devlin

That would "make more sense" if one wasn't interested in the taste of a traditional Red Velvet Cake. The vinegar, buttermilk, and underlying hint of chocolate make for the distinctive Red Velvet Cake taste that appeals most to the people that love it. ← But is it an inherently dry, dense cake? Or do I need to do something different? Because otherwise, if that's what it is, there's just no way I want to bother. I'm fine with the buttermilk, chocolate and hint of vinegar. The flavor's not the issue. It's the godawful result I got that was the most unbelievably dry cake I've ever had in my life. My husband said it was more cookie than cake, if that helps.

People phone now and again asking for birthday cakes and the like, which I've never done, or anyway not traditional sorts of decorated cakes, and because red velvet seems to be such a popular thing, I decided to try it. I'm also finally teaching myself the very basics (6 year old level) of cake decorating, which at this point means layers and icings and some basic piping. The plan is to do a whole lot more with more complex stuff, but I'm just starting. Anyway, two things here.... I made the red velvet cake according to the recipe in The New York Times article, which seemed pretty promising, given the accompanying article. I did everything exactly according to the directions. Frankly, by the time it was mixed and I was pouring it into the pans I was already worried. The color was good, but the batter was like heavy goo. By the end of bake, which was a good 15 minutes earlier than the recipe called for (and I have an oven thermometer in my oven for calibration), the cakes were like hocky pucks. I tried another icing, a meringue-based icing, rather than the cream cheese, and it was really nice (though next time some flavor in it I think). My infant-level cake decorating results. Note: because I was playing around with piping shells and then reverse shells, the results are a little ragged (or anyway that's part of the reason they're ragged, apart from my total incompetence): and... My husband and I were eager to try it, because, well, it's cake, and it did look sort of pretty in a homey sort of way, so.... It was the most godawful cake I've ever eaten in my life, I think. I mean, I know how to bake a delicious, flavorful, moister than believable cake, and some of my cakes get really good reviews just for that, but this was terrible -- dense, dry to the point that it seemed as if it had been sliced and sitting on the counter for three weeks. Hocky pucks. Awful. The frosting was pretty nice, though. Here's a question, about the quality of the cake itself. Maybe it's a couple of things?... The differences in mixing ingredients and the length of mix?... Or the additional oil in some recipes? Otherwise, wouldn't it make more sense to just take an already proven cake that's light and fluffy and moist and just add food coloring? eta: the photo doesn't do justice to the actual redness of the red. It looks brown to me in that photo, when in fact it's a really rich, deep red.

I came across a website yesterday that has a recipe for what it terms "crusting cream cheese buttercream" (scroll to about middle of page). Haven't tried it yet, but I intend to. Here's the link: http://www.designmeacake.com/recipes.html

Jeanne, you're my hero! Thank you. And I was actually wondering where I might find the flat-top as well. Yay!

It is frustrating. And they're beautiful too. If there's any way I can get away with not cutting to shape, I'd prefer it. I've been sort of resigning myself to the notion of it though. Maddening. The next step is to see if there's anyway to contact somebody about it at her web site.

You'd think it would be simple, but I'm trying to track down diamond-shaped cake pans (not square, diamond). Like the pans Martha Stewart used to make the wedding cake in Baking With Julia. I've tried my usual sources, done a mess of searches, googled til I'm blue in the face. Nothing.

