Miss Christine Tooknap convinced me to invest in The Joy of Cooking as a baking resource. What great advice. This weekend's cake is JOC's white cake and (in order to use up all the leftover yolks) classic buttercream icing. The light green layer is pistachio marzipan from a recipe in Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible, a much applauded and much criticized book. I'm thrilled with the colors of this cake. I'm not sure the above pic accurately captures the hue of the icing, which is the color of butter.
I've only just begun to figure out how to convert recipes appropriately for my 6" pans. Here's where I ran out of icing, had to make more, and became whiny and disgruntled. If the cake ain't so prettily iced in the end, this is why.
7 comments:
I'm madly in love with this one -- everything about it really -- the height of the four (!) fat layers, the pistachio green against butter, the cross-section, the external seams.
Do you have 4 pans, or did you bake in shifts?
I'm spending the fifty bucks I made from spontaneously combusting at Surfas today, in service to our cult. . . on pans?
Just two pans. The reduced recipe I produced created two 2"+ layers which were easily halved. The cake eventually ended up fully covered in icing. Are you suggesting that it looks nice with sides exposed? If so, I'll keep that in mind for future ventures. Kenneth is really pushing for simple cakes, though: "Wouldn't it be nice to have just one kind of icing and one kind of cake?" He's a staunch traditionalist in many regards.
That's an ionic column of a cake.
It's only a little over 5 inches tall. In the porn world, that's hardly iconic...
Speaking of, Jack, could you send some Cadinot films back to the USA?
Erk, I wouldn't suggest with this particular cake that you leave the sides exposed (although there are some cakes left raw that I admire), only that i lurrrrrve seeing the sandwiches, fillings, & walls before being iced up in a safe skin. Kind of like how I used to want to wear Underoos outside of my clothes. Kind of. Or maybe it's something else entirely. I have to go think about that one alone. In any case, I worship the cross-section shot.
& while I revere staunch traditionalism, I'm in a mad phase of mixing and matching fillings, icings, and cake varietals. . .
Cakes Left Raw. My new favorite T-shirt band.
Raw Power!
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