Showing posts with label berries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label berries. Show all posts

Saturday, August 18, 2012

triple berry summer buttermilk bundt

summer berry buttermilk bundt

Our toddler left us. Or, at least until Friday. Over the last 2 3/4 years, weve occasionally been blessed with the chance to go away for a few days sans bb. We return well-rested and smiling, sandy grit in the bottom of our suitcases, traces of whatever had vexed us before we left deliciously eviscerated from memory, and almost giddy with excitement to start scraping spaghetti from the underside of the high chair again. But this is the first time with barely a Sayonara! as he ran out the door or a single Wish you were here! postcard from the road that Jacob has headed out for lazier climes without us. Hes spending a week at the mountain retreat of Camp Grandparents, where hes forced to endure petting zoos, baby pools, wide expanses of fresh air, nonstop adoration, and, no doubt, all of the ice cream he can talk them into.

three berries
light and so very fluffy batter

Meanwhile, Alex and I have been left behind to attend to our assigned daily grinds and realize how totally dull this place is in the morning without a toddler buzzing from room to room at the crack of dawn, pulling on our earlobes to announce, Im awake! Wake UP! and serenading us with ABCs on his guitar. Weve also learned that we share differing interpretations of a weeks Vacation From Parenting. For example, I was thinking that, freed from the daily whirlwind of tight schedules, tantrums, irregular sleep patterns and spontaneous song-and-dance-and-marching! parties that life with a toddler demands, we could finally get caught up on things that have been neglected for the last 2 3/4 years. My to-do list for this week involves such enticing tasks as Get the apartment painted! Rearrange furniture and pictures! Clean out closets! Meet at gym every day after work, and Back-up and replace laptops. I was also thinking we could read and discuss War and Peace every night before we hit the pillow, but didnt want to be overly ambitious. Alexs comparatively modest list includes such audacious suggestions as Get lots of sleep, get drinks with friends, watch TV with the sound on and the Closed Captioning off, and very little else. Yeah, so who would you rather party with? Its okay, I wont take it personally.

folding in the floured berries

thick berried batter, to be smoothed
from the oven
cooling, messily

Whichever version of our week off will prevail remains to be seen, but at least for the weekend, as it should, leisure won. Shortly after Jacob hit the road on Saturday (armed with eight books, Ernie, Bert, two monkeys, a soccer ball and glockenspiel, just the basics) I set out two sticks of butter, picked through all of the market berries Id bought and let languish throughout the week and baked what has to be the most perfect summer embodiment a buttermilk bundt bronzed with a faint crunch at the edges, tender to the point of pudding-ness in the center, and welcome wherever you take it. Its dotted with slumped berries, marbled with pink and purple streaks and topped with a thick, tart lemon glaze. And if that doesnt scream summer enough to you, consider taking it to a housewarming party on a gorgeous evening with the skyline of Manhattan in the distance, where you dont have to nervously glance at your watch as the babysitters tab adds up, nobody cares when you get up the next morning, and as you have long, uninterrupted conversations with friends about life itself, start to imagine that maybe if the closets have gone neglected this long, another week without cannot hurt them.

sharp lemon glaze
triple berry summer buttermilk bundt

One year ago: Blueberry Yogurt Multigrain Pancakes
Two years ago: Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, Improved
Three years ago: Chocolate Yogurt Snack Cakes
Four years ago: Zucchini Strand Spaghetti
Five years ago: Lemon Risotto and Strawberry Chiffon Shortcake

Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt
Adapted from Rustic Fruit Desserts

The recipe, as originally published, uses 3 cups rhubarb for the berries and 1/2 teaspoon lemon oil for the vanilla. As you can imagine, you could likely use 3 cups of many chopped fruits or berries for different, delicious bundts throughout the year, such as cranberries in the fall or even diced peaches and other stone fruits in the month or two to come. Have fun with it.

Although I made these with the 3 cups of berries listed below (using one cup each of blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries, though currants or huckleberries or whatever you can get would also be delicious) I think this cake has the potential to be even more of a berry bomb with a fourth cup of berries. The cake as written below is full of berries, but its a balanced amount they dont overwhelm the cake, and I do really like a cake thats almost overwhelmed with fruit.

Updated with weights, at last, 7/10/12. Plus, a note about weights: Making it even more confusing for home cooks, not every recipe writer agrees on the weight of a cup of flour or sugar. However, when theres a discrepancy between what I would get and what a recipe writer has included in their ingredients, I default to their measurements, as I do below. The weights are on the heavy side by my measurements (my spoon-and-sweep cups clock in at 125 grams), but will work as listed in this recipe.

