Day 6, Day 8, and Day 12: Return of the Chile Chocolate Torte

  Can't leave this cake alone.  The sumptuous smell filling my home, the exotic flavor of chiles with chocolate, the endless possible variations....
  Day 6 - the work torte.  Like a lot of employers, mine has a food culture thing going that includes somebody bringing treats every Friday.  When I brought this cake, made just like before with pecans and a little bit of cayenne, it vanished immediately from the break room - always a good sign. 
   Day 8 - frosted chile pecan torte. A man I know suggested this cake needs frosting.  Not really seeing how this perfect little confection needs anything at all, but always willing to experiment, this time the cake received a little buttercream on top and down the sides.  Strangely, I prefer this cake without the beloved buttercream.  Frosting detracts from the trademark chile flavor, and I won't ice this cake again.  It's still fine to serve it with a little ice cream or whipped cream, however.
   Day 12 - nonlethal version.  My dear friend A. is a Spanish teacher, artist, extraordinary gardener, and quite possibly the most meticulously straight forward and ethical human being I know.  She's also allergic to nuts. She quipped, "You're making all these cakes, and we haven't gotten even one.  We're Hispanic, and ours better have chile."  Or something like that; it's paraphrasing. 
   SO I found a way to make my version of Michelle's wonderful Chile Chocolate Torte without nuts, since I so very much prefer A. enjoy it and still live.  Here's how it went.  Dried cherries, the snack kind that are slightly sweetened and surprisingly have a tiny bit of oil on them, soaked overnight in kirsch, replaced the nuts.  As with all chile chocolate cakes, this smelled outrageously delicious baking. Dropped the Chile Chocolate Torte with Cherries onto A.'s kitchen table while the family was out celebrating her daughter's 22nd birthday.  Didn't actually taste this particular cake, but I hear it was good. "¡maravillo-el pastel!"

Quintessential French Chocolate Cake Goes to Orchid

   Suddenly realizing it's my turn to bring, and needing something quick to make with ingredients on hand, I chose  this cake for its single star degree of difficulty and  country French appeal.  It went together efficiently with Michelle Urvater's stellar directions, and by 10:00am on this cold, windy Saturday, I was on my way to the orchid club meeting with a lovely, warm chocolate cake.  It was extremely well received.

Cake #5: Deep Dish Chocolate Cake with Buttercream Frosting

   Ever wonder what becomes of those goth teenagers when they hit 30?  The goth girl of my aquaintance ( And she will tell you, "Once a goth, always a goth.") became a brilliant, compassionate, and inspired adult who still wears a lot of earrings and black nail polish. T. is a rock.
  We work together.  She's the kind of person who will listen, encourage, create, argue, and pull you right back from the edge of that metaphorical cliff.  The next recipient had to be T.  A family woman, she needed something easy to transport back home, something that would hold up if she froze it, a cake suitable for children. 
   Page 113, Michelle Urvater's Deep-Dish Chocolate Cake leaped off the page and into my oven.  The only change I made was to go with buttercream, rather than the  suggested sour cream frosting.  My high-mileage Toyota  Matrix (great gas economy, flimsy body) once sat in T.'s driveway while we went traveling. When we returned from our coastal adventure, T.'s husband B. had washed and waxed that  old Toyota.  B. loves buttercream frosting, and a man like that deserves buttercream.
   This recipe makes a lot of cake, and I did a snack sized one  to test the flavor.  It is, as Michelle says, a "perfect...moist, sweet cake...".  Upon tasting this, B. asked my friend what she did to warrant chocolate cake.  T. told B. she had no clue.   B. said he hoped whatever it was, she'd keep right on doing it.
 
    

Orange and Chocolate Bundt Cake in a Box

   Last Christmas  kind and thoughtful in-laws sent us a truly gorgeous and delicious professionally made red velevet cake with to-die-for cream cheese frosting.  We absolutely loved it.  Still I am schlepping cakes everywhere in the perfect-for-cake-of-course packing box.  There is nothing quite like being surprised with an excellent cake in the mail.
    My son studies cellular and molecular biology in a far away, damp, dark, cloudy, coastal town, near (By near I mean geographically and spiritually near.) the hometown of Curt Cobain.  Even the boy's fine laying hens, Twinkie and Cupcake, grow tired of the relentless overcast and wet weather, and they complain loudly.  It's understandable.  A good cheerful shipping cake was clearly needed in February. Orange and Chocolate Bundt Cake, page 122, turned out to be just the ticket. If you slice this cake and wrap it in plastic wrap, you can get a lot of it into one of those small post office boxes that ship for the same rate regardless of weight.  He received his cake in 4 days and was delighted.  Mailing this cake is like sending sunshine in a box.

