Wendy DeBord

Oh man you just wrote something I think I accidently discovered........I made some candys dipped in chocolate and set them on a textured sheet of acetate (first time for this). When they dried I was horrified that some didn't get a clean tight contact with the acetate. I was trying to keep the chocolate neat and I placed them down "normally" so I wondered if I should have sort of dropped them down onto the sheet to get a better contact? I also had another issue with these.........I had a white fondant center and used reg. chocolate not thinned but you can see through the chocolate in places. I now have to go back and mask both these imperfections-yuk waste of time. Any advice how I should have handled this better?

Well I agree with that point Steve, except I sort of think thats going to have more importance only when we tweek 'the best'. I believe the brand of cocoa doesn't do any drastic changes to the over-all texture, moisture, crumb perfection we're seeking. As in mkfradins post.......her side by side taste tests have people choosing a wetter/denser cake then what I offered up. We as a group need to do more side by side taste comparisions to determine really which cake is prefered. Baking and tasting one cake at a time will make it harder to determine your favorite. If you keep a percentage of each cake in the freezer until you accumulate several that would be ideal. Have any of you gotten further and made a couple of the posted recipes to begin comparing between those?

Did anyone else get a chance to bake any of these white cakes?

Absolutely lovely ladies! Thanks for including photos!!!!!!!!! I'm lagging behind everyone right now because I've very busy at work. But I promise I'll get testing asap. I took a naked picture of the Wooley cake today at work but will have to post at a later date. Just breifly a note to mkfradin: when I make this cake in large batches I leave the cakes in the pans and put them on a sheet tray. I cover the whole sheet pan with a sheet pan cover (large plastic baggie). It's quicker then individually wrapping and does the same thing steaming them. You also can stack your sheet pans with the cakes in the pan on top of each other, that seals them up and steams them too. Doesn't take any more effort really. I gave up on the M Braun recipe a while ago. I'd get the weirdest results even though I followed the changed recipe. It's texture was like rubber with air pockets that shot striaght up in a line...as if you had poked holes in it. I would like to know the exact science of what does that, if anyone knows? I'm excited by how many people are participating in these tests. I think in the end we all will have a damn fine cake we all can brag about. Thanks everyone........and keep on testing and posting results, I promise I'll get back here and update the records after this weekend.

Boy oh boy I just have to jump on this band wagon too. A couple of you had me laughing pretty good, thanks! First I think we need to imagine what it's like to make buttercream at home with a tiny mixer on the kitchen counter. That's foreign to several of us. Where I'm heading is HEIGHT. Unless your very tall your visually limited when you pour into a kitchen aid sitting on an averagely HIGH kitchen counter.....and the bowl is closer to your face- I can see how someone might be scared the syrup would splash out at you. SO from that deduction I can understand why Kthull has his method and why Carp used the sheild as a saftey blanket. I think we also have to remember that in these little kitchen aides is waht like 6 whites at the most.....it's tiny. THEN when you cook a sugar syrup in such a small amount you're highly likely to over heat because you have to consider the pan continues cooking the syrup while your picking it up to move to you mixer. I then THINK what happens to people is their syrup has gotten way too hot and when it hits the bowl and whisk they've got vertually a hard crack shooting around in their bowl. When we/professionals make buttercream we're using mixers set at a lower height, we can see clearly into our bowls. We're not heating 3 tbsp. worth of syrup, we know when to take it off the heat depending upon how heavy our pan is and how far we need to walk it to the bowl...during that time the syrup isn't turning into hard crack. But of course Lesley and the other pros here are correct and only giving great advice. I just wanted to point out that it's not comparing apples to apples what we do at work and what people in home kitchens experince. Quite frankly it's easier to make a huge batch then a tiny one-I think! O.k. I'll shut up and sit down now.........oh wait, if we get to pick favorites.... I agree with a egg yolk butter cream for taste and for easiest method for a meringue- a water bath beats a syrup for home baking. Hey where's Annie's site I want to take a peek too?

