# 9 - Chocolate Apricot Upside-Down Cake

   What to do when you need a tasty and beautiful cake for lunch with friends, health conscious people who may rather eat a simpler cake without a whole lot of alchol, coffee, or butter in it?  Michelle Urvater's Chocolate Apricot Upside-Down Cake, page 134, really really fills the bill. All right, it does have over a stick of butter, but with all that fruit as well, it's practically health food. 

Days 7, 13, and 16: No Cake for Children, Pecan Bourbon Chocolate Cake Permutations

  The first  Pecan Bourbon Chocolate Cake came around Fat Tuesday, at the onset of Lent.  Although certainly not Catholic, I love Lent.  I love the idea that you can give up something for a while with an option to maybe pick it up later. If you can get along without it for 40 days and 40 nights, do you really need it at all?  One year someone I know applied this principle to her soon-to-be-ex husband.  This year friends gave up alcohol, chocolate, even coffee.  I went without all sugar except that associated with chocolate cake.
   If you enjoy bourbon and chocolate, this may be your favorite cake.  It's one of mine.  The first cake went as exactly to Michelle Urvater's recipe as possible.  It was phenomenal: intense, rich, overtly smelling of bourbon both during the baking and after.  It was jaw-droppingly expensive to make, requiring 2 cups of "good bourbon" and a full pound of pecans.  This recipe also uses 2 pounds of brown sugar, so it is, as you have guessed, a huge cake.  I adjusted baking time and made it in my bundt pan with cupcakes on the side, but this is no cake for kids.
   Cake # 13 - Another night, another version of  Pecan Bourbon Chocolate Cake.  On this sloshy, cold and wet, almost spring night, I set off for home anticipating the warm comfort of baking.  My first husband asked for  "that bourbon cake", which seems to be his favorite, and I thought the ingredients were in the house, so why not? 
   Arriving home and beginning baking, I immediately saw some ingredients were a little short.  I was down to my last cup of bourbon. Where did that stuff go?  Also the pecan stash had dwindled to 5 ounces.  Therefore, cake #13 deviates wildly from the original recipe.  For the second cup of bourbon I used Petron brand orange liqueur.  To fill in for missing pecans, 10.5 ounces of Ghirrardelle's 60% cacao bittersweet chocolate chips.  Again, an enormous amount of cake batter, plenty for a bundt  and two snack sized cakes.  The snack cakes went by mail to my son in that dark coastal city and to my dad in a large southern state, who appreciates good bourbon and loves cake.  I'm very fond of this new version, and so were the many people who got to eat it because there was so much of it.  Even my mom, who has no interest whatsoever in sweets, said it was really good cake.
   Cake #16, third bourbon cake, whereupon I learn this is not bourbon.  Again baked by request;  used second version entirely, with one small change.  What if this cake could be more about chocolate and alcohol and less about sugar?  Used 1 1/2 pounds of sugar rather than the prescribed 2.  This is my preferred version of Pecan Bourbon Chocolate Cake.
   Except there's no bourbon in mine.  I thought Southern Comfort was a bourbon whiskey.  So did the liquor store man. A former bartender with a business degree, who usually knows everything about everything alcoholic, he did sell me Southern Comfort when I asked for "good bourbon".  Until the 100 cake project, I rarely had occasion to purchase any whiskey, bourbon or otherwise, and  when I did buy bourbon, I always chose Southern Comfort in tribute to Janus Joplin.  Turns out, according to  meticulous internet research,  Southern Comfort is not bourbon at all.  Southern Comfort is a liqueur similar to whiskey,  created by M.W. Heron in New Orleans over 100 years ago.  So these bourbon cakes, when I make them, are not bourbon cakes at all.  They are Southern Comfort Pecan Chocolate Cakes.

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.