Random moosages as I see fit.

Now with 100% more moose oven mitt photobomb.

I’ve been baking a lot more recently.  It’s mostly because of fruit.  Or rather, the need to get rid of fruit.  In this case, bananas and lemons.

The banana nut bread is an Allrecipes find made basically as is.  I normally halve the recipe because I’ll have the random three bananas that I didn’t want to eat because I only like bananas when they’re still slightly green.  The three bananas are normally enough for one loaf of banana nut bread, which is approximately all I want to eat at a time anyway.  I’ll also reduce the sugar by 25% as well, but that’s because I don’t really like really sweet banana nut bread.  Otherwise, it’s a good recipe as is.

The lemon pound cake is adapted from this recipe for Meyer lemon cake.  I have a normal lemon tree in the backyard and of course, I had a lot of lemons to get rid of.  I came across this recipe awhile ago and decided I’d try it out with normal lemons.  It’s pretty good as is, but I made a few adjustments because I like it when lemon cake punches you in the face with lemon flavor.

Key change was stabbing the cake several times with a bamboo skewer all the way to the bottom of the cake after taking it out of the oven and before pouring on the syrup so there’s syrupy lemoniness all the way through the cake.  I also increased the amount of lemon juice to 1/3 cup in the syrup but reduced the amount of sugar to a scant 1/4 cup.  Um, the glaze was probably 3 tbsp of lemon juice and something less than 1/2 cup of powdered sugar.  Like I said, I was looking to maximize the lemon flavor.

And…it’s good.  It’s really good.  It makes your  mouth water but it’s not so sour to make your lips pucker and there’s so much lemony goodness.  You should try it.

As promised, here is the post.

I came across Sam’s favorite chocolate cake awhile ago and it looked good enough to try out the recipe.  The thing is, I basically live alone and I cannot eat an entire chocolate cake by myself.  Before when I wanted to try out recipes, I would just foist the resultant baked good upon coworkers at the office.  But since I work for THEM, either I am rarely in my home office or no one else is in the home office.  Still can’t eat a whole chocolate cake by myself.

Now that I’m on a long term project at Clib, I can find plenty of people to foist baking experiments upon, but Clib is FAR.  I don’t often have time or energy to bake after getting home from work and weekends are for doing everything I couldn’t do during the week because I was driving to/from Clib.

But finally, I gathered up enough motivation to try out this recipe, especially since I promised a chocolate cake to a coworker.  And…you see the result above.

I made the cake pretty much to the letter.  I didn’t sift the dry ingredients as I really hate sifting.  I did whisk to combine though.  And at the end, I actually pulled the batter before the mixer fully incorporated the last addition of the dry and folded the batter a few more times by hand to make sure everything was combined.  I also used natural cocoa powder and not Dutch process.  The recipe didn’t specify, but I suspect that the author of the recipe used Dutch process cocoa because the only leavening agent is baking powder and I didn’t notice that until reviewing the recipe again just now.  And…now a whole bunch of things make sense, which I will get to later on.

I used store bought sour cherry preserves.  I have several ethnic markets in my area that carry a wide selection of good quality preserves.  While I would normally make my own…I just didn’t have time.  And it can be hard to get sour cherries.

The “frosting,” as they call it, is just a ganache.  Just make it like you would any other ganache.  And let it cool before you pour it over the cake.  It’s easier to work with and you don’t have it running all the way off the cake this way.

My thoughts: The cake isn’t bad.  It’s very chocolately, of which I approve.  I’m a big fan of chocolate.  But the cake is dense.  DENSE.  Maybe too dense.

And here is the later on.  A lot of the denseness probably was because of the fact that I used natural cocoa powder and not Dutch process.  Natural cocoa powder would be the wrong type of cocoa powder for the leavening agent.  Natural cocoa powder goes with baking SODA (because natural cocoa powder is acidic and baking soda is basic).  Dutch process cocoa powder goes with baking POWDER (because Dutch process is neutral and baking powder has all the acids and bases already mixed in, so I guess you would consider it to be neutral as well), which is what this recipe called for and I only noticed this just now.  Or rather, I obviously noticed while I was baking, but I didn’t think of the import of the pairings until writing this up.

So anyway, if you’re using natural cocoa powder when you’re baking, sub the powder out for soda.  I would cut it down to about 1 tsp of baking soda if you’re using natural cocoa powder.

If I were to make it again, I might make a cake more like devil’s food cake, or I might just not be a dummy and think about the leavening agent I’m using BEFORE I start baking with natural cocoa powder.  But another thing I think I’d change is that I’d slice each cake into two, making this a four layer cake.  Those cherry preserves paired very well with the chocolatiness of the cake.  I think I would like to add more cherry preserves by upping the layers.  And if you decide to make a more fudge-like cake, it’ll make the cake less overwhelmingly dense.