Beautiful Cake!! Thank you so much for the write up and pictures.
I saw that reference to the tart pan - it threw me. A standard 9" pan ended up being just the right dimensions.
You’re welcome. I showed you mine - now you can show me yours.
I looked at my “New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” 2014, and the recipe in the revised new edition doesn’t include weights for flour either.
The lack of weights especially for baking really irritates me these days.
Also in savory recipes “one bunch of kale.” I just made a one-pot pasta recipe from NYT (starts with one pound of pasta, sliced cherry tomatoes, lemon zest, EVOO), boiled with about a quart of water, then kale/greens added. NYT says one bunch of kale. A European version of the same recipe specifies 400 grams/14 ounces of kale or spinach. My bunch of kale from WF was 8 ounces, so I doubled it. The dish really benefited from more kale, which cooks down so much.
I made a chocolate stout cake using Alice Medrich’s recipe for one-bowl chocolate cupcakes, which @Saregama shared a while ago. It’s very close to her one-bowl cake. I subbed stout for the water as she suggests and increased the cocoa (following her instructions to sub half oil for the butter to compensate). Thinking it would enhance the stout flavor, I subbed half graham flour for the AP. I think that might have been a mistake – it was a little dry (I may have overbaked) and the graham is coarser than AP.
Still, with cream cheese frosting I wouldn’t refuse a slice.
I bet it will be moister after an overnight rest.
It would have been helpful , at least for the flour, if she had indicated even elsewhere in the book , what her preference for ingredients was based on. I have seen in some cookbooks where the author will list the weights for ingredients in the beginning of the book. Sometimes you just have to use your own judgment and that’s usually not too bad. Many European recipes are written with a lot less information as they assume people will either know or muddle through it!
OT, but was it this recipe (gift link)?
We love that dish. Stick with it!
1/2 recipe of a marbled cheesecake using a recipe in Baking With Dorie. I made a mistake and dumped my chocolate in the wrong bowl and instead of it being marbled it baked layered. Instead of baking it, i used my Instapot. Came out nice and creamy with aftertaste of espresso. I will have to catch up on everyones baking. Last week I was sick.
beautiful, as usual!
yes, it was that one from the NYT. And yes, this is OT!
I first found it on a website also featuring the recipe from ‘A Modern Way to Cook.’ The older adult male here is afraid of carbs and calories (with notable exceptions!) and usually refuses pasta. He thinks this turned out really well (we used a shorter pasta, not long/thin) and we’ll be eating the leftovers for a couple of days and add some blue cheese. I’d use more cherry tomatoes next time and stick with a pound of greens. The ease of prep and lemon zest make it a winner for us!
Thank you!
Two cottage cheese bakes today – one a failure, one a success.
The failure was something I saw online – cottage cheese crackers / frico. Basically cottage cheese scoops baked until they crisp up. Well, they never did, and the liquid evaporating from between the curds also meant they weren’t really stable. Also – chewy, not crisp. If I wanted to bother with it again, I would mix in a spoon of some flour to hold them together. But that wouldn’t solve the chewy part.
The successful bake was a mini chocolate cake inspired by a ricotta cake recipe. I subbed cocoa for a bunch of the flour, added rum, and crossed my fingers. Took a lot longer to bake than I expected, but the result is a lovely, tender cake. I meant to add chocolate chips but forgot. (Also forgot the baking soda, so had to scoop the batter out to stir that in, silly me.)
The rum comes through nicely with the chocolate, and I expect this to be even more moist tomorrow.
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Ah, so glad you let us see and read your results! And glad you liked it. I did the shaping part, my batter/dough wasn’t too hard to shape, not liquid. I remember I did beat (by hand) quite a bit-- it’s hard to figure exactly what “until batter is silky” means.
OK – just now went out to the kitchen to figure out the weight thing. If I don’t have a weight (which I prefer and trust now) I stir the flour a ridiculous amount until none of the molecules are touching each other and then very gently scoop into a measuring cup. So this morning my full, levelled cup weighed 117 grams. Never really checked before, now I know. Anyway, a keeper, I wish there was a way to make the top prettier. I thought baking at 400F would “golden” the sugar, but it stayed blotchy white. I always use parchment rounds so removal wasn’t a problem.
(I have one D. Madison book, but it’s for soup.) Funny that you found a forgotten bookmark from the past. I have a fat folder labeled CAKE and go through it once in a while. Very glad I found this yeasty nice one.
A suggested topping for the cake was sliced almonds, that would pretty it up! I love a little extra crunch on a cake!
I agree “silky” is a bit vague. Maybe next time I’ll give it a few more minutes in the mixer before going hog-wild with additional flour. It did all work out nicely at 125 g./cup (except for the shaping part).
My report for the next day is, the cake acquires a bread-ier texture as it sets up, which is not a bad thing. We really like the recipe, and I will make it again.
Circling back, this is lovely the next day – moist, tender, chocolatey, rummy.
Given this, curious why it was so hard for me to find a cottage cheese cake recipe that didn’t read like a diet fad or weird in some other way.
Texture is not the same as a ricotta cake or a cream cheese cake (both of which I love) – those have a firm, fine crumb and are sturdy. This one is tender, not firm, and delicate, not sturdy.
I think cottage cheese is regarded by many as diet food and ricotta as more mainstream. Me, I always have cottage cheese around, it’s so handy when I have literally 4-5 minutes between calls to eat something.
Glad your cottage cheese cake is so yummy - it sure sounds good!
Does anyone have a pullman recipe they like?
In addition to the cottage cheese, your sub of cocoa for a “bunch of” the flour was probably a key contributor to the more delicate texture, since you removed a fair amount of gluten content.