Trouble Shooting and General Principles

    People have taught me tons of valuable ideas, and I've figured out a few things that greatly improved my baking and my life. Those are good things, too, because to live more than 50 years and learn just nothing would be sad, wouldn't it?   Fortunately for the reader, only a few are appearing today in this blog:

1.  Cook when you can enjoy it; eat fruit with cheese or leftovers when you can't.  Cook with good friends whenever possible.
2.  Double the vanilla.  Use real vanilla, of course, Mexican vanilla when you can get it.
3.  Check, check, check your cake once it's in the oven!  Every oven is different, and a slightly gooey cake is always better than a dried-out or burnt one.  Throw a huge sheet of aluminum foil over a cake that threatens to burn on top.  Gently rotate your cake if you suspect the oven heats unevenly.
4.  Use an oven thermometer to check your oven temp.  My ancient Whirlpool electric checks pretty close to the dial set temperature, but still it somehow almost always cooks faster than recipe cooking times suggest.
5. Play.  If you think the ingredient you have in mind would suit your taste better than the one in the recipe, try it.
6.  It's okay to throw out a baking disaster.  You really don't have to eat that.
7.  Cake has a short quality life-span.  It should be eaten right away.  Never hoard; always share.

Day 2: Chile Changes Everything

   Because chocolate candy with chiles is delicious, because I adore flourless chocolate cakes and also because of the movie Chocolat, the next cake had to be page 238, Chile Chocolate Peanut Torte. Remaining true to the Michelle's recipe except for 3 deviations, this is my new Favorite Thing in the World.  Switching pecans for peanuts, bumping 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon to 1 full teaspoon, and  adding 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne to the oncho chile worked for me.  An extra egg also went into the batter, but that was only because this box of large eggs seemed on the small side.
   During a wet snow near the end of a far too long winter, there's nothing like baking to soothe the winter-weary soul.  The smell of this cake  - the nuts, the chocolate, especially the chiles - permeated the house like the essence of comfort.

First Actual Cake

     Like most jobs, my work is fraught with dull, dreary, unneeded meetings.  A man I know says if this weren't the case, those work days wouldn't be work, they'd be  vacation.  Faced with a particularly daunting upcoming work meeting, the only way to make it bearable was to bring chocolate cake, a pretty one with layers.
   Michelle Urvater's Chocolate Cake offers so many superb choices.  Concentrating on the single star (least complicated) recipes, I picked Silky Chocolate Cake, page 150, and decided to make it with  pastry cream filling and whipped ganache frosting  just like Michelle suggests. 
   Clearly the reason so many potlucks and party cakes turn out to be sheet cakes served right in the pan is the extra time it takes, skill even, to produce layer cake.  A pan of cake with frosting on top will be lovely no matter what, but layer cake can lean to one side or just generally show flaws you wouldn't notice in pan cake.  BUT copious frosting can often hide lots of mistakes!  And that thought gave me the courage to proceed.
   One reason I love Michelle's book is the surgically precise directions.  For example, she encourages the baker to weigh ingredients rather than just measuring volume with a measuring cup.  She tells you  exactly how long to beat the mixtures in minutes instead of assuming this baker will know what "until creamy" might mean.  I find all these exact details for what to do comforting, a source of hope.
   My grandmother was a baker extraordinaire (more on that later).  Never was there anything left on beaters or bowl to really taste because she meticulously spatulaed it into the baking pan.  I however like to leave some batter, filling, frosting in the bowl for tasting.  To me this practice enhances the process, and since I did not live through the Great Depression, I always do that.  Having never before in my life made pastry cream, I expected it to be like Bavarian cream filling in donuts and found the bowl taste slightly dry-ish maybe because it's made with a little cornstarch.  But when it's sandwiched between cake layers, this is fabulous stuff!  The excellent ganache frosting avoids too much sweetness and makes the cake oober rich.  Next time, I plan to make the altitude adjustment so the layers will rise a bit more; they were a little flat-ish.
   Chocolate cake has transformative powers, and as hoped, it vastly improved the long, long  meeting. People were surprised, happy, pleased .  Even the  dieters and the health-oriented had nothing but good things to say, particularly about the pastry cream filling.  Since there were 6 of us collaborating that day, and this decadent cake serves 12 to 14, it also brought bliss to the lounge.  People who didn't even have to sit through a single meeting that day could could enjoy the benefits of chocolate cake.