I think the point is why should you have to ask to see it, why isn't it offered with dinner? I can tell you it isn't exactly lady like to ask to see the dessert menu while your looking at the dinner menu. Granted here at eg you've got foodies who don't care if it's lady like. But in other social circles that does apply. Personally I think dessert if part of the whole meal and should be included from the start. But in so many places dessert is an after thought-or something they haven't given any serious thought to. There's alot of restaurants that shouldn't be in that catagory-but they are.........reminds me of Zillas old restaurant. I can understand the not wanting to order dessert before dinner too. Who knows if you'll want it by then. As far as excluding desserts from the main menu-do you mean printed on it? That only works in fine dinning situations. I change my dessert menu weekly and the chef changes his seasonally if that frequently, they have to be printed seperately. Usually the featured entree for the night is a verbal, not written. I think you get in dessert sales what you put into it. Having been lucky enough to work in a place thats the opposite of Teds experince I now see more to sales then just the quality of the product coming out of the kitchen. It really does come down to the sales staff/wait staff. I think they make or break a restaurant. In Teds example his chef has tried verbally to clue the staff into the importance of selling, but honestly it's time to let people go that don't perform. You can't let a negative vibe run/ruin your sales. If the waitstaff doesn't realize selling extras inpacts their pockets-their too dumb to qualify as staff I'd keep. I'm currently working in one kitchen where the wait staff is outstanding. It's remarkable, something I've never seen to this extent before. In March a dead dead month at a golf clubs they ran a compeition on dessert sales. I had one girl sell over 200 in the month (I don't have all the numbers yet-but I thought they were remarkable given this type of food outlet), several other girls were over 100. They gave the winner $55.00 cash.....big deal- right-but they regularly run competitions and the wait staff really gets into it. It sort of cuts into their bordom and they have fun with this. Ultimately so many things interrelate in the restaurant. But it still all comes down to the owners/managers and chefs.......too often they get stuck looking too narrowly at a couple factors instead of seeing the place as a whole and working it that way.

Oh yeah, butter in ganche is great. BUT one word of caution....I've come across one brand of chocolate that doesn't behave well with butter in the ganche...I'm drawing a blank on it's name (it's very past my bed time). Really your adding butter for taste not enough really for texture. If you get your ganche to the right temp. that's what makes it handle easily. This won't be hard, I think you'll be please with the results.

This is Martha Stewarts recipe. Of which, I for one have had great success with her baking recipes. Bring to a boil in a large sauce pan: 1 qt. whole milk Stir in: 3/4 c. arborio rice 1 tsp. cinnamon 1/2 tsp. salt 1 vanilla bean split Reduce heat and cook rice until it's very tender and absorbed all the liquid. You'll need to attend to stirring occasionally. Remove pan from heat. Add: 3/4 c. sugar Cover and cool down to room temp. Take out vanilla bean before preceeding with the rest of the cake. To make this into a cake use a 8" buttered and floured pan, and a 350f oven temp. Combine the rice mixture with: 3 pounds fresh ricotta, previously drained overnight. 3 eggs 3 yolks 1/2 c. sugar (this is additional to above) They give aprox. 65 to 70 minutes to bake. If the top takes on too much color before it's set, cover the top with foil while finishing the bake. This really is a custard more then a cake, yet the photo shows a cleanly sliced cake. It's actually gotten to me, I'll definately try this recipe when I can work it into my schedule. If you make this-PLEASE come back and tell me what you think of it, o.k.? thinking more.........you know this could be seasoned a number of ways for variety. Good luck.

o.k. I will post it-but it's not for a couple more months.

Lots of things to comment on.....First I agree, buttercream, jam and ganche is alot of sweetness in one cake- verging on gross. You had beginners luck pouring ganche over buttercream because they typical do not adhear to each other. Your "luck" was that you hit the temp.s just right. But in any typical situation you'd watch your ganche slide right off the buttercream, it also typically won't work nicely over a jam coating either. So the answer I'll give you is, do NOT try to repeat this on a wedding cake thats going to sit at room temp. for a couple hours. You will run into problems. If you want a ganche finish do your undercoating with ganche only. Use it slightly cool to fill in any areas not perfectly smooth. Then you can pour your liquid ganche over the cake and it will adhear and look smooth. As for the jam in this recipe-they add sugar to it......that's not necessary or wanted-it's tooooooo sweet. If you want this glaze you should use it in between your layers not under your poured ganche finish. Same with the butter cream-use it between your layers not on the exterior. Flavor wise.....I might mix the jam into my butter cream or use a rasp. emulsion or puree to flavor the butter cream and use it very thinnly between torted layers. Keep the sweetness of the fruit down by choosing a sugarless jam or puree. That should compliment the pound cake and ganche instead of competeing with it. HTH?

