Garden cake

My friend Aisha's dad's birthday was coming up and she decided to help throw him a birthday party! I'm all about celebrations and celebrating people's birthdays in a special way, so I offered to make a cake. She one-upped me and wanted to help me make it. We were thinking of different designs for the cake and decided that he loved gardening so we picked the garden cupcakes from the "Hello Cupcake" book and adapted it to a 9x11 sheet cake. Everything on the cake is edible: Signs are graham crackers coated with white chocolate and icing for writing, the lettuce is green icing covered corn flakes, radishes and carrots are laffy taffy and starbursts, and peas are m &ms with laffy taffy. Of course there's chocolate graham cracker dirt!

I didn't quite have enough time to make really pretty pictures, we were making this thing up to the last minute! It took a long time to make each individual candy, and for that reason I'm not excited to make it again, but boy was it a showstopper!

The cake turned out wonderfully, oh yeah, its just a basic chocolate cake (my favorite is on the back of the hershey's cocoa, substituting butter for oil) and the chocolate frosting (also on the can).

Happy Birthday Aisha's Dad!

Strawberry Lemon Tart

Strawberries. They're so red and pretty. I love when they are in season, namely because of my dad's Strawberry Shortcake, which I will save for another post. Other things strawberry are great too, milkshakes, jam, cake, the list goes on. My breakfast all week was blackberries and strawberries with cottage cheese and flax seeds. Anyways, I had my pseudo-grandparents over the other night for a nice dinner and decided to stick with a strawberry-ish theme. Most of the dishes are somewhat scatterbrained, but they all are so delicious I just couldn't resist. I made Chicken Marsala, Sauteed Asparagus, Strawberry Pecan Avocado Salad and Miso-glazed Salmon. For dessert I decided to try my hand at a Strawberry Tart with Lemon Curd. I went to the grocery store and then two and a half hours later I was finishing up the meal and my guests were at the table. It was chaos.

After my usual Tastespotting perusal I found Half Baked's recipe that seemed to be everything I was looking for. Sweet tart crust, tart lemon cream, and of course STRAWBERRIES!

Strawberry Lemon Curd Tart

9 inch tart pan

The Crust

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup confectioner's sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 stick plus 1 tablespoon (9 tablespoons; 4 1/2 ounces) very cold (or frozen) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 large egg yolk lightly beaten

Procedure

1. Put the flour, sugar and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to combine. Scatter the pieces of butter over the dry ingredients and pulse until the butter is coarsely cut in. Add yolk a little at a time, pulsing after each addition. When the egg is in, process in long pulses—about 10 seconds each—until the dough, which will look granular soon after the egg is added, forms clumps and curds. Just before you reach this stage, the sound of the machine working the dough will change—heads up. Turn the dough out onto a work surface and, very lightly and sparingly, knead the dough just to incorporate any dry ingredients that might have escaped mixing.

2. Press the dough evenly over the bottom and up the sides of the pan. Don't be too heavy-handed – press the crust in so that the edges of the pieces cling to one another, but don't press so hard that the crust loses its crumbly texture.

3. Freeze the crust for at least 30 minutes, preferably longer, before baking.

4. To fully bake the crust: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 375°F.

5. Butter the shiny side of a piece of aluminum foil and fit the foil, buttered side down, tightly against the crust. (Since you froze the crust, you can bake it without weights.) Put the tart pan on a baking sheet and bake the crust for 25 minutes. Carefully remove the foil. If the crust has puffed, press it down gently with the back of a spoon. Bake the crust for another 8 minutes or so, or until it is firm and golden brown, brown being the important word: a pale crust doesn't have a lot of flavor. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool the crust to room temperature.

The Lemon Curd
4 large eggs
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup fresh lemon juice
grated zest of one lemon
1/2 stick (2 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temp cut into 8 pieces

Choose a saucepan that will hold the bowl from your mixer (or a heat proof mixing bowl) in a double-boiler arrangement. Fill the pan with 2 to 3 inches of water and bring to a simmer.
Put the eggs and sugar in the mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and whip at high speed until very light and fluffy. Still whisking, add the lemon juice and zest. Set the bowl in the saucepan, making sure the the bottom of the bowl does not touch the simmering water, and cook the mixture, whisking constantly by hand until smooth, thick , and custardlike. Be patient; this can take a while. Remove bowl from saucepan and whisk in butter piece by piece. Cover the curd with plastic wrap pressed to the top, and refrigerate until chilled and set, or pour directly into cooled crust and top with sliced strawberries.

