Triple Lemon Chiffon Cake, bishes! Via howtoeatacupcake.net @ Flickr.
As the dog days of August wind down, I realize I’m oversubscribed for birthday parties! I have two this weekend, followed by next weekend’s spectacular celebration of MamaSharper’s birthday at an undisclosed foreign location complete with four star restaurant and Aveda spa.
I’m a big fan of birthdays for many reasons. I believe that we should be thankful for each one we get–after all, we all know plenty of people who should have had more birthdays, but didn’t. But besides that, there’s birthday cake. I am always, always, looking for an excuse to eat cake. You see, my childhood home was an anti-junk food stronghold. No soda, no cookies, no sugary cereals, no nothing. The lure of sugary delights was so strong that at friends’ birthday parties, I would practically plunge face-down into the cake as soon as the candles were out. This unfortunately led to massive sugar highs and post-party sugar crashes, which MamaSharper describes as “you bouncing off the walls until you got irritable and started crying and I had to put you in your room.”
These days I love cake in a more moderate fashion, but I can tell you that the E-vite for my friend Anna’s party tomorrow night was received with more than the usual enthusiasm when I saw she’d written “there will be chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream icing from Sugar Sweet Sunshine.“ Sugar Sweet is my second favorite bakery in New York, after the all-time champion, Amy’s Bread.
In addition to the the cinnamon crispy pastries that send me and sarah.of.a.lesser.god into swoons of delight, Amy’s makes the best layer cakes ever, including Monkey Cake (banana and pineapple with cream cheese icing), Lucious Lemon Mousseline (with a deliciously tart schmear of curd between the cake layers) and Apple Walnut (with maple buttercream frosting). They are all perfectly moist, tender and delicious, unlike the overrated, dried-out, too-sweet (but SATC-approved) cupcakes from Magnolia (and don’t get me started on wedding cake, which is nearly always dried out, over-decorated and tasteless–at 100 times the price).
Now I realize not everyone is into cake. MamaSharper, for instance, is all about home-baked cookies. DaddySharper is fond of pie, particularly post-Thanksgiving, when leftover pie is our breakfast of choice. But for me, there is no better food–anytime–than cake.
Are you the girl with the most cake? Tell us about your favorite cake-y memories in the comments…
my mom made a cake on the other day in honor of my son’s 15th
It was yellow cake with melted guava paste as the filling. Maybe I’ll have some now…
Guava paste is a highly underutilized resource, IMO. There’s a bakery near me in Brooklyn that makes a rolled sponge “bizcocho flor de paraiso” with coconut and guava paste that is unbelievably yummy.
Ice cream cake!
I like a classic Chocolate Sheath Cake leavened with baking soda and buttermilk so it’s tangy. I also like that the frosting for such a cake is shortening-free b/c I hate shortening.
I love cake so much that I get legitimate cravings for it. I will go to the grocery store and buy one from the bakery (chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream frosting ONLY) and take it home to eat. On the couch with a fork and a giant cake on my lap. It is usually gone in about 48 hours. Dammit now I want some cake.
Each year that I am able to celebrate my birthday with my mom she makes me a yellow sheet cake that is drizzled with pineapple juice, then layered with crushed pineapple and fresh whipped cream.
OMG, my mouth is watering…I love it so much.
I eat pies for their crust and cakes, in general, for their icing. Sometimes when I’m home alone I just buy a pre-made pie crust for dessert.
I recently discovered hummingbird cake for the first time: http://www.joyofbaking.com/HummingbirdCake.html. It’s like carrot cake, but with banana and pineapple instead of carrot, and it’s delicious.
OMG Y’All! I WANT CAKE SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!
I’m sad that so many of your cake ideas involve pineapple, which I’m terribly allergic to. But I’m making an incredible chocolate cake with whipped cream filling and chocolate frosting that comes from a old Southern Living. It’s an incredible cake, rich and moist and chocolatey.
Next week I’m going to make a coffee cake with coffee in the batter and frosting. I’m pretty excited about it too.
I would make a cake every day if my family’s health could handle it.
I love desserts of all sorts. But, my new favorite is my mother-in-law’s famous ‘Ding-Dong’ cake, its a chocolate pudding layer cake (like 6 layers high) with fluffy, whipped cream cheese ‘filling’ between the layers…divine.
Close second, especially in the hot Midwest, is “Icebox Pie” made with lemonade and obscene amounts of cream cheese, mixed together and frozen. Gah. I’m drooling.
@Av0gadro: That chocolate cake sounds awesome! I would eat cake every day if I could. A few years ago when I needed to gain back weight I’d lost after being depressed and ill, I was getting cake at Amy’s Bread every day. It was awesome.
One of my friends can’t have pineapple either, so I’ve substituted peaches or apricots in upside-down cake and guava shells in cake batter (although the guava shells come packed in sugar syrup, so you have to reduce the sugar a little in your recipe or you wind up with an overly sweet cake).
Red Velvet Cake. For birthdays. And Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And Easter. I can never tire of it, really! : )
Ahem. The “yankee” version of red velvet (cream cheese frosting), not the southern (roux icing).