What kind of breads are you specifically aiming for? For breads that use commercial yeast (no sponge, straight method), you can mix and knead in the evening then proof overnight. Take out of the fridge when you get home from work and leave out for 1-2 hours (depends on your ambient temp). When the dough has warmed up somewhat, deflate and shape. Final proof for say another hour, then bake. For sponges, you could do an overnight sponge, then mix in the morning and proof in the fridge. Do as for above when you get back from work. (Leave out to warm up, deflate, shape and final proof. For sourdough, assuming you have an active starter and depending on your ambient temps, you can refresh your starter first thing in the morning before work. When you get home, mix and shape, then proof (in my case about 4 hours) and bake. ← Those are really good options, and I wish more people would take the time to try those sorts of methods. In the long run, those methods will yield better bread than the super fast Bittman minimalist bread, more flavorful and with better keeping qualities, and once you do it a few times, it actually isn't that much more complicated or time-consuming than Bittman's approach. Most of the on-hands work, either way, is mixing and shaping, which you have to do with any bread. The bulk of the time is, well, time passing as you wait to bake. And for me, I'd rather mix up a starter (what, five minutes max?), let it sit overnight (nothing I have to do, just let it sit), then mix the dough (another 5 minutes?), let rise or put in fridge (again, nothing for me to do), and then work the dough as you like, which, depending on your schedule, will amount to the time it takes to maybe stretch and fold over 2 to 4 hours (again, 5 minutes max each stretch and fold), shape (same thing), rise and then stick in the oven. Easy peasy.

Taking dough to work would be a tedious exercise, it seems to me. There are other ways. I just wrote a long thing to you here and then hit something and poof, gone.... Anyway, I think you can replicate what I do, but it takes practice more than anything. Once you've taught yourself (and that's precisely what I did -- I'm self-taught), I suspect you'd be surprised by how much simpler my process is than it might appear. Don't let the three-day process scare you. You don't have to do it that way for your own purposes, and in fact the "artisan bread in five minutes" approach may be similar in many ways. If I were you, I might start there, but actually I'd sort of prefer people start with something like Dan Lepard's book, The Handmade Loaf. So in partial answer to your question "Is there an easy way?" etc., yes and no. The biggest challenge in the process is learning how to recognize what your dough is doing, and nobody can tell you exactly how to do that. You have to work with dough enough to figure out how it works best. That's a learning curve that no "recipe" can do for you. In that regard, the traditional, home-baked loaf is sort of fool-proof, which is exactly what it's supposed to be. Something from The Tassajara Bread Book, for example. If you follow something like that, you'll get uniform results without much trouble, except for the kneading and the finding a warm place and the rising and then the bake. For me, that process is a bigger pain in the neck than the method I use, which is actually pretty similar to Lepard's in many ways, although on a different scale and time frame, only I don't use commercial yeast. And I don't knead at all. I use the stretch and fold method, a thing that worried and scared me for awhile because I wasn't sure I knew what I was doing, but it's really so simple a flatworm could do it. I started with the Tassajara book, was dissatisfied pretty quickly, moved on to Julia Child's big baking compendium, which was dissatisfying partially because the stuff I wanted to make from that was beyond my ken at the time, then took up Nancy Silverton, who was more helpful, though still I wasn't liking the idea of all that kneading, and the breads I was producing still weren't what I had in mind (and I wasn't even sure I'd ever had any bread like what I had in mind), used Reinhart, Hamelman, etc. Still, none of those quite got me there.... At the same time, because I'd been experimenting quite a bit, I learned more over time than I think I'd even realized at the time, and that's part of it.... Time, and practice. You just can't dismiss the significance of those two elements in learning how to make good bread. No one recipe can teach anybody how to make good bread. It's as much an art as it is a science,... and maybe even more so. I used to teach college English, and it's the same thing. I can help you learn how to deconstruct a sentence and a paragraph and an essay and an argument. I can correct your grammar and your spelling. I can give good advice about making your sentence or paragraph or essay better. I can tell you what's wrong with it. But ultimately you're the one who's got to write it the best way you can. Nobody can really teach you how to write great stuff. But about bread.... Looking around the internet helped enormously, and I obsessively searched til I found what sounded more to the point in terms of what I was groping around for, a lot of info on strictly sourdough leavening, discovering Alan Scott and then Jackal here at egullet, both of whom nudged up my understanding of what I could do on my own to a whole nother level. I'd look up his tutorial here, if I were you. It seems really complex and complicated, if you've never worked with sourdough, and in many facets I guess it is, but once you become familiar with the various elements and the technique, it's actually supremely simple. And that's the wonder of it. It was a major breakthrough for me. Together with Ed Wood's Classic Sourdoughs book which is enormously helpful insofar as offering tutorials on how to care for a sourdough culture. Those sources really challenged me to learn how to make the best bread I know how to make. It wasn't easy. It took time. It was maddening and often totally disheartening. In the long run, it pushed me right up to a whole nother level of understanding how making really good bread is actually not that difficult. Of course it would have been easier had I had someone standing next to me saying, "That's wrong," or "That's good," or "Do it this way," etc. If women still baked bread the way they used to? Before the advent of commercial yeast? I suspect more of us would come by it more naturally than we do today. Anyway.... Can you replicate what I do in a scaled down time-frame? I think you can. I've never done it to quite that extent, but Jackal and others have discussed this around here a lot. If I were you, I'd look up Jackal's tutorial and also get Lepard's book and start there. If you want really good bread, I don't think it's possible using Bittman's minimalist and super-minimalist approach. You'll get a home-baked loaf that is marginally more interesting than what we're most of us accustomed to, but not much more. To get anything like what people like Jackal and I and others here produce, you have to bump up your learning curve a bit, be willing to experiment and practice and spend some concentrated time up front. In one of several possible scenarios, that might mean making a starter one night before bed and leaving it til you get home from work the next day at which time you could work with it in one of a number of possible ways. You could make the final dough according to one of the recipes in Lepard's book and then bake it that night, or you could put the shaped loaves in the refrigerator and bake them the next day. For a longish process like that, you'd start with much cooler water than you might be used to, and very small amounts of yeast because you want the leavening to work slowly rather than quickly, which will give you more flavorful breads, and as Dougal suggested above, bread with better keeping qualities. Anything warm and fast will yield a bland bread that will dry out in about the time it takes to cool from the bake. You might try Reinhart's Ancient Bread, for example, which works with ice-cold water and a tiny amount of yeast. You could also double or triple a batch of dough you like, bake it off and then freeze the loaves and refresh them. That would simplify the whole thing by just allowing a concentrated chunk of work to produce a bigger batch and so you wouldn't have to do it that often and you'd have bread in the freezer waiting. But anyway, the 5 minute approach sounds like a good option and may actually be similar to what I'm suggesting above (I don't know for certain, and I've never tried it), and also Lepard offers some fairly expedient options for making good bread. Try his barm or his maize. They're actually very doable and fairly simple (especially when you do them a few times), and it's good bread. Sorry for the length. Hope that didn't annoy you beyond measure.

