Thanks to my friend, Miranda, I was given a chance to get in the kitchen and do a little cooking. Miranda is a friend from my time in DC and she was recently married. She asked me if I could make two round cakes for her open house in Utah. I gladly agreed and thought that it would be a great opportunity to improve my skills. When I asked Miranda what kind of cake she would like, she gave me some options, something with peanut butter or a pineapple upside down cake. My thought was a single 9" round cake just isn't very nice. You definitely need a second layer and I didn't really want to have to deal with that, so I went with the pineapple upside down. How hard could it be? Boy, was I wrong. Now the problems I had could be totally related to my skills and not necessarily related to the difficulty of the cake itself, but I will say I don't think I'll be making any pineapple upside down cakes, or any upside down cakes for that matter, anytime soon. (Miranda is lucky I love her.)
I did some researching online and saw some interesting recipes for other types of upside down cakes, for example peach raspberry. I decided to do one traditional pineapple upside down and a peach raspberry upside down. As I was looking for a recipe to use, my cousin Anne, who is an AMAZING chef, suggested I try a recipe by Tyler Florence that she absolutely loves and has had great success with. She did tell me that she made some adjustments to the recipe and suggested that I give it a test run. Thank heavens she did or I really could have had a disaster on my hands.
The first time I attempted this cake (yes there were MULTIPLE attempts) I thought I was using a 9" round cake pan, but discovered that I was incorrect. I followed Anne's adjustments and aside from the cake being a little undercooked in the center and the caramel overflowing the taste was really cooked. Anne also told me she likes to make the cake portion by itself sometimes, so that was attempt number two. This time I used a 10" round pan. No success. The cake completely sunk in the middle.
Now I was at a loss. With two weeks until the open house, I had no idea what I was going to do to not only get ONE cake to be edible and look pretty, but TWO. I started to get desperate. I went a hunt for a 9 1/2" round pan, but the only thing I could find was a springform pan. Someone suggested that maybe the altitude of Utah was part of the problem.
On attempt three, I decided to give it a try in the springform pan and this time to follow Tyler Florence's recipe exactly. I also decided to add two tablespoons of cornstarch for each cup of flour to help with any altitude problems. The night before the open house I made what I think was the most successful of all of my attempts. There were no problems of overflowing or undercooking, but upon flipping the cake I did lose a portion to the plate at the bottom of the springform pan. Aside from the small missing portion, the flavor was good and it was fairly pretty.
And then we have the day of the open house.....on attempt number 4, there was complete and utter disaster. I used a regular 9" round pan and followed Tyler's recipe, but the cake batter TOTALLY overflowed. Thankfully I had placed it on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet, but unfortunately I did lose half to three quarters of the batter to the parchment paper. It went straight to the trash.
I was out of time. The next two cakes had to come with me to the open house regardless of how they turned out. As I was about to pour the batter for cake number 5, I got the idea to split the batter between the two cakes. During the baking process, this seemed to have been a genius idea. The cakes turned out ok, but they just weren't very pretty. In fact, the peach raspberry was so lack luster in it's appearance that I dusted it with powdered sugar in an attempt to make it look more presentable. The flavor apparently was great, but I was definitely not happy with the appearance.
Here are some pictures of the process and the final two cakes.
This was not a confidence booster in the slightest. I'm now completely terrified to start my cooking classes in the fall, especially since I start the semester off with a baking and pastry skills class! Ahhhh! Hopefully, whatever baking issues I'm having will go away before August 27th.
Enjoy the summer and all of the wonderful produce that you'll be able to find. Put it all to good use in the kitchen by making wonderful fresh tasty meals. Hopefully more blogs to be coming soon and Happy Cooking!