I am loving this thread, because I love cake so so much. My favourite to make is Nigella Lawson’s “nutella” cake (flourless dark-chocolate-hazelnut). My current favourite to eat is my German aunt’s cake — I have no idea is this is a traditional cake or her own invention or what — which is a dense/doughy base cake, with Avocat liqueur poured over it, and served with fresh fruit and whipped cream. Mmmmmmm.
But truly, I love all cakes. I am poly-cake-amorous!
oh, it’s been years since I made my favorite death-by-chocolate cake, frosted with ganache. Rich, dense, fudgy layer cake. Now I’m craving it.
It takes a full half-day to make, so I’ll have to actually acquire babysitting in order to make it happen…but two of my housemates are having a shared birthday party next month, so that’s a fine excuse!
German chocolate cake… oh the coconut in the frosting!!
@MsM: I’m usually not a huge fan of frosting–except cream cheese frosting–but the frosting on German chocolate cake has always been the exception!
Yes, I’m one of those weirdos that will often excavate the cake and leave most of the frosting. Especially if it’s that crappy frosting that’s just sweetened shortening.
I am a pie fan, but cake has it’s well-deserved place, too. Not your standard bakery cakes, though. And sugar-lard frosting makes me want to hurl. My favorite is probably my mom’s (which was my grandma’s) pound cake recipe. Dense and buttery, not too sweet.
On our recent trip, the Dude and I shared a dessert called the Anabolic Ding-Dong: a chocolate mini-cake with a mint-wasabi cream fillilng, garnished w/ whipped cream and fresh raspberries. Pretty amazing.
vickimae–plz to send/post the recipe for that frozen lemonade/creamcheese thing. Drooooool.
It’s supposed to get into the 90s where I live today, but I plan to bake a birthday cake for my husband. Three layer devil’s food with vanilla cream cheese frosting.
My mom made me a chocolate espresso cake with chocolate mascarpone frosting a couple weeks ago for my birthday. AMAZING.
I would take an Anabolic Ding-Dong solely for its name, but I cannot imagine what a mint-wasabi cream filling would taste like. Who comes up with these things, anyway? Like, “I think what would make this chocolate mint raspberry whipped cream dessert better is wasabi. Definitely needs some wasabi.” I am humbled and awed.
My favorite cake memories all trace back to my mum. She is a home ec teacher and a kick ass baker.
When I was little she made a birthday cake for me and my little brother (he’s exactly 2 years younger than me). It was Cookie Monster. She painstakingly decorated a homemade cake with little blue homemade frosting drops and somehow made the googly eyes we loved. I loved her frosting bag – I thought it was magical. I couldn’t even believe how she fit Cookie Monster in the bag.
Best cake ever.
A GREAT summer cake – Jell-O poke cake. You basically bake a regular yellow cake. Poke holes in it and pour liquid Jell-O all over it so it soaks in. Shove it in the fridge for the usual Jell-O period or overnight. Take it out. “Frost” it with Cool Whip. Serve chilled.
Un-freaking-believable.
When my siblings and I were little my mom would make us these elaborately decorated, 3D cut-out cakes for our b-days: trains, spaceships, butterflies, you name it. So my best cake memories aren’t related to flavor, they’re related to shape. Maybe that’s why I enjoy all those cake decorating shows on food t.v. so much. I like the artistry of cakes more than I like eating them.
That said, I will be trying this recipe this evening: http://www.ehow.com/how_4821704_cake-delicious-moist-cake-recipe.html
We were given a bottle of amaretto a few years ago, and it sat on the shelf for like two years. I finally got sick of it sitting there and launched a quest to find the best way to use a giant bottle of amaretto. Three attempts later I had developed a really easy and super-moist chocolate amaretto bundt cake with amaretto glaze and sliced almonds sprinkled all over it. Now my friends are addicted to it, and I’m the default cake-baker for everybody’s birthday party, which doesn’t seem entirely fair. But at least it doesn’t have all the hyrogenated oils in it that most bakery cakes have. I cringe at the thought of it when I watch everyone eat bakery cakes or cake-mix cakes.
Oh, and if you ever wander into Laramie WY, head over to Sweet Melissa’s Vegetarian Cafe and order the carrot cake. Unreal. (And shortening free. Yay!)
What, no bacon cake??
Does molten chocolate cake (the kind with liquid chocolate in the center) count? Because I could live on that, for like three days until my heart stopped. Or carrot cake or red velvet or anything with cream cheese frosting. Or coffee cake. I’m also sentimental for anything Entenmann’s and the chocolate chip loaf served at every spark-ly holiday dinner.
Waltzing Matilda, my mom made me a Cookie Monster cake with googly ping-pong ball eyes, too! …Except it was for my 16th birthday. And although I don’t make/eat them anymore (gelatin, boo!), those Jell-O cakes were the shit. Esp. the lemon ones. They’d get that crackly glaze on the top and have spikes of mega-flavor. Om nom nom nom.