Wendy DeBord

I couldn't find the recipe over at Martha's site. But this is it: (it's from Baking with Julia, by Dorie Greenspan, page 296) 9.5 oz almond paste 9 oz. butter 7 oz. sugar 6 eggs 1 c. cake flour Just beat together the almond paste with the sugar until it's not lumpy (she does this in a cusinart), then add the rest of the ingredients like you would any butter cake. This batter doesn't rise any higher when baked verses how it is raw, so adjust your quantities based on that.

I made the double chocolate cake recipe and really liked it also. I had intended to bake the lastest one from CI but didn't have the time. I did however bake their (CI) german chocolate cake (I think Patrick mentioned it in another thread) and really liked it. I made their coffee, cashew version for the frosting at work and really dug that too. Dailey, CI is Cooks Illustrated magazine. They have a website (which you have to pay to view), their monthly magazine CI, plus books and their lastest magazine is called CooksCountry. So they've published several recipes over the years for chocolate cake. But the current copy of CI on the news stand has their very lastest chocolate cake version, which is what's being referred to in this thread. It's also posted on their site, which you can't access with-out paying.

Pam, can I talk you into sharing which recipes you've liked from this site, please?

I'll give it a try.............gotta give me a little time to get it into my schedule though.

Wendy, Do you have a recipe for the moist dense cakes you refer to? Lauren ← If you click on the highlighted words they'll lead you to those recipes. The Martha Stewart almond cake I refer to should be posted at her website. I'll try to find a link for you.

While we're talking about Patricks amazing photos............I recently bought this book and Patrick has us sooooooo spoiled that I thought the photos paled in comparision to Patricks! .............AND the thing is Patrick is doing the baking as well as the photography..............I'm his biggest fan!!!!!!! I could plaster my home and work with poster size reproductions of his work.

I tryed Becca's pound cake recipe last week. It's very good. I need to bake Friebergs pound cake and do a side by side taste test. As I recall, I think I like Friebergs a little more. But it all depends upon what your looking for. Friebergs has a more tender crumb and I think a dash of almond extract........where as Becca's is more like a butter cake. Both delish.

I just wanted to add, that I've experienced what your mentioning...........various shade of color. I've always used them and never had problems.

Any insight as to how Pastry's Best is choosing it's articles and who/what they feature? I don't know anything about the publisher..........so I'm curious how he's so spot on with what pro's want. Are you around Dave?

Oh, I'm glad you mentioned this Pam. I'll have to try F.'s nibs, I guess I thought they'd all be the same/similar............... I used to use their chocolates and really liked them!

I also checked out the recipe from the cover...........that's whats so fun/cool........theres good details worthy of researching. O.k...............I don't get it..........the attraction for the dragon ball. I mean I get the interest in how it's made, but I can't imagine eating it no matter how thin the sugar is. How do you avoid getting shards of the isomalt in your bites? Duckduck, ......... for the most part you get those clean slices if your cutting thru a semi frozen item verses a fresh/soft cake.

Urg............I got my issue of Chocolatier yesterday too. They have to get their delivery together! It show's Valentines articles and I recieved it on Feb 21st.........a little too late for Valentines. If your reading Michael, isn't there something you can do to speed up your delivery system?

I recieved my 4th issue yesterday in the mail. I'm still really digging this publication! But I have my first complaint..........I want 12 issues a year not 4!!! I found myself staying up late last night just to research the things I saw. I really got hooked into the demo on "Showpieces on the fly" by Stephane Treand and Michael Joy. Check it out!!! It's so simple and brilliant, typical of Treand.......... So I checked out http://www.chicagomoldschool.com website further. Lots of incredible photos to study there. It's really fasinating and educational at the same time. In a strange co-incidence I just purchased Joy's book on Monday thru JB Prince (haven't recieved it yet) and this article shows up........I'm so excited to learn about this. What's so cool is that the articles the magazine is writing/producing are even better then the exerpts from the established magazines they feature. Again, hats off to Mitch Stamm for a really clear article on brioche.....it's as good if not better then anything I've seen on the topic in any book. What book tells you the correct settings for your proof box?..........none I know of! The credits list En-Ming Hsu and Chris Northmore as pastry advisors.........I can't wait to see some articles from Hsu. I hope she'll be more visibly active.....?

I never heard of adding the gelatin Ted...........what's the reasoning......does that plate better?

I'm with Tan and Setho. But want to give one more word of caution. When going by taste with peppermint..........the fumes from the oil can fool your taste buds (cause they stay so strong floating in the air). Close the bottle your using and walk away from your area, then taste your item.