As for myself, I'd like to see you start your own thread about your bread... with recipes, of course! We already have a dinner thread, a lunch thread, a breakfast thread, and a dessert thread. I'd love to see what you're doing. ← What am I doing?... http://www.thevillagebakeryonline.com/ I'd give you recipes, but then I'd have to kill you.... eta: I hope the spirit in which that was intended isn't lost on the department of homeland security.

I noticed Bittman's article yesterday. My response to the "fast" approach to breads is that while the idea is compelling, the end product never matches my expectations, or the expectations inspired by the proponents of the method. As someone noted above, while the bread might be okay, it's never as good as an authentic artisan loaf you'll pick up at an artisan bread shop. I know, not everybody has access to an artisan bread shop, and a lot of people want a fast bread they can make at home. I understand that. And I suspect the appeal of the "minimalist" bread is the better than average crust from using the iron pot. Sorry for sounding grouchy or touchy on the subject, but having worked with fast breads and moving on to the slower methods, unless you add other ingredients (flavorings, butter, milk, etc), the base dough of a quick bread is for my taste exceptionally bland, unless you crack it open right away and polish it off fairly quickly, preferably with butter or some other topping. Anyway, that's a longish intro to my gripe with Bittman's "even faster" minimalist bread, which is that to make it faster he has decided, "Just add more yeast!" Yes, well you can add more yeast to make bread even faster, but again you've just compromised the "minimalist" bread even more. Adding yeast will get your bread to rise faster, but it will invariably dumb down the result, giving you not an even blander bread, but more than likely a bread tasting more like yeast, possibly a sort of unpleasantly acidic (for lack of a better word) after taste. So, I dunno. For me? This isn't progress, it's a step backward for home cooks looking to produce good bread on their own. Okay, sorry to intrude here..... I'll back away from the thread now.

