Strawberry Basil Pound Cake

This week, I was gifted with so many things that I just knew I needed to show them off! First, some lovely girls from the church across the street were walking around our neighborhood handing out bags of fresh basil and oregano from their community garden! Isn't that awesome? It smelled SO good, folks.

I was also a lucky recipient of some bakeware tools from Pyrex, thanks to Foodbuzz! They sent me some magnetic measuring cups, magnetic measuring spoons, and a large glass mixing bowl. Guys, I can't tell you how happy I am with these items. The cups and spoons are shaped with a little spout on them for easy scooping and pouring, and their magnets make them SO easy to keep together. The mixing bowl is the perfect size for mixing by hand, and my rubber spatula is pretty much in love with its smooth interior. Yay, thank you Pyrex and Foodbuzz!

And thanks to the suggestion of a friend, I decided to make a strawberry and basil pound cake with all of my new stuff! Luckily I already had some strawberry puree that I'd been planning to use for something else. And I have just bought the most adorable mini loaf pans at the craft store!

This recipe makes four small (7 oz) pound cakes, or one large pound cake.

Ingredients

• 1 cup sugar
• 5 tbsp butter, melted
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup gluten-free all-purpose flour*
• generous 1/4 tsp baking powder
• pinch salt
• generous 1/3 cup strawberry puree
• 2 fresh basil leaves, finely chopped

*My GF flour mixture consists of 3 parts brown rice flour, 3 parts white rice flour, 2 parts potato starch, 1 part tapioca starch, and 1/2 tsp xanthan gum per cup of flour. The original recipe called for cake flour, which is fine, too, but for a gluten-free recipe, I prefer not to use cake flour most of the time.

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 325° F and spray your loaf pans with cooking spray.
2. Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and set aside.
3. Stir the butter and sugar until well mixed (feel free to use your kitchenaid for this, but if you don't have one, hand mixing works beautifully).
4. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well between each addition.
5. Add the flour mixture slowly, mixing well until it is cohesive.
6. Add the strawberry puree and basil and mix until well combined.
7. Pour into pans (for my mini pans it was about 1/2-cup batter per pan - it made 4 cakes).
8. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Serving and Eating

Friends, this cake is so good that my boyfriend can't stop eating it! I suggest that you serve it with some vanilla cream (recipe here), or even a nice strawberry glaze on top. The strawberry flavor in this cake isn't overwhelming, but the entire combination is a sweet, gently spicy, soft cake.

[The photo at the top of this blog has been entered in the Gluten Free Photo Contest!]

Strawberry Pie

Well, I've been on this weird strawberry kick lately. After making strawberry icing for some chocolate cupcakes, and then strawberry cupcakes (sorry, no pics or blogs about those), my next adventure was a strawberry pie.

I borrowed this lovely recipe for the pie crust and changed it up to suit me. Well, by "changing it up" I mean that I substituted in my gluten-free flour. I also decided to do the first part of the process in my food processor since I don't have a pastry cutter, then did the second part as specified in the recipe. The dough turned out great!

I then borrowed this recipe for the pie filling. It looked so yummy before it was even baked!



As the pie was busy baking, I noticed that it looked gorgeous and the crust smelled SO GOOD - like puff pastry!



But after a while, I thought I smelled something burning. Indeed, the pie has burst somehow, and spilled all over the place! It has oozed out sweet red goo all over the tray I set it on and and overflowed down into the bottom of the oven, which was now busy bubbling like molten lava.



Yes, folks, my oven actually caught on fire. Luckily, my boyfriend knows how to use a fire extinguisher, and I happen to have one under the sink in my kitchen, so he quickly came to the rescue. Gosh, what a mess!



I inspected the pie to see what caused the damage. All I can guess is that I didn't seal the crust well enough on this spot. Boo.



Luckily, the pie wasn't a total failure. It didn't get to cook is as long as specified, so it was still a bit runny inside. However, my boyfriend says it's delicious (I haven't even gotten to taste it yet).

World of Warcraft's Delicious Chocolate Cake

Premises and Promises

In order to bridge the gap between World of Warcraft and my kitchen, I've decided to embark on a new endeavor to make WoW food in real life. That is to say that I will be taking in-game recipes and attempting to recreate them in my own kitchen.

There will, of course, be a certain amount of improvisation on my part, in order to make some of these (unrealistic) recipes work; however, I do intend to stick as closely to the game recipes as possible. As time goes on, I also intend to branch out into recipes from other video games, but in the beginning it will be purely WoW items. If there's one you'd like to suggest, please send me a PM.

Blizzard's Delicious Chocolate Cake

I figured that a good place to start would be with a popular item from Burning Crusade days - the Delicious Chocolate Cake. (Since I am a pastry chef, I intend to stick to the baked goods, but we'll see where things go in the future.)

