Long absence on the part of Poppycakes.  To talk about why is to talk about the audience for any creative act in which one engages. A cake has a community implicit in its abundance. And my cakes have been fortunate feeders of more than one set of masses. But there is always the favorite recipient, the person that a good cake is made to please. For my fig cake, an old recipe, tried and tried and true, I have always enjoyed serving my father. My father is a professional cook and to bake or cook anything that he might compliment is a fine thing.  But for the last two years, I have been able to bake for my partner's father, a man with a sensitive palate, one of those rare persons who sees the poetry in a cake's blend of flavor and texture and that welcome, welcome soul who asks, each time the cake is unveiled for a description of the cake and filling and frosting and upon hearing the words: white chocolate, cream cheese frosting, or raspberry filling gets an extra glitter to the already-sparkling eyes.

He was eighty-four, dashing, elegant and so handsome that even at eighty-four it was easy to see how smitten his wife of sixty years must have been when that beautiful man came to her door that first time. Such was this man, such was the cakemaker's new favorite connoisseur.  With the exception of dollcakes, every cake on this blog made by Poppycakes was made for GCM.  So today's cake is as much in memory as it is in gratitude, not just for Thanksgiving but for those souls that pass through our lives and make every sweetness the sweeter for it.  Today's cake was meant to be made with a smaller cake version of itself that was going to be frosting-inscribed Happy Thanksgiving GCM. Every cake is still for you.  I was going to leave the smaller cake in the woods and let some soon-to-be-diabetic raccoon swear his initials were GCM. But my frosting-inscriptions aren't ever legible enough for long notes and the cake I chose to bake was devil's food in its base, I worried about the dangers of chocolate to wildlife. Also, the loss was recent and I was sad. So I chose to make this cake and add my own personal symbol to include my old friend and favorite taster in the cake's message. I made small white frosting loops or ribbons on the edges with my own makeshift baggy-with-a-hole frosting bag. The frosting, a cream cheese white chocolate blend was rich and divine and the filling, raspberry preserves with marshmallow sauce and pure almond extract added just enough difference in texture as did the toasted almonds, and the cake itself was moist enough to have made my friend smile, the thought of which made a bittersweet holiday, a little bit happier.  

Recipe: Cakes Made Simple Magazine 
Reading:  Blue Nights by Joan Didion

This is a caramelized pear upside-down cake I've made a few times. It's fairly easy to make (the caramel can be a little tricky and takes more time than you think it will). It's quite tasty. Recipe: Fine Cooking


This is a white chocolate lemon cake from a cookbook I received as a gift, and which I served at a holiday party last year. It was delicious, but challenging - so much so I dubbed it the "Complicake."



-Sweetcakes

It's easy for a cake to look and taste dramatic with lots of poppyseeds and cream cheese and whipped cream frosting.

 The cake recipe is incredibly simple, just six ingredients - butter, superfine sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder and poppy seeds.

Instead of the buttercream frosting from the recipe, I made whipped cream and cream cheese frosting and added grated orange peels, which upped the flavor quite a bit.

Here's the whole cake, frosted. After this photo, I added more poppyseeds to the top.

And here's a slice.

-Sweetcakes

That was the name in the recipe, but really, these were just cookies. I didn't even have a cup of tea with mine. Still, they were delicious, buttery wedding cookies with chopped maraschino cherries, then drizzled with white chocolate.

Recipe: Just a Pinch Recipe Club

-Sweetcakes

You can't smell ice cream swirling the way you can smell a cake baking. And indeed, homemade ice cream is underway at chez Sweetcakes.  But first, Thai curry chicken for dinner, thanks to the chef of the house. Hope your Sunday is sweet.

Poppycakes made a cake for Easter and now, eyeball-deep into summer, it's only fitting she serve it up.

The cake was a pineapple-confetti cake, extra vanilla pudding and a fragrance, enhanced by a dash of orange blossom water to the filling that was meant to resurrect one's every sense.

 There was just enough sweetness suggested by all of the summery scents, that I wanted to keep the frosting light and leave room for Ghiradelli's white chocolate inlay of "tile work" on the sides.
The icing was a light glaze, oranged up by some zest and a little orange extract.

Reading: Crazy in the Kitchen

Cake Slideshow: bonappetit.com

A cake-devotee from way back, Poppycakes, on the eve of the anniversary of her birth, considers the various memories baked inside every cake.

Let's flash back: Salt Lake City Utah, before it was cool to be a deeply-smoky brunette with hair that curled to form the words: Not-Your-Disney-Princess, Princess.  So that what Poppycakes had for allies were Marlo Thomas circa That Girl (reruns by the time she was viewing) and the occasional sultry wicked witch or sidekick. Even the bakery was blonde-biased as the six year old PoppyC. fell into a swoon for a dollcake that was yellow-haired and baked square into the skirt of a yellow-cake with tiers of frosting ruffles and sugar flowers cascading down her gown. The young Poppy wanted nothing more than a dollcake for herself, one that, if at all possible, resembled her.  But the cakette in the sweet gown only came with golden hair and the still-aswoon Poppycakes was happy enough to have her.