I was going thru my recipe file last night searching for Mothers Day ideas and came across a recipe I saved for ricotta cake from Martha Stewart. It has a photo and a nice description too-I've never made anything quite like this-but it does look very tastie! They describe it as "soft as a down pillow, creamy like a custard, and lightly flavored with vanilla and cinnamon." They serve it with strawberries. Do you have any interest in me posting the recipe-since I can't give a personal reccomendation with it? Also you might find it at her site, she calls it a"Pastiera with strawberry sauce". HTH?

Ah, I'm learning. I did breifly work at a bakery that had the more expensive Sweetartjet system and I thought it seemed superior to icing sheets. When you lay icing sheets down you can tell thats what it is on a cake. But with this other printing process since it prints dirrectly on your fondant it's a real fooler. This is the process I'm looking for. Thank-you for giving me a name for this, now I can call around to local bakeries and find someone who owns a sweet art jet. Sweetart, do you have a photo that you could post to show everyone how well this prints? Also how does it work, can I use a disk or is it only a scanner system? Theres a couple top cake decorators out there that are using your system (I believe).....do you work with them at all and can you post any advance examples of what their doing with your printer? From what I've seen this could really be an amazing tool. I know the top decorators print onto chocolate plastic, are there other surfaces that you know work well too in addition to fondant? Icing Magic, sorry I must have mis-understood. I am familar with sugarcraft and have ordered from them serveral times. I agree their service is great-I have nothing but praise for them.

I bought one with a handle but it's driving me nuts. I keep planeing my thumb on .......I prefer the ones with-out handles the narrower area keeps my fingers and knuckles safer.

I understand where your coming from wanting to divide a recipe so you don't have waste. Honestly I don't think it's a good idea at all, I think you won't be able to judge these recipes properly. When you work with too little or too much in your bowl it does effect quality. Your more likely to over-mix or under-mix, which to a cake recipe, technique can make or break it. Any possiblity you could share your over flow with a neighbor? I've done that and they LOVED getting a gift and wanted to participate in rating them too. Otherwise most cakes freeze very well.

I went though the previous posts and sor far this is what we have: Lorea: gave it a 4.5 Moopheus: baked it but didn't give it a number-will you? Mklynch: gave it a 4. Mkfradin: offered their favorite recipe, but did you get a chance to bake this first one we are testing? Is so, will you give it a number 1-5 please? Ladybug: gave it a 4.5 Kthull: gives it a 5. KarenS: offered us her recipe to try. Did you get a chance to try this first one? If so will you post your results 1-5? Nightscotsman: gave it a 4.5. Samaki: gives it a 4. RMR: gave it a 4.5. JanKK: rated it a 4, and she's the first person to anty-up with a recipe she knows beats this first one. Everyone that baked the first one-would you try Jankk's recipe when you can and rank it 1-5 too? Everyone that baked this chocolate cake, if you have a tested known better recipe please share it "anty-up baby"? You can bake any of the other recipes posted here too...using the first one from Wooley as your base to judge up or down from that. Lets see where this takes us. Anyone else who baked this first testing cake that I missed-please join in and give us your thoughts and rank the Wooley recipe. I'll add future rankings back in this exact post.

Your right bleudauvergne, we should establish the criteria for judgement. Some people on other threads naturaly did this and taking their lead we can do the same. How about a 1-5 rating for these 3 criterias: 1. Over all taste 2. Texture, moisture, crumb. 3. Other: could be used to rate appearance or something that doesn't fit nicely into the first two judgements. You need to make a note and tell us what your "other" issue is. 4. Then we should add the total numbers from above that you gave and thats your final score on this item. So if you give something 5 for taste, 3 for moisture and a 4 for cracked top-your final score would be 12. BUT on second thought-I think this will become too complicated. Personally I think it makes the most sense to keep things simple and just pick one number 1-5 to represent your over all judgement. We are looking for the best recipe, not building the best recipe (right now at least) so we don't need to know details. It's an eliminating and antying up system. Anyone disagree? As to dividing up the recipes-lets just do that naturally, people will come and go as they want anyway. I hope that we can get as many people as possible to try each recipe and post their results because as I've learned so far everyone has a different opinion on what is best. So the more people that bake and give opinions the more balanced the judgements will be. Ideally everyone would bake each recipe....but that's too much to ask for. I'll attempt to bake them all so I can bring everyones opinion together from my experience. Joni-I use both oils interchangably. I've never detected a difference when used in a cake recipe.

