He Cooks, She Cooks

Sometimes you just want cake.

Last week I randomly got an intense craving for cake. Well, maybe one of the 50-or-so food blogs I read had something to do with it. Regardless, I needed get baking.

I browsed through my bookmarked recipes and saw the LA Times’ Celestial Chocolate Cake — chocolate with a whipped cream center and chocolate frosting. It made me think to do a chocolate cake with whipped cream both in the center and coating the entire thing.

Then as I was walking to the store to get cream, I thought I smelled strawberry shortcake. It is unlikely there was any strawberry shortcake in the vicinity, but whether there was the faint scent of another cake in the air or just in my head, it was enough to change my plans.

So chocolate cake with whipped cream and strawberries it was. And it absolutely hit the spot. Continue reading »

Chocolate and dulce de leche. I don’t even have to say much more to convince anyone this is a great idea, but I’ll get a little more specific: Three layers of dark chocolate cake loaded with thick Argentine dulce de leche that permeates what had been an extra springy cake, then covered, as everything should be, with creamy bittersweet chocolate ganache.

You shouldn’t need any other reason to make this, but I came up with this decadent idea because today is my friend Kat’s birthday. If you read He Cooks She Cooks fairly regularly, you know her name comes up often. While I was in Missouri, I cooked dinner with or for her nearly every night this summer and many times during the school year.

Now we’re a hemisphere apart, but I wanted to make something to celebrate her birthday.

No, she can’t eat any of this and that’s sad, but I hope she appreciates the thought. I’m not much of a baker because I’m no good at following recipes and I don’t have much patience. This is the first three layer cake I’ve ever made — my family makes a lot of bundt and sheet cakes because we’d rather get to eating cake than wait around for multiple tiers to cool so they can be properly frosted. But for this cake, I cooked each layer individually (I have a small oven and only one cake pan), waited for them to cool, and tried my best to be neat with the ganache.

Since you can’t taste the cake, Kat, I hope the effort means something to you. And trust me, the cake is as amazing as you are imagining it right now. Happy birthday!

See also: Dulce de Leche Ice Cream

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Dessert recipes usually aren’t as forgiving as savory dishes, but I still can’t ever seem to follow the rules. I had a big bag of cornmeal and frozen cranberries — the main ingredients — but didn’t want to go to the store for anything else. I swapped plain yogurt for ricotta, honey for maple syrup, dried orange rind for fresh zest and some margarine since we only had one stick of butter.

No one had any complaints about the result. The cake is a nice, not-too-sweet dessert. And on Day 2, it’s more moist, and the cranberries are a little less tart. I have a lot of hungry friends, though, so it didn’t make it to Day 3.

I can only imagine how great it would be with ricotta and maple syrup. Yogurt was a good substitute though, and I would always choose pure honey if your only other option is fake maple-and-butter-flavored corn syrup.

This would also be great with an orange glaze, as Kat suggested.

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What? You forgot about pumpkin after Thanksgiving?

I love pumpkin. Mostly, I love all the spices that are associated with it: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice… Tonight after a Moroccan-inspired dinner, a spiced cake with dark chocolate chips was just what we needed. And who says pumpkin isn’t February food?

This recipe is a variation of the New York Times’ chocolate-pumpkin layer cake. We needed dessert fast, so layers weren’t an option and neither was making frosting. I basically cut the recipe in half, skipped the nuts, added my own touches (cardamom and orange zest) and 30 minutes later, we were enjoying spicy, pumpkinny, dark chocolatey goodness. This is really dense and moist, and that’s what makes it good.

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