Finnish Pulla. Cardamom flavored sweet bread.

Orange Butter Cake with homemade mango preserves and Grand Marnier Swiss buttercream frosting.

Experimental Fun

In honor of the boy's brother's birthday, I have been fiddling with some cakes. Said brother has an inordinate penchant for eggnog and had declared an interest in a strawberry cake or filling. So I decided to attempt an eggnog cake and a strawberry cake.

Both cakes began as my beloved Golden Butter Cake from Whimsical and evolved from there. In the cookbook, the ladies have the GB Cake on one page and the Orange Butter Cake on the facing. They say that the Orange evolved from the Butter by substituting some orange juice for the milk and adding orange zest. Since I can not zest a strawberry, I pureed and strained strawberries, and used the puree for half of the milk. Everything else proceeded as normal, adding a bit of pink dye. The cake had a lovely smell (and an excellent color), but didn't scream strawberry. It was subtle and nice, but next time I am going to add a bit of strawberry extract just to reinforce the flavor.

On to eggnog. For this one I decided to replace the milk completely with eggnog and add some spices to punch it up. Using the Spice Cake recipe as a guide, I added one teaspoon of cinnamon and nutmeg to the dry ingredients and one half teaspoon of cloves. The cake baked nicely and had a pleasant eggnog smell. Unfortunately the spices were too strong since I was forgetting I was halving the recipe. I think for Eggnog Cake II I will use half to three-quarters teaspoon nutmeg and cinnamon, and one quarter cloves.

When the cakes sufficiently cooled, I approached the problem of icings. I still had some strawberry puree left over, roughly a quarter a cup, and decided to use it with the buttercream. The House Buttercream recipe calls for water added to the powdered sugar mix before the butter is added, so I substituted the puree for the water. The buttercream became nicely pink and perfectly fluffy with a nice strawberry taste. Still a little subtle, but my buttercreams have a tendency to be subtle, so I am okay with that. My only complaint was that some seeds were still in the puree, and so are in the buttercream. If I had the money for those fancy quarts of puree you can buy from L'epicerie I sure as hell would, but for now my food processor is go.

All in all I consider both cakes to be a great success and fully believe that I am on my way to having a nice repertoire of my very own.