Whimsical Bakehouse: An Earnest Summation

This is what "Fling" looks two days later. Not even half eaten, picked at, melting, sagging, altogether depressing. 

Three pounds fatter and rather frustrated, I'm ending the Whimsical Bakehouse interlude. But before I do my breakdown of the recipes, a few words of appreciation.

It's a fun book to flip through, as the cakes are colorful, playful, unpretentious. The introduction by Meredith Vieira -- who randomly wandered into Liv and Kaye Hansen's Ardsley, New York bakery to buy a princess cake for her daughter -- is sweetly gushing: "You'll know you're there by the tinkle of the bell, the wave of warmth, and Kaye's smile. . ."

Okay, it's a little much, but sometimes nice is nice.

The tone of the book is encouraging and relaxed, as opposed to, say, Rose Levy Berenbaum's unforgiving Cake Bible, which implies you need a PhD to bake a butter cake.

 

Having said all this, Whimsical Bakehouse isn't precise enough for the amateur. I've detailed those lapses in my posts, and they're reflected below in my assessment of the "recipes" for finished cakes. 

On the other hand, almost all the recipes for the components of said cakes (chocolate glaze excepted) are excellent. 

Over the last week I made 9 recipes from the Whimsical Bakehouse:

Worth the Price of the Book: 1

Great: 1

Good: 4

So-so: 1

Flat-out bad: 2

A solid, middle-of the road performance.

I'm going to finish up Arabesque this week. Isabel has posted a poll on the right side of the page, so if you have an opinion, please vote.

Whimsical Bakehouse: Fling

Yesterday was all about "Fling," and as you can see, I didn't have an easy time of it.

The most elegant cake in the Whimsical Bakehouse, "Fling" -- at least as it appears in the book -- is a glossy chocolate-glazed beauty festooned with flat, colorful discs of chocolate. 

I started by baking three layers of chocolate chip pound cake (worked fine) and making the whipped chocolate ganache for filling.

Just about every cookbook contains at least one jewel of a recipe, and whipped chocolate ganache may be the crowning achievement of Whimsical authors Liv and Kaye Hansen. Essentially, you melt chocolate, then add cream. Freeze. Whip. Spread the fluffy, delicious ganache on your cake.

Miraculous. 

Then I tackled the chocolate glaze. Complete disaster. I've made many chocolate glazes, usually the easiest of icings, but this one behaved like oil, slipping off the cake rather than sheeting and adhering smoothly, a problem for which the Hansens offered no solutions. I muddled through, patching chocolate wherever I could, but never managed to cover every raggedy surface of cake.

Finally, I melted the wafer chocolate for the decorative disks and piped circles on a sheet of parchment, something the Hansens make sound straightforward. And so it was, though I ended up not with delicate, flat disks but lumps. 

My sloppy "Fling" does not appear related to the Hansens' "Fling," which is an extraordinarily pretty cake. If you ever get hold of a copy of Whimsical Bakehouse, check out page 56. The dots on their cake look like bubbles, or party balloons, floating across a matte chocolate sky.

Fortunately, no one seemed to care how my "Fling" looked. It was a tall, powerfully rich cake -- not my thing at all, but extremely popular with children.

Whimsical Bakehouse: Lemon Ginger Cream Cheese Cake

Pretty, but a cop-out.

Yes, definitely a cop-out. The Whimsical Bakehouse is all about gaudy, lavishly decorated cakes (which is why Owen chose it) and I am cherry-picking the easy ones that you don't even need to frost. 

I guess I should change that, but I find cake decorating stressful and maddening! You can't fix your mistakes, you can't fake it, you can't add a little more cumin and make everything all better. You're just left there with your pathetic, lopsided creation that resembles a 5-year-old's pottery project.

Which is why I play it safe and stick to boring recipes, like lemon ginger cream cheese cake. Very moist and richly flavored -- with lemon zest, lemon juice, powdered ginger and chopped crystallized ginger. Here's what authors, Kay and Liv Hansen have to say: "The combination of lemon and ginger makes this cake a great choice for any summer party. . . you will get rave reviews."

I like that Hansen energy!

Were my reviews raves?

Isabel : Good, except when you bite into a piece of "that candied ginger stuff."

Owen: Lemony. Really "stuffing." (?)

Mark: Why did you have to put in those ginger pieces?

Not quite raves, but respectable. I think the gist of the criticisms is: Let lemon cake be lemon cake, don't try to smarten it up with all that elite, "Georgetown cocktail party" ginger stuff.

I do need to tackle a more ambitious Whimsical project next. Maybe "Fling" or "Ode to Jackson Pollock."

