May 4, 2009 - American Cakes

I'm in heaven this week -- a full week of cake! Last week, we baked chiffon cakes and tonight we worked on butter cakes. It hasn't taken me long to learn that butter = delicious, so just by name I knew these cakes would be good. Although I'm not a huge chocoholic, I decided to make the chocolate cake. My chiffon cake last week was a white cake, so I wanted to mix it up.


We started the evening with a presentation on cake frosting by the lovely Katie (our wonderful assistant teacher). I originally planned to do a full cake and prepared my cake pan, but while mixing my batter had a last minute urge to do cupcakes, so I switched. And good thing I did - we had all of the chocolate in our large non-convection ovens, and while the cupcakes set up perfectly, the cakes did not. Almost everyone who made a chocolate cake had to use a reserve chiffon for decorating. We had some leftover violas, so I sugared a few of those, arranged on the cupcakes, and then sprinkled the rest with chocolate shavings. They were springtime delights!

And I must say, my cupcakes looked lovely alongside Judy's beautiful spring cake (this spring thing is wishful thinking....after all, this is San Francisco, so it's raining in May). I love the look of the sugar flowers and can't wait to pick up some other edible flowers to play with at home.


As much as I loved my cupcakes, my two favorite cakes were non-chocolate....butter cakes frosