Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

Chocolate Raspberry Cake Our book and social club was getting together and the host asked me to bring a cake to celebrate the birthdays of all the summer girls. I'm always delighted to have a reason to make a cake, but especially for my girls! I knew I wanted a chocolate cake because that's my best friend's favorite. When I saw  this recipe  I figured it was going to be great. Wrong! I already wrote  a post  about it.   Now I needed a new idea, fast. Leafing through my recipe binder, I remembered  this recipe  that Tessa Huff from Style Sweet published in The Cake Blog. I'd made if before, for Xmas 2020, and it was very good.  I figured you couldn't go wrong with it! Even though it was already early evening I had to run to the store for ingredients because I don't keep frozen raspberries at hand. The only glitch while making the recipe was that the water I poured into the batter may have been too hot. It had been in the tea kettle, and I thin...

Working on a cake that needed a last-minute raspberry filling, I came across Sugar Geek Show's recipe. I decided to try it because it was late at night and it wasn't a reduction. The whole thing comes together pretty quickly. In this recipe you dissolve a bag of frozen raspberries in sugar and after it boils once you sieve it to get rid of the seeds, then continue with the recipe. The next step is to add a slurry made with cornstarch and water, instead of adding cornstarch directly into the mixture which usually results in lumps. I made the slurry before getting started and noticed it was drying out a bit, but would come back together with a whisk. Maybe that was the problem, maybe I should have added a bit more water, because I there were several cornstarch blobs in the mixture that never did dissolve and that I had to remove. I did this by removing the blobs I could see then sieving the mixture again. Perhaps because of this, the filling never really set up as a filling overn...

A few days ago R mentioned that he'd like some Cinnamon Raisin Bread with breakfast.  I happened to have some leftover raisins in the pantry, and some time on my hands today. I found  this recipe  on the King Arthur Baking website. It was the easiest dough recipe I've made yet!  I didn't even have to knead it by hand because the dough is soft enough that the machine can take care of kneading it for 5 minutes. Based on reviews on the website, I decided to leave out the oats, double the cinnamon from 1 to 2 teaspoons, and use 1.5 the amount of raisins the recipe called for. The amount of water should be 1/4 cup on a humid day and 1/3 cup in a dry day. Well, we're in the middle of a heat wave but I got mixed up and used 1/3. The dough still behaved great. Something's off with our oven, so it took 48-50 minutes instead of 40-45.  I forgot to brush it with milk before baking, so I brushed the warm loaf with a bit of butter when it came out of the oven. The bread did...

 I was excited to find this recipe for Chocolate Orange Cake from the Life Love and Sugar blog. I've tried a couple of their recipes before and they were very good, and the cake got rave reviews from other people. Chocolate and orange is such a great combination! I even bought orange extract for the recipe. What a disappointment! The cakes are supposed to bake at 300F, an extremely low temperature that I've never seen in any other recipe. Not surprisingly after the half hour was up they were nowhere near done. They didn't rise evenly. One side of the cake actually looked like a pancake. I kept them in the oven until a toothpick came out clean, but there was no way I could use these cake layers for the cake I need to bring to book club.  The taste was disappointing as well. There's a hint of orange but it's not very detectable and doesn't blend well with the chocolate. And there's an unpleasant aftertaste, likely from the artificial extract.  R tried it as we...

  A special Graduation Cake Bubby graduated from High School! I still have to pinch myself to believe it, because it feels like I just dropped him off at preschool.  On that day so long ago, I was so nervous about how he would do that I couldn't go home and waited the entire three hours he was there at the nearest café in case they needed me to pick him up. A lifetime ago, when he was 3! The family was coming to a brunch at our house before the early evening ceremony and we prepared a nice spread including a corn chips with guacamole, a cheese array, pork tenderloin, local asparagus, couscous salad and plenty of beverages. I decorated the house to make it look festive for the graduate and he received lots of gifts of money, a watch, t-shirts and more. The grand finale of the afternoon needed to be a special cake. I decided to try  this recipe  from Preppy Kitchen because I wanted a hefty cake in 8-inch pans.  I liked how simple it was to put together! I didn't h...