Whimsical Bakehouse: Cupcakes

"Why are you so negative about this cake book?" Isabel asked me earlier. I felt her tone was a little pissy.

"I'm not," I said.

"Yes, you are." Definitely pissy.

She's right. I'm negative about this cake book. Not sure why, but I have some theories that I'm still working out and will share in the fullness of time.

So, I made Whimsical Bakehouse vanilla cupcakes for Owen's class birthday party. He wanted them glazed in chocolate and decorated with these adorable homemade chocolate bumblebees, as they appear in the book.

I actually purchased the special chocolate and candy dye to make the bees, but discovered I lacked the will to execute the project. I foresaw hours of finicky work, much frustration, and eventual failure. Valuable time I could spend compulsively monitoring the election.

Instead, I slapped on some buttercream and sent the cupcakes off to school. Isabel and her cousin Edie ate the leftovers.

Whimsical Bakehouse: Crazy Swirls

The agony this ugly cake caused me.

Meet "Crazy Swirls," baked and decorated according to the instructions in Liv and Kaye Hansen's The Whimsical Bakehouse, a lively, chatty volume that I bought when I was preparing to bake my sister's wedding cake a few years ago.

I ultimately decided the Whimsical aesthetic -- bright, clangorous color combinations -- wasn't one I embraced. But I kept the book on the shelf anyway, and Owen recently chose it as "his" cookbook. Now I have to make some effort to work from it for a few days.

For the joint birthday party of Owen and his cousin Stella, I made my first Whimsical creation:

1. I baked a walnut caramel cake -- three rather delicious layers of toast-brown butter cake.

2. Made the coffee mousse filling.

3. Broke the extremely friable cake while stacking and filling with coffee mousse. Sad, but fixable.

4. Whipped the egg whites for Kaye's buttercream and "boiled" the sugar syrup for 7 minutes per the instructions. The sugar caramelized. I poured it into the egg whites nonetheless. Hot, brown soup, sloshing around in the mixer. A minute later I poured it all down the drain.

5. I whipped more egg whites for Kaye's buttercream and this time SIMMERED the sugar syrup for 7 minutes. The sugar didn't caramelize. I poured it into the egg whites. Hot white soup sloshing around in the mixer.  A minute later I poured it all down the drain.

6. See #5, but this time instead of soup, I got glossy, sweet, snow-white meringue to which I added a pound and a half of butter in tiny clumps. Beat for ten minutes. If you've never made meringue buttercream, it's a silky miracle. When it works.

7. Crumb coated the cake.

8. Divided the buttercream into five different bowls, and colored each with a different hue on the yellow-orange-pink spectrum, per the instructions.

9. Put blobs of frosting all over the cake.

10. Chilled the cake.

11. With a warm spatula, scraped off the lumpy ridges of buttercream to yield a moderately smooth, piebald orange-pink cake. 

12. Decorated with white buttercream squiggles. Voila, Crazy Swirls.

Took to Justine's house, adorned with candles, cut, ate, sent leftovers home with Checka who proclaimed it her "dream" mocha cake.

Mocha cake?

So far, achieving whimsy has been exhausting, expensive, and fattening.

Whimsical Bakehouse: An Interlude

I am taking a short break from Arabesque for reasons I will explain. 

A while back I decided that my family members (a.k.a. prisoners) should have a say in choosing the cookbooks from which I cook our meals. Big of me, don't you think? Isabel started us off with the Cuisine of California, and now it's Owen's turn. 

It was his birthday this week and he chose The Whimsical Bakehouse cake book. I tried to convince him to change his mind, as this is basically a book of elaborately decorated, garishly colored party cakes.

He declined. 

Fair is fair and I will give it my best shot, though cake decorating is not my forte.

I asked Owen to explain his choice:

Tipsy Baker: Why this book?

Owen: Because I like desserts and cakes and stuff and sweet things.

Tipsy Baker: But I have a lot of dessert books. Why this one?

Owen: Because it has a lot of pretty designs and it's a challenge and you've been doing this a long time and I thought you should get on to something more fancy.

Tipsy Baker: Anything in particular you want me to make?

Owen: The spotted cake. And "Summer Nights," and "Sunflower."

Tipsy Baker: What was your favorite book we've cooked from so far?

Owen: The Alaska cookbook. Because we went to Alaska and I thought it was amazing. And I kind of liked -- what was it called -- oh yeah, the baked Alaska.

Tipsy Baker: What is your favorite thing to eat?

Owen: Lamb steak.

Ed. note: Lamb steak? What the hell is lamb steak?