ABC - Strawberry-filled Angel Food Cake

When I searched the King Arthur Flour website for a summery dessert, I came across this Strawberry-filled Angel Food Cake. About five years ago, I baked and tasted my very first Angel Food Cake, and loved it. It was a recipe by the baking queen, Rose Levy Beranbaum. The thought of filling with the cake with a fruit-filled cream filling sounded REALLY good, and so it became our July challenge for ABC.

Orange flavored Angel Food cake with Red/White/Blue filling. Bon appetit!

If you'd like to join the ABC bakers in their monthly baking adventures, please go to the ABC blog for more information.

ABC - No-Knead Chocolate Cherry Pecan Bread

Chocolate Cherry Berry No-Knead Bread

This month's recipe for the ABC bakers was the ever-so-popular No-Knead bread. The King Arthur Flour recipe we made was a Chocolate Cherry Pecan bread. I made some changes by using mini chocolate chips and instead of just dried cherries, I used a mix of dried cherries and other berries (cranberries, blueberries and strawberries). Since I can't eat pecans, I simply omitted them. I briefly considered substituting almonds and although I love almonds, I'm not too crazy about them in bread because they get a bit soggy.

There may have been a bit of confusion around this KAF recipe. The recipe on their site differed slightly from the recipe on their blog. They have a pretty good explanation as to why that is. I decided to go with the recipe in the blog because I liked the step-by-step pictures :o)

If you'd like to join the ABC bakers in their monthly baking adventures, please go to the ABC blog for more information.

Birthday cake

I usually bake my own birthday cake. Although I skipped this “tradition” last year, I thought I’d make up for it by making this year’s cake extra special. With so many different cakes, fillings, and frostings to choose from, where do you start? I had just borrowed Flo Braker’s “Baking for All Occasions” from the library and wanted to bake from it. The idea of a deconstructed Black Forest Cake or Schwarzwalder Kirsch Torte came to me. Now I had everything I needed to start baking.



Instead of the usual sponge cake, I thought the cake would taste good with a vanilla bean-infused white cake. I used Flo Braker’s recipe for Silver Cake with Poppy Seeds and just omitted the poppy seeds as she recommended for a classic white cake.

I love fruit-based mousses and have made them multiple times for cake fillings. In this case, in order to stay in the Black Forest Cake spirit, I thought I’d make a cherry mousse. If you haven’t had a chance to browse through Rick Rodgers’ “Kaffeehaus”, you’re missing out on tons of delectable recipes for European-style baked goods. For my birthday cake, I adapted his recipe for Strawberry Cream Filling. For that extra cherry flavor, I arranged halved cherries on top of the mousse filling.

Now for the icing on the cake (literally), I decided to use white chocolate instead of dark chocolate, so I chose Flo Braker’s recipe White Chocolate/Cream Cheese Buttercream frosting. I highly recommend using good-quality white chocolate for this otherwise it will taste like wax. This frosting was very creamy with a great melt-in-your-mouth feel to it. The vanilla flavor in the white chocolate paired beautifully with the vanilla bean aroma in the white cake. The almond flavor added to the the frosting complimented the cherries very well, in my opinion. On top of the cake, I spread some cherry preserves for that nice dark red color contrast against the ivory-white frosting.