Cake
2 1/2 cups (355 grams) plus 2 tablespoons (20 grams) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons (10 grams) baking powder
1 teaspoon fine sea salt or table salt
1 cup (8 ounces or 225 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups (340 grams) granulated sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup (175 ml) buttermilk
3 cups (350 to 450 grams) mixed berries

Glaze
2 cups (240 grams) powdered or confections sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon (15 grams) unsalted butter, very, very soft

Preheat your oven to 350F. Generously grease a 10-cup Bundt pan, either with butter or a nonstick spray.* Set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk or sift 2 1/2 cups flour (leaving 2 tablespoons back), baking powder and salt together and set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer or large mixing bowl, cream together the butter, sugar and lemon zest until light and impossibly fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Then, with the mixer on a low speed, add your eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl between each addition. Beat in vanilla, briefly. Add 1/3 flour mixture to batter, beating until just combined, followed by half the buttermilk, another 1/3 of the flour mixture, the remaining buttermilk and remaining flour mixture. Scrape down from time to time and dont mix any more than you need to. In the bowl where youd mixed your dry ingredients, toss the berries with the remaining 2 tablespoons of flour. With a silicon spatula, gently fold the berries into the cake batter. The batter will be very thick and this will seem impossible without squishing the berries a little, but just do your best and remember that squished berries do indeed make for a pretty batter.

Spread cake batter you might find it easier to plop it in the pan in large spoonfuls, because its so thick in the prepared baking pan and spread the top smooth. Bake for 55 to 60 minutes, rotating the cake 180 degrees after 30 (to make sure it browns evenly). The cake is done as soon as a tester comes out clean of batter. At 10 minutes before my baking time was up, a tester was totally wet with batter and I was certain it would never be done in the estimated time. 7 minutes later, the same tester was clean as a whistle, so fret not.

Set cake pan on a wire rack to cool for 30 minutes, before inverting the cake onto a serving platter to cool the rest of the way. Cool completely. Once cool, whisk together the powdered sugar, lemon juice and butter until smooth and very, very thick. (If youd like it thinner, add more juice, but I like the thick drippiness of it, seen above.) Spread carefully over top of cake, letting it trickle down the sides when and where it wishes. Serve at once or keep it covered at room temperature for 3 to 4 days.

* Updated note, due to comments about cake sticking: If you have a nonstick Bundt, just a coat of butter or nonstick spray should do. However, if you have a regular Bundt, not nonstick coated, youre really going to want to make sure every nook and cranny is well-coated with butter or even shortening (the solidity of both helps them stick to the cake walls), and then dust the inside with flour. Setting your cake pan in the fridge or freezer (to set the coating even further) while you make the cake batter will provide even more insurance. I hope this improves the release rate of the cake!


Blueberry-Lemon Buttermilk Bundt Cake I saw Debs triple berry summer cake and couldnt take my eyes off of it for days ... Blueberry-Lemon Buttermilk Bundt Cake. Yield: 10 to 12 servings. Prep Time: 20 minutes ... triple berry summer buttermilk bundt smitten kitchen A home cooking weblog from a tiny kitchen in New York City. The place to find all of your new favorite things to cook. Delicious / Wow, that is a scrumptious cake! Triple Berry Summer ... Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt via smittenkitchen.com. summer berry buttermilk bundt by smitten on Flickr. Pinned via web Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt Punchfork From Smitten Kitchen. Ingredients: Berries, lemon, lemon, all-purpose flour, baking powder, granulated sugar, vanilla extract, butter, eggs, 2 more. Summer Berry Buttermilk Bundt Cake In the kitchen with Kath I first saw the recipe for Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt on Smitten Kitchen, where Deb Perelman said she had adapted it from a recipe in Rustic Fruit ... Dinner At Sheila's - Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt The bundt cake above is the perfect vehicle for the summer berries in abundance now at the farmers markets, produce stands and ... triple berry summer buttermilk bundt Flickr - Photo Sharing! Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt on smittenkitchen.com This photo was taken on June 23, 2012 using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II Amanda Peterson: Sunday Servings: Triple Berry Buttermilk Bundt Seasons are back where they are supposed to be. It's July, and it's summer. And that feels right and very proudly American because of course, the southern ... Triple Berry Summer Buttermilk Bundt Cake Recipe - Food.com - 483287 This recipe came from SmittenKitchen.com, one of my favourite food blogs... and she's adapted it from Rustic Fruit Desserts. All I know is that it's delicious! It's ... Double Berry Bundt Cake eat.wander.love Lucky for me, she had just posted a recipe for a triple berry summer buttermilk bundt. Talk about timing. Her cake looked delicious, except for maybe ...