Recipe Assessment

Things to note about this recipe:

• Simple Flour, not cake flour - this means the cake will be light and fluffy.
• Ice Cold Milk - this means the cake will be rich, especially in ratio to the flour
• Mild Spices - perhaps this could be the chocolate? I'm not sure what to use for this.
• Small Egg - high ratio of eggs-to-flour. This cake will be rich and thick after all.
• Flask of Port - quite a large amount of alcohol, although this could be tasty.
• Mageroyal - this could be lumped into the spices, or add an accent to the chocolate.
• There is no chocolate listed in the ingredients. Interesting.
• There is no sugar listed in the ingredients. Also interesting.
• There are berries in the picture (below) but not in the recipe. Heh.

Image Assessment

The first thing that I noticed is the icon doesn't look anything like a chocolate cake. It looks like white cake with some sort of berry filling and green goo on top. I could decorate it to look like that, but let's see what the item looks like in-game.



So in-game, the actual item looks (or is presumed to look) more like a chocolate cake with some berries on top. I'll shoot for this model because it seems more fitting for the name anyhow.

Kelley's Delicious Chocolate Cake

Now that I'd seen what the original recipe and cake look like, it was time for me to recreate this in my own kitchen. I decided to do this in the style used by Mythbusters. I'd make one cake using the exact recipe from the game (substituting spices/mageroyal as I see fit). Then I'd make another cake using the recipe but expanding it to make it an actual delicious chocolate cake.

Translated WoW Recipe

• 8x Simple Flour = 2 cups flour (assuming 1 part = 1/4 cup)
• 4x Ice Cold Milk = 1 cup milk (assuming 1 part = 2 tbsp)
• 4x Mild Spices = 4 tbsp cocoa (assuming spices = chocolate)
• 8x Small Egg = 4 extra-large eggs (cause who can find small eggs?)
• Flask of Port = 1/2 cup port wine
• 3x Mageroyal =1 tsp lavender (it's a flower, at least!)

I decided to go for the normal (non-French) mixing style and just mix the wet ingredients and then add the dry ingredients. The batter turned out looking pretty good.


I was a bit leery, however, that the recipe called for four eggs, but no leavening of any sort. Would the cake rise?


That's right, folks. The cake came out very flat and very dense.

So dense, in fact, that I decided to use it as a makiwara.


It barely rose, meaning the final cake was about 1.5 inches in thickness. It had barely any flavor (thanks to there being no sugar in the recipe, Blizzard).

So. Almost total fail. Next it was time to try this with some revisions, because by now it was clear that I needed a real delicious chocolate cake.

Kelley's Revised Recipe

• 8x Simple Flour = 1.75 cups flour
• 4x Ice Cold Milk = 1 cup milk
• 4x Mild Spices = .75 cup cocoa, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp baking soda
• 8x Small Egg = 2 extra-large eggs + .5 cup vegetable oil
• Flask of Port = 1/2 cup port wine + 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3x Mageroyal =1 tsp lavender (it's a flower, at least!)
• MISSING SUGAR = 2 cups sugar

As you can see, I altered the recipe to include some leavening, some sugar, and a slight alteration of wet-to-dry ratio. I also replaced some of the flour with more cocoa. The batter turned out nice and dark, and had a bit more volume than the first recipe.


The cakes rose beautifully, and I had no trouble at all removing them from the rings.


I baked two cakes and cut them both in half in order to stack them. I used three for stacking and the other for tasting. The cake was chocolatey and moist, but the port was a bit... odd. I knew I would need a very tasty frosting in order to even out the flavors. And I was glad that the images showed berries on the cake, too.

The Delicious Chocolate Cake

I decided to use a chocolate fudge frosting to fill between the layers and on the top. I also used sliced strawberries in between the layers, and halved strawberries to garnish the top of the cake.


So, the cake looked pretty, and actually rather WoW-ish. But... would it taste good? I sliced a piece and gave it a taste. The fudge frosting and strawberries were actually pretty perfect for balancing out the flavors. Yay~!

Final Thoughts

Blizzard was on the right track with this recipe, but in actuality, it didn't turn out so well. Hint: if you're going to use the word delicious in the name of your cake, you had better put some sugar in it. I'd also recommend leaving the port wine out, and replacing it with something more tasty, like coffee or maybe even some Kahlúa -- and less of it.

Oh, and by the way -- yes, it's completely gluten-free.

Cupcakes Make Everything Better!

Today is Memorial Day, but it's also my dad's birthday. In lieu of a birthday gift this year (I never know what to buy him anyway), I decided to bake some cupcakes - which is way better than some store bought cake anyhow.

I saw Chockylit's recipe for chocolate cupcakes stuffed with strawberry chocolate ganache and frosted with chocolate glaze and buttercream and I was in love.



The cupcakes came out sunken in the middle, which created a bit of a predicament when trying to fill them. In the end, I decided to just pour the filling into the sunken middles instead of cutting off the tops. But they were so messy and somewhat ugly that I decided to use a store-bought cake mix for a second batch. The results? The store-bought ones look pretty, but the from-scratch recipe tastes SO much better! My family loved them. They are the first thing I have baked that wasn't gluten free in a year and a half (the store-bought mix, anyway).