Ha, thats interesting and hard to believe. Maybe instead of using a quick and tastie ganche they are tempering chocolate in a small machine-hense the amount of time to prepare............that would account for the amount of time it takes them to prep. And maybe they only have one little table top machine and thats why they can only do 1 at a time. It's pretty silly, but thats the only real excuse I can think of.

Can you clairfy a little more.........when you say ricotta cake are meaning a cheesecake or other? And what's you description of a "decent ricotta cake" so we understand exactly what your looking for? Thanks

Great JanKK! That's the whole point, finding the best.......we needed someone to offer up a tested recipe they believe is better. O.k. testers time to check out JanKK's recipe. Anyone else have a TRIED recipe they can offer up thats better then the Wooley recipe? Also, if we could post photos of our work I think that would be very helpful as we compare.

Samaki, do you refridgerate overnight or leave on the counter?

Samaki, at one time used to make that chiffon cake as my all purpose chocolate cake. But it was too dense and sunken, it's density didn't work well in tortes or sheet cake form. Your correction on that going down to 1/2 c. oil makes it identical to how she does it in a cake roll, right? Well, that makes alot of sense because I liked this cake recipe in a roll, but not baked in round pans...........when I was doing the 3/4 c. oil. So thats a good tip! I would definately need to do a side by side taste of these two Clarks and Bergens.....my gut tells me a cross between the two would be perfect. If we could have the crumb of Clarks and the richness of Bergens it would be ideal. I have to run to work now........but maybe we should disuss how to combine both? P.S. Jan, I'm glad you desided to post! Welcome!! Anyone else hiding, come on out and join us.

Oh my, thats funny.......now that you mentioned it I've noticed that too with "pain in the butt" custumers..........I never put it together. Thats how my father sits at every restaurant table and he's a PIB customer always. Next time I see that I'm getting away from that table fast.

I sort of think its you peanut butter....even though Jiff is a good brand, there must be something about its taste that changes after baking. Logically your cookies aren't stale the next day. So the flavor you don't like is coming from your ingredients regardless of how they taste raw.....it's the baked combo you don't like. So I'd try this: use another peanut butter cookie recipe with your Jiff and see if that taste develops in that recipe too. If so, it's got to be the peanut butter. Then try a different brand of pb and use it in your recipe and see if you still get that off taste. Personally I've had to use what ever pb work has had. Yesterday I was making a kids treat with pb and rice crispys and I noticed I really didn't like their pb. It's dryer, less sweet and almost bitter-ish compared to what I use at home. I haven't looked at the back of the label in a while but are they putting sugar or anything other then peanuts in pb?

Icing magic thanks for the offer, but I need to do this local. I'm a very hands on person.....and will only be printing the card images, the rest will be free hand work.

Just some thoughts/opinions off the top of my head........first-I've baked the ice-water cake from cookstalk (I've baked several items from there that were excellent), but I believe my own white cake version beats theirs. So if it's o.k. I can eliminate that one. I'm also thinking we should eliminate RBL's white choc. whisper cake from this catagory-because it's a white chocolate cake, not a straight white cake. Opinions on that? Do you agree or disagree? If you agree with me so far, that gets us down to 4 recipes to test: 1. KThulls cake with the pudding 2. mkFradin's 3. Trishes cake 4. Samaki's version of RBL's standard white cake. DO you want to summit that one? (If you post this, can you include RBL's metric too for people that work in weights?) So we have 3 or 4 cakes to begin with. I suppose it would be best if we each made as many as possible to compare notes. So if everyone picks 1 or 2 cakes to test we should be able to narrow down this batch of trials. So do what you can and report back. OH also -no ingredient substitutions, if you don't have all the exact ingredients then chose a different recipe to test....otherwise it becomes too confusing to compare notes. Side note: Samaki: you said you've been playing around testing but are you saying that RBL's cake still beats where your experiments have lead? Replacing part of the butter with oil has been something I talked about with others for a while now with both white and yellow cakes. I tend to agree it makes for a better cake after refridgeration. Have you ever played with using an instant pudding verses the cornstarch to effect texture? If so what were your results?