Friday, August 17, 2012

flag cake

berry flag cake

Last year, I brought a flag cake to a 4th of July rooftop barbecue. Earlier in the week, Id harbored fantasies about making an elaborate ice cream cake or layered berry yogurt popsicles or salads teetering on the edge of food safety standards but New York City, as it always seems to be in the first week of July, was at the crest of a week-plus of ever-increasing temperatures and stickiness, a summit where it tends to linger for a few even more airless days before finally releasing the thunder and lightening, sinking the mercury back to a brief day or two of something resembling temperate before it starts the climb again. What, me? No fan of NYC summers? Where would you get such an idea?

cake batter
buttery sheet cake

(This is also the time of year, every year, where I break my please-dont-be-so-dull-as-to-complain-about-the-weather-Deb rule. Forgive me) Anyway, the heat got the better of my ambitions and I decided to make a simple yellow sheet cake with cream cheese frosting and an arrangement of patriotic berries that had, in fact, been imported from Baja. To me, it was good, cute even, but nothing crazy, just something Id seen kicked around magazines and TV shows for two decades, hardly a revolutionary idea. My friends, however many of whom use their ovens for sweater storage and gasp! do not spend their days ingesting various formats of food media went absolutely ballistic over it. When strangers from other parties on the roof started taking some, they became possessive of their cake and shooed them away. The told me in no uncertain terms would I ever be welcome at a July 4th party again without it.

cream cheese frosting

powdered and fresh

Of course, I didnt listen. Yesterday, ignoring this, I decided that I must be the type of person who likes to make insane cakes I saw on Pinterest. I am, in fact, not, but by the time I remembered this my kitchen, arms, all of my towels, and my toddler were covered with food dye and the sticky residue of a red-white-and-lets-never-talk-about-this-again disaster. Then I remembered this lovely, dead-simple cake that I should have been making instead. Did I mention its a quickie? That it involves no piping bags, no strained warmed jam glazes, no pastry crusts and, most importantly, food dye? That I had streamlined my standard yellow birthday cake into a virtually one-bowl, single layer recipe, presuming we all have better things to do this evening than scrub out a sink full of dishes? That the frosting is a dump-and-whip kind of thing? And the berries just need to be rinsed and patted dry? Next year, and all the years after that until the end of the time, Im going to listen to my friends and make this flag cake. I think you should too.

blue stars
red stripes

One year ago: Flatbreads with Honey, Thyme and Sea Salt
Two years ago: Sour Cherry Pie with Almond Crumble and Porch Swing
Three years ago: Cherry Brown Butter Bars and Watermelon Lemonade
Four years ago: Project Wedding Cake
Five years ago: Classic Madeleines

Flag Cake

If you have access to white raspberries, you can use them for the white stripes instead of powdering the raspberries. You could also use them to make stars in the blueberry portion.

If you wash your berries I tend to just look them over for dirt, and then decide if they need an extra rinse make sure to get them very dry. Youll want them to be fully dry on the outside or the powdered sugar wont stay on top. (That said, even the ones I had that were slightly more damp, still kept their white appearance, even with more pink popping through, so dont drive yourself bonkers trying to keep berries dry.)

I like to serve (and carry) this cake in the pan, rustic style, so I let it cool completely in there. If youd like to unmold it to serve on a different platter, let it cool on the rack for 15 minutes, before flipping it over onto another rack, removing the parchment paper, and flipping it back onto a serving platter. The frosting amount suggested is just for the top of the cake, but its a generous layer, so if youd like to frost the sides, you can use the same amount and it will be thinner all around, or you can increase the frosting volume by half and cover the sides evenly. You may also unmold the cake and still only frost the top, leaving the sides bare.

Cake
2 sticks (1 cup, 1/2 pound or 225 grams) unsalted butter, softened
2 cups (400 grams) sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 teaspoons (10 ml) pure vanilla extract
4 cups (465 grams) cake flour or 3 2/3 cups (460 grams) all-purpose flour plus 1/3 cup (45 grams) cornstarch
2 teaspoons (10 grams) baking powder
1 teaspoon (5 grams) baking soda
1 teaspoon (6 grams) table salt
2 cups buttermilk (475 ml), well-shaken

Frosting
8-ounce (225 gram) block cream cheese, at room temperature
1/2 cup (1 stick or 1/4 pound) butter, at room temperature
1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract
2 to 3 cups (240 to 360 grams) powdered sugar

Decoration
Powdered sugar
1 cup blueberries (1/2 pint, about 170 grams), very dry
3 cups raspberries (1 1/2 pints, about 360 grams), very dry

Make cake: Preheat oven to 350F. Butter a 913-inch baking pan and line the bottom with a rectangle of parchment paper, then butter parchment. (Or, you can use a nonstick cooking spray instead of butter for speed and ease.)