Well,... I vote for just buying an extra pan or two. Look in the wedding section at Wal Mart. You can pick up decent cake pans really cheap. ← I was right by Home Goods (TJ Maxx's home goods only store) and there were four of them sitting there -- really nice heavy non-stick ones with straight sides -- regularly $18.99/each on the clearance rack for $1.99 each. I bought all four of them! ← Wow. That's even better than Wal Mart prices. At least I think it is. Our Wal Mart stores carry wilton cake pans pretty cheap, but not $1.99 each.

Well,... I vote for just buying an extra pan or two. Look in the wedding section at Wal Mart. You can pick up decent cake pans really cheap.

And thanks for that site link. That's a great source for packaging/boxes, etc.

You're my new hero. Thank you. That's it!

Um... no. I ordered a cake from a place in New York and it shipped it in a box lined with a sort of metalic (foil) bubble wrap that apparently held dry ice. I'd never seen anything like it, and I'd like to find a source. It has the advantage of being a very slender bubble wrap, and so it doesn't bulk up a box.

I'm googling, but can't find a source for this. Anybody know where I might purchase dry ice bubble wrap?

Y'all folks are great. Thanks. Those are all great ideas.

They're unripe enough so that they won't ripen sufficiently using the usual methods, at least not to eat as they are. I thought about poaching, but wasn't sure whether they were too unripe. But I'm thinking that's probably the best option. Thanks folks.

The hurricane-force winds that tore through Louiseville and southern Indiana recently did a real number on our pear tree, and now I've got about 20 pears sitting on my kitchen counter. I'm reluctant to throw them out, but I'm not sure whether they can be salvaged. Any ideas? Can I use them? Or do I just need to toss them?

I'd also recommend looking for a local source. I live in the Louisville area and we have a fabulous, massive place locally that supplies everything imaginable to local restaurants and bakeries (and also has a small storefront for the public), including big blocks of callebaut and 1 pound bags of the stuff chopped up. Asking a local bakery or restaurant who does good desserts is a good idea, and they'll be able to direct you to a place. It'll save you a bundle on shipping, not to mention the cost may be a bit lower than the usual retail outfits.

I have the micro torch - I wanted the big one, but my husband was afraid I'd accidentally burn the house down . It works fine, but it's not all that quick to caramelize things. If you're looking for more instant results, the big torch may work better. ← Damn. Guess I'll have to exchange it. Thanks!

Okay, so I went to pick up a Bernzomatic torch today, but there were several types available. Will the Bernzomatic micro torch (3 in 1) work? Or should I get the heavier duty torch? Here's a link to the micro torch at Amazon. A review says Cooks Illustrated recommends it. http://www.amazon.com/BERNZOMATIC-CORPORAT...F/dp/B000SM8TTY

I don't know about the cream cheese, but about freezing a cake filled with pastry cream, I have had shipped to me cakes with buttercream frosting and a pastry cream filling that have been shipped frozen and they have held up beautifully. eta: here's a link to the site, but specifically their carrot cake with cream cheese in the usual (I assume) manner which they freeze and ship frozen: http://www.blackhoundny.com/products2.cfm?ID=39&nav_chooser= Is there something I'm missing? I've never frozen a cake like this, but it appears Black Hound does.

Um,... what IS the smell? Good smell? More intense smell?

Thanks Jeanne. I'll give that a try.