Years passed, and the magic of girl baked into cake resolved itself into the realization that perhaps the girl was added later, and one day with thefirsttruelove of Poppycakes another dollcake was spotted and an attempt to order it as a surprise for her birthday failed as the supermarket (a now-erased market in dear Tuscaloosa) called to inform that the cake alas, only came in blonde-girl and thefirsttruelove of Poppycakes, a dark-haired prince himself, was crestfallen. Poppycakes, now privy to the plot, assured him that she was long-accostumed to the bakery-racism of fair-haired dollcakes and vowed, that a bundt pan and a thrift store *barbie  would remedy all of that.  *By barbie, we mean, Esmerelda, Jasmine or one of the ethnic modern dolls, the size and shape of the original Barbie.

More years passed and Poppycakes had occasions for many cakes, at least two of which involved dollcakes. One, for another day, involved her sister's babyshower and the other, pictured below, the publication of the book of her good friend, Lemoncakes and the acquisition of her own graduate degree.

Lemoncakes, a strawberry blonde proved an easy doll-find and her cake, made second a more graceful fit of bundt cake skirt with doll frosting glued in place. Her cake, a chocolate marble with chocolate icing and raspberry filling, was garnished with fresh raspberries and mint from the garden.

The cake of Poppy, was another matter, a layering of bundt cakes and seam that could never quite cover the attempt to learn the process on two cakes on the day of the party,  and it proved maddening.  The celebrating girl seemed to be sinking into an ant lion's hole of frosting quicksand. Further, the ever-mischievous Tootsiecakes, middle sister of Poppy and Babycakes, left the only existing picture with a salacious booby-poke. But we digress:



While the cake, a fragrant vanilla (loaded with vanilla bean and pure vanilla extract, filled with lemon-essenced marshmallow fluff and decorated with little lemon-jelly wedges) tasted great, the look of it frustrated Poppycakes and would do so until she discovered that dollcakes have grown up, have graduated to special cake pans with half-dolls to be staked into the tops of perfect-bell skirts. And at Michael's on the west side of Columbus, Ohio, one afternoon, that very August, Poppycakes would find only one kit left and with held breath would open it to reveal: a brunette!  But that is for the Babycakes post and for another day.

All this is foreshadowing. For this birthday, Poppycakes has asked her lasttruelove, Mr. Poppycakes to brave the Italian Merengue Frosting, while she will make a homemade Angel Food Cake and without a kit, and likely without real precision, she hopes to make a Floating Flamenco Doll Cake, in lightest gown and lightest lace. Or, if her flamenco's a flop, she will hope that Sweetcakes is ready with a pretty dessert to the rescue. In either case, long live the doll cake, long live brunettes!

Recipe: Chocolate Raspberry Bundt Cake
Lemon Vanilla Bundt Cake
Reading Companion: Children on their Birthdays Truman Capote
Listening: <iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lMgU5B2TZIA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The medical illustration one makes me ache with envy.

Tease:
A new post coming up for Poppyseed Angel Food Cake. Here is your pre-eating, reading companion. (Because I love Anne Sexton at least as much as Angel Food Cake or is it the other way around?)

For a fast cake fix: this one isn't from scratch but the filling, a blend of crushed pineapple, vanilla pudding and whipped cream makes a tropical, fragrant cloud and a quick satisfying dessert.

The Angel Food Dogs

Or at least to say a word or two about them. All sprinkles are not created equal. For texture and color, the supermarket shaker varietal will do fine. But if you are serious about flavor, and lucky enough to have a Graeter's in your area, their "sprills" actually taste, and taste good. The chocolate taste just like chocolate.
You'll hear about them again when I discuss cooked icing, my deep love for marshmallow fluff and gourmet marshmallows and the good marshmallow creme at yes, Graeter's ice cream.

I am no Martha Stewart and my version of chrysanthemum cake is slightly less ambitious than hers--which I found by looking for the Italian Meringue icing I will be posting about later and well, wedding cakes: a minor, recent interest of mine.

My chrysanthemum cake started as a birthday cake for Mr. Poppycakes, whose simple request was "no loopy extras just a good old-fashioned chocolate cake with maybe some nuts."  I believe he refers to my recent obsession with rosewater, orange blossom water, Penzey spices (in particular, their cinnamon and cardamon) and well, the poet in me who decides to invent forms within my cakes (wait until you see the cake that prompted one of my favorite foodies to proclaim "nothing says dessert like a fetus") There's a not-so-tantalizing-tease to hold you!

But I digress. This cake began then, all devil's food and traditional. Save for the fact that I wanted a little nut paste (marzipan was a little denser than I wanted) between layers one and two and for the next layer, I used a very dark chocolate icing with a dash of almond extract.  The result was a subtlety of flavor in the fillings that actually made the chocolate cake moreso.

I melted some Ghiradelli's deep chocolate morsels and dipped the edges of some of my slivered almonds and I found, on our holly tree as it was March, some leaves for molds. I made a few chocolate leaves and found that I preferred the natural leaves themselves for the palette of the overall cake (dark midnighty brown, cream, beige and forest green). 

Sometimes, I like a cake to have a bit of that homemade wonky-ness to it. Something beautiful but not bakery-precise makes my mouth water when I look at it. (Although Sweetcakes' lemon cake is the ultimate in perfect, gorgeous perfection, I could lay down and die in those folds, enrobed in tart glaze and call it all we know of heaven).

This two-layer stack of sin passed the "traditional chocolate cake" test for the birthday boy and the need to play a little with the process for me.

Until next cake,
Poppycakes

Base recipe: Hershey's Perfectly-Chocolate Chocolate Cake
Reading companion: Chocolat by Joann Harris