Beat butter and sugar together in the bottom of a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, at least 3 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, scraping down the bowl between each addition. Add vanilla extract. Place flour, cornstarch (if using), baking powder, baking soda and table salt in a sifter or fine-mesh strainer and shake half of mixture into mixing bowl. (If this makes a huge mess, you can also do so onto a piece of waxed paper and use that to dump it into the mixing bowl.) Mix until just combined. Add buttermilk and stir it in slowly, because it will splash easily. The mixture might look curdled, but it will come together just fine in a moment. Add remaining dry ingredients and mix until combined.

Pour batter in prepared pan and smooth top. Bake until golden and a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, [updated!] 30 to 35 minutes my initial notes said 35 minutes baking time, but early testers report it took 45 to 50, which, frankly, sounds a little closer to what Id expect. Please, check at 35 and if the cake is quite battery still, come back in 10 minutes to check again. Dont remove the cake until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Once it does, transfer the cake to a rack to cool completely.

Make frosting Beat cream cheese and butter together until light and very fluffy, scraping down the sides to make sure no pesky cream cheese is left unmixed. Add the vanilla. Add the first cup of powdered sugar, and beat it until combined. Add the second. I prefer my cream cheese frostings less sweet, so I stopped there. Because the frosting is just going to be a layer between the berries and cake, it doesnt need to be terribly stiff, so you can get away with skipping the additional cup of sugar. However, if yours still seems way too soft to use as frosting or not sweet enough, add the third cup of powdered sugar.

If your cake is very domed on top and youd rather it be flat, you can level it a bit with a small serrated knife. Spread frosting evenly over top of cake. Or not evenly. Nobody will know, which is another reason why this cake is the greatest.

Decorate away Place your powdered sugar in a sifter or fine-mesh strainer. If youve got an open tea strainer, this is a great time to use it, although it will only hold a spoonful at a time. The short side of the blue rectangle of an American flag yes, I looked this up, and yes, I need a hobby will fall at roughly half the height of the short side of your cake. The long side will fall at a little more than one-third the width of your cake. You can outline this shape with blueberries. Then, dot a few blueberries inside, spaced apart. Coat the inside berries with a dusting of powdered sugar. Then, fill the rest of the space with uncoated blueberries.

An American flag has 13 stripes total, beginning and ending with a red stripe. Unless you have really tiny berries, youre not going to fit all of them and nobody, least of you, should care. Eyeball the width your first row of raspberries will take up, and start your second row after that (approximately 1/2 to 2/3-inch down). Continue this pattern of an empty row followed by a row of raspberries the rest of the way down your cake. Coat these rows with a dusting of powdered sugar. Fill the empty rows with uncoated raspberries. Admire your pretty work. Cover pan with lid or foil and refrigerate until needed for your party/picnic/barbecue.


Flag Sheet Cake - Martha Stewart Recipes - Delicious Food Recipes ... Get Martha Stewart's Flag Sheet Cake recipe. Also browse hundreds more test kitchen-approved food recipes and cooking tips from Martha Stewart. Flag Cake Recipe Taste of Home Recipes - Find Recipes ... Find recipes for Flag Cake and other Baby Shower Recipe recipes. Get all the best recipes at Taste of Home. Recipe directions: Line a 13-in. x 9-in. baking pan with ... Flag Cake recipe Very easy to make and tastes great! Very light and perfect for a summer barbeque. Used angel food cake, and 2 tubs of the small whipped topping. Easy American flag cake Recipe - Recipes Recipe for Easy American Flag Cake. This 4th of July cake is so easy that you could make it with your eyes closed. Let the kids in on the fun, they may surprise you ... The Coolest Fourth of July Cake I've Ever Seen - The Secret Life ... Fourth of July Layered Red, White and Blue Flag Cake with cream cheese frosting, The Secret Life of a Chef's Wife Flag Cake Duncan Hines Duncan Hines Classic White Cake smothered in juicy strawberries, fresh blueberries and sweet marshmallows. Decorate your Flag Cake for the most patriotic dessert ever. Flag Cake - American Flag Cake - Patriotic Cake Recipe This flag cake makes a great patriotic cake recipe for Memorial Day or 4th of July. This American flag cake starts with a cake mix and is decorated with blueberries ... Flag Cake Recipe : Ina Garten : Recipes : Food Network 1 hr 15 min; 18 tablespoons (2 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature; 3 cups sugar; 6 extra-large eggs at room temperature; 1 cup sour cream at room ... Cooks.com - Recipes - Flag Cake FOURTH OF JULY FLAG CAKE: Ingredients: 5 (blueberries .. strawberries .. sugar ... FLAG POKE CAKE: This cake is wonderful for a ... left corner where you will place ... Decorating a Flag Cake Article - Allrecipes.com A step-by-step tutorial for decorating a flag cake. ... Do More FREE! SAVE favorites in your Recipe Box; CREATE and save shopping lists