Back to flours: Just use the type the recipe calls for. Forget learning all about them for now. If you can't find the flour called for just start a thread and ask for help, everyone around here will help. Back to toffee and the right pan: Toffee doesn't need a pan with sides at all. You pour it on to you pan and it naturally spreads out free form. If you want a thinner toffee you can quickly spread it while it's very molten, spread it with a metal spatula. I pour my toffee on to a silpat pan lined with chopped salted pecans. The 5lb roast: No one can tell you how many that feeds either. Do your people eat like birds or pigs? You can to make a guess as some point. You can understand that it will shrink down as it cooks, you can make a questimate on how many it will feed. But how much it will feed depends on you and your guests. Cut it small and let them go back for more. With baking recipes: Mix up the batter first, then pick out what pan your going to bake it in. Like picking out what size box to pack your items into, judge by sight. If you wind up having too much batter for the pan, don't add all of it. Only fill your pan 3/4 of the way, never (o.k. rarely) more. If you put your batter in a pan and it doesn't even reach the sides of the pan, the pan is too big. Just scrape out the batter into another smaller pan. If you have extra batter put it in a cupcake pan and bake it off that way, instead of over filling your pan. It's all forgiving. There's only a few items that won't let you move the batter with-out deflating drasticly. Just don't be heavy handed and slam around a light batter, etc... treat it with respect as you change pans.

I'm sorry sometimes I forget which questions have been answered and which haven't...........just repost to your hearts delight, we'll notice that way. O.k. here's a tip: Stop greasing your pans. Stop buttering your pans. Stop STOP STOP. And........don't bother with flouring the pan over the fat or using cocoa powder. STOP ALL OF THAT NOW! We shall set you free! Buy a can of pan spray, use it in all applications that require greasing a pan. Forget the need to flour the pan, it's totally not needed (yes that's true!)...........just spray NO flour. There is one small thing you do need to pay attention to though: You must buy a good pan spray that does NOT include water. Many pan spray brands used to contain water as their first ingredient. Well water makes batters stick! It's the same thing with buttering a pan. If you butter a pan, butter has water in it.........and low and behold it helps your items stick to the pan, not release. It's a big fat ole myth that you can taste some difference in a pan where butter was used as a release coating. Poppy Kock!!! That's in your head 99% of the time. Save your butter for the item being baked, not the pan. Would you really want to eat an item coated in cold butter. I'd rather eat a item baked in a super light coating of pan spray cause you can't taste or see it. Next tip (along the same lines), line your pans with parchment paper!: You'll never go wrong with lining your pans with parchment paper. You'll never have a item stuck in your pan again. I still spray the bottom of my pan with pan spray, that's so the parchment really sticks down flat to the pan.........so no batter can get under it. I line all (well most of them) my baked goods with parchment. When I make a bundt cake, I bake them in tube pans lined with parchment........and they never ever stick to the pan. Well.......we also don't own any bundt pans at work..........so I can't use them if I wanted. A word of advice with lining your pans.........you've got to cut the paper to fit the pan. You can't fold it and cram it into the pan. It MUST lie flat against the pan to work properly. In your corners, cut the paper so you don't have any folds. Or just lay the paper along one side of the pan leaving the ends unpapered, just sprayed. You really only need the paper for the bottom part of the pan. After all you can use a knive to release the sides of your item from the pan. So when I say I'm lining my pans, I'm only ever lining the bottom of my pans, not the sides.

How about: (hope I'm not repeating what's already written) chocolate chip coconut macaroons flavored palmiers, coated with chocolate (if you had the time you could make your own flavored puff pastry, like pistachio or chocolate cinnamon) a ton of brownies.........all different flavors and textures. Drizzle with tempered chocolate so they don't need refridgeration Fruit turn overs made from puff pastry last a couple days or/and you can make them up in bulk then freeze and cook off a couple everyday. A variety of shortbread cookies..........not butter or decorated sugar cookies

