad about it.
Yes, that is pretty much what I did. I lifted the top 2 layers off, removed the 3rd layer that had partially slid out and gotten crushed, scraped the old filling and frosting off the bottom layer only and moved it to a new cake board. I piped a new dam on it and added new jam and then restacked it.
Then I chilled the cake down in the fridge and chipped off all the frosting above the crumb coat. Whipped the chipped frosting & flowers into some frosting I had leftover from making the cake. (Removed and threw away the green leaves so it wouldn’t make the pink color muddy or brown) I added a bit of new crumb coat to cover any bare parts and the cut area to try to keep it from going stale and the chilled it again.
Then I refrosted using an acrylic with glad wrap on top and chilled overnight. 4 hours would have been fine.
I removed the acrylic & cleaned up any frosting crumbs that came off the glad wrap.
I cleaned up the cake board with a paper towel and transferred the cake to a cake stand. I topped with leftover buttercream flowers that I had frozen for my wedding cake, piped on some leaves to fill in the gaps, and piped a border to hide the cake board a bit, and called it good.
Here is a photo of the cake after it was cut into, you can see where the frosting was filling in parts where the cake had crumbled away in the center. You can see that the old frosting dam is a different color than the new. This slice looked the worst, the rest came out pretty normal looking though less neat than usual.
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You are Wonder Woman! And a diplomat as well!!
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Really this belongs in a documentary of some sort. Bravo for the pictures and your skill!
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What was your name on CH? You did the green cake for Zach? I saved it in my photos and show people what an excellent job you did. If you lived nearby, I’d want to order a birthday cake from you! You have a lot to feel proud about!
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It was puffychicken over there as well, even though my avatar photo suggests a snailbee kind of name! You were Walker right? Yes that green birthday cake was me Thanks for your kind words
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Walker, right. In this next life, I wanted to be a little exotic. Believe, I never flatter anyone, you’re incredible. Have you thought of starting a business, even baby beginner step business?
King Arthur’s Savory Star Bread.
Filling was comprised of pepperoni, parmigiano Reggiano, sun-dried tomatoes and homemade basil pesto. For the dough I used a mix of white whole wheat and all-purpose flours, adding some sourdough discard for flavor.
I’ve made this before – today’s version did not disappoint.
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So impressed with both the original cake, and the repair job!!