DB: Cheesecake! Delish...

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

I was excited to see Cheesecake as this month's Daring Baker's challenge! As usual every month I get a little apprehensive with the challenges. Always something just a bit out of my comfort zone. Things I like to eat, but not necessarily make. Close to something I know or have tried, but always just out of the reach of familiarity. I've made little cheesecakelets, but never made a whole cake at once, never made the crust, and never dealt with a water bath or a springform pan. The concept of something needing a water bath scares me away from pursuing that recipe. I didn't even have a springform pan until I stole one of my mom's a few months ago because she had two. The pan is a square one, nontraditional, but its what my mom had in her closet. The square pan was problematic when it came to the water bath.

This cheesecake was easy to assemble and bake. Much less complicated than I expected. There was not much clean up and very few steps involved. There were many different variations on the original cheesecake. Part of the challenge was to take a basic Cheeecake recipe and make it our own. We were supposed to put a personal spin on the recipe, so if you read other Daring Bakers you'll see thousands of cheesecake ideas, from vegan to double decker, there's something different for every one! I decided on the Key Lime Cheesecake with a chocolate graham crust. Refreshing and citrusy, perfect for all the hot weather we've been having! Today is supposed to get up to 94 degrees! I made a chocolate graham crust, that ended up being chocolate Teddy Grahams, Graham Crackers and Vanilla Wafers ground. I was short on the Teddy Grahams, and then only had a few graham crackers, and just enough vanilla wafers to make the needed 2 cups. Here's the cake in the pan. You can see a couple spots where the Saran Wrap touched the top and pulled out a divot, and a nibble mark on the side where my mom and I tasted it while it was still cooling. We couldn't wait hours and hours for it to cool down, we needed to know how it was Right THEN!

The side view, you can see the chocolate graham crust. It's a teensy bit soggy, I don't think my springform pan is 100% waterproof.

Yum! the cake is sooo good! When I pulled out the first piece I took a fork and went to town on the cake in the pan. It was delicious! Light, refreshing, creamy summery treat. The lime taste comes through strong but not overpowering.

I will definitely make this Cheesecake again, probably with a different variation, caramel apple sounds good right? MmmMmmm. As always, check out all the Daring Baker's creations, they are truly amazing!

Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake:

crust:
2 cups / 180 g graham cracker crumbs (Or combo chocolate Teddy Grahams, graham crackers, and vanilla wafers)
1 stick / 4 oz butter, melted
2 tbsp. / 24 g sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

cheesecake:
3 sticks of cream cheese, 8 oz each (total of 24 oz) room temperature
1 cup / 210 g sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup / 8 oz heavy cream
3 tbsp. Lime juice

Zest of 1 lime

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Begin to boil a large pot of water for the water bath.

2. Mix together the crust ingredients and press into your preferred pan. You can press the crust just into the bottom, or up the sides of the pan too - baker's choice. Set crust aside.
3. Combine cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer (or in a large bowl if using a hand-mixer) and cream together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Make sure to scrape down the bowl in between each egg. Add heavy cream, vanilla, lemon juice, and alcohol and blend until smooth and creamy.
4. Pour batter into prepared crust and tap the pan on the counter a few times to bring all air bubbles to the surface. Place pan into a larger pan and pour boiling water into the larger pan until halfway up the side of the cheesecake pan. If cheesecake pan is not airtight, cover bottom securely with foil before adding water.
5. Bake 45 to 55 minutes, until it is almost done - this can be hard to judge, but you're looking for the cake to hold together, but still have a lot of jiggle to it in the center. You don't want it to be completely firm at this stage. Close the oven door, turn the heat off, and let rest in the cooling oven for one hour. This lets the cake finish cooking and cool down gently enough so that it won't crack on the top. After one hour, remove cheesecake from oven and lift carefully out of water bath. Let it finish cooling on the counter, and then cover and put in the fridge to chill. Once fully chilled, it is ready to serve.

Pan note: The creator of this recipe used to use a springform pan, but no matter how well she wrapped the thing in tin foil, water would always seep in and make the crust soggy. Now she uses one of those 1-use foil "casserole" shaped pans from the grocery store. They're 8 or 9 inches wide and really deep, and best of all, water-tight. When it comes time to serve, just cut the foil away.