Reality time: Sometimes I'm mumuring the same thing Chris.....or shaking my head saying "hell if I know". There aren't always simple answers...........theres so many variables with baking that it's almost impossible to figure out what the "wrong" factor is. Shirley C. was supposed to have a book out on baking, what like last year. But to the best of my knowledge it's not ready yet. Even great scientists struggle figuring out/singling out what reaction is causing what. We make educated guesses around here based on experience........but who knows our/my guesses could be way off from the real science of what went wrong. So jump in, go for it!! It's exactly like learning anything else, give yourself time and repetition to learn. Where you want to go on this topic depends upon you. I wish I could write a couple pages and clarify all of baking for you all. I'd be rich too if I could. We can reccomend some good baking books for beginners and someone or everyone will come in here behind me and tell you "no don't get this book, get that book.". The best I can do is tell you which books I'd buy if I had to re-learn basic baking, and which ones I wish I hadn't spent money on. I wouldn't buy a baking book that was dumbed down for begginers or overly simplified. Often they leave out the brain work for you so your not learning as you go. They can mystify and pass on incomplete information on baking and pastisery so you never learn the 'why's' and 'hows' of baking. I'd choose books that show me specific skills, books that show me how those skills relate to other skills. Books that show me that 'this', is related to 'that'. If I had to relearn baking tommarow I'd choose a teaching book from a major culinary school. I particularly like Le Cordon Bleu Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen. I know the fact that it's called a "professional" book will run off most people.......you gotta remember it's to teach you how to bake....not a book for only professionals. Theres several similar teaching/professional books available but I can't reccomend those. Typcially because they don't stand alone as a teaching tool with-out a teacher teaching you as you go. Where as Gisslens book does a very good job of teaching with explainations, not a mear listing of recipes. He explains flours, sugars, fats, weighing ingredients, etc.... He talks about how things relate and interact with each other. His book even includes terms for review and questions for review if you were inclined to want to learn along with turning out a decent cake. O.k..........I'm sure many peoples eyes are glazing over.........I know you just want to learn some basics of baking..........but this really is where I'd dirrect you as a person who just wants to learn the basics. It's not alot different then opening RBL's Cake Bible, as far as difficulty goes. In fact, I think Gisslen is more simplified, more basic, covers a much wider range of items, is more accurate, more trust worthy for the quality of the baked goods it produces.

How to pick your recipes: The easiest short cut to achieving this, with-out learning a great deal about every book and every chef is to listen to more advanced bakers opinions of a book and author. Understand that you'll never see us all agree on any one book or author, that's a fact! But there are a couple authors and books that the vast majority of us will agree on.........seek those out. You can just look thru our forum (Pastry & Baking) and see that a few books and authors have some huge threads.....theres your clue. If left totally on your own to find reliable recipes there are some sources that are typically reliable. Major brands like Kraft, Pillsbury, Cooks Illustrated, Godiva, Martha Stewart, etc... do alot of testing of their recipes before publishing. Where as Ms. Q. with her blog and cake website might not have even baked the recipe she's giving you. Looking closer, Ms. Q. might even be posting on this very thread..........just cause they are here doesn't give them instant crediblity (that includes myself). You gotta figure out who you can trust over a period of time.

Urg............where to begin..........first, I simply refuse to let someone label themselves a baking dumbass! Imo, you can only label yourself that if you refuse to listen to good advice from experienced people and can't follow a recipe as is written. You really don't have to know alot about baking to bake well. But you definately must be able to follow written dirrections to have success baking. It is very different then cooking and to a certain point you need to think of it as a different skill, set of skills. It's a little more like science class then a cooking class is. Even though working with weights is far more exact, using cups as measurements will be just fine. It's worked for millions of Americans for countless years. You just have to understand (in the back of your head) that HOW you fill that measuring cup will effect your finished baked good. Then you have to have a sense of accuracy. We'll be searching for the best cake (in threads here at eG) and someone will test the core recipe we are working with and pronouce it shit because it wasn't great when they made it. But then as they write more they reveal that they didn't have the correct ingredients, didn't follow the method of mixing and then put it in the wrong pan in too hot of an oven. You just can't find success baking if you aren't accurate and if you don't follow the dirrections. Perhaps some of the confusion happens when beginning bakers learn that advanced bakers break rules and don't always follow recipes exactly...so they think they can also. But baking isn't random. So right this second, if you can follow written dirrections and the dirrections your given are good/accurate your a baker! But of course it's not exactly that simple (but almost). Now you gotta figure out where to find the best recipes with the best written dirrections........and the book with the prettiest cover isn't necessarily the book you should be trusting. Theres authors out there with mutiple well selling baking books but because a book sells well doesn't mean it's a really good book on baking. I got into a discussion a couple months back with a website owner who had a top 10 list of must have baking books. His creteria included books that appeared to be reader freindly.........judged so by a critic whom has no real skill in baking themselves. How can you be on a panel to judge baking books if you don't bake?.....makes no sense to me.

Wow.............thank-you!! Your photos did turn out well, as you mentioned in another thread. Please look here, for a complete list of our Demo threads.

What I wish I could do is give everyone confidence to trust your own instinct and common sense in baking. I don't think you can find anyone serious about baking that thinks using imperial measurements are equal to weighing ingredients or even accurate compared to weighing. Yet, all the baking books in the U.S. still use imperial measurements and rarely include ingredient weight. I can't stress just how incorrect, inacurate this is...........but it goes on. Similarly theres other myths that get carried on, that have been disspelled and lots of scarey forwarnings written in baking books that aren't exactly accurate. I think people get all confused about baking because of all the things/warnings they've read. What was written in 1970's (just a random date, it could be 1990 or 2004) can be completely incorrect to something written today. Our knowledge has grown and theres lots of incorrect information still sitting in books, still being purpetuated by authors who are incorrect. What was once known is being disproved or relearned each and everyday........science is advancing everyday. This won't have alot of weight/impression making to you all, unless other professionals back me up........so I'm asking them to please do so with a few remarks. Perhaps if you see us talk in volume we can equal the credibility of RBL and other authors whom people believe, excluding all else. If a recipe says bake in a 8"x 8" pan, that's a guide, not a rule. That yeilds the amount of batter that fits that size pan, to a depth that they suggest. But you can bake that same amount/yeild of batter in several mini muffin cups, you could bake it in a 9"x 9" pan and get a thinner layer, you could bake it in a 10" x 10" pan and get an even thinner cake. You can take that same batter and bake it in a 4" x 12" pan or a tube cake pan, etc...... Do you all know that most professional (European) baking books don't suggest a pan size for their recipes at all. Imagaine, baking with-out knowing your yeild. It was scarey at first for me. Just as it will be scarey for you all to believe me/us about interchanging pan sizes. If you know what type of cake your making, then you can deduct what kind of pan you should bake that batter in. If you know what type of batter your making, then you can deduct what type of mixing method you should use, with-out dirrections in your recipe. If you know what type of batter your baking, you can figure out if the pan your using needs to be sprayed with pan release/or grease or if it needs to be fat free for the cake to cling to it's walls. If you know that most recipes call for filling the pan 3/4's of the way full, then you can put your batter in any pan, following that guideline. If you see you've got a huge amount of batter to squeeze into a small pan, that possibly the recipe has a mistaken written in it. And conversely, if you have a tiny yeild of batter that doesn't begin to fill your pan, you can suspect that it won't be enough for that pan. Then once you've got your batter 3/4's of the way full in your pan, how will you know how long to bake the item? Again.......the same concepts apply. If you know how to test a cake, a cookie, a brownie, a sponge cake, etc... for doneness. Testing for that doneness is the same, regardless of the size of the item. If it's a mini cupcake sized brownie or a full sheet pan worth of brownies, you still want to bake it until done, yet not over done. Professional bakers, don't judge baked goods based on time. We know that every oven varies and no two are exactly alike. We know our oven might be running hot, we know someone may have opened the door and let cool air into our oven. Baking by time is as inacurate as using imperial measurements. YET, all our baking books include how long something takes to bake. Again, I ask you to trust me/us, I ask other bakers to chime in and back me up on this fact, please. (Ooops gotta run to work, but I'll come back and hopefully tye this all together to make more sense)

A couple of thoughts: I'd suggest not buying the cake pans sold in grocery stores. It's like buying your knives or pans from the grocery store, it's the same inferior quality. If the ones by your home are like the ones by my home, they are thin metal with a thin non-stick coating. The thinness of the metal can effect how your cakes bake in them. And the coating on those pans usually becomes compromised the first time you slice something dirrectly in the pan. From then on, they rust easily. The professional pans I like really typically cost the same or less then other types. I like the heavy duty aluminum pans that are 3" deep as my favorite all around pans. I'll give you a couple links to where you can purchase them tommarrow (gotta run to work now). The 3" deep pans are ideal because you can use them to bake taller cakes, if wanted. For instance I use them for baking all my cheesecakes instead of using spring form pans which leak in water baths. I also use them in place of cake rings to assemble my tortes in them.....and I use them to mold ice cream bombes too. Your 12" pan would make a nice size for when a recipe calls for a water bath. You can easily place a 10, 9, 8, 6 etc... round into it. Last.............I/we really hope to teach/help people understand baking here. If you understand the basic methods of mixing and the basic chemical reactions of ingredients you can feel confident to zig when a recipe tells you to zag (or feel comfortable using a 7" pan when the recipe calls for a 10"). Professional bakers increase and decrease recipe sizes all the time............just like chefs do with savory recipes. Asked to everyone here:Do we have a need for more clarification here? Do you want more basic help/info.? If so, please feel free to speak up and I'll try to start a new thread on that topic and see if we can get everyone more confident baking and making adjustments to recipes.

My last batches with reg. salt....the salt incorporated as expected, it wasn't enough volume to taste the salt. Next time I'll see if I can incorporate the fleur de sel after the caramel has been poured into the pan to set. Finding the right density so it doesn't sit on top of the caramel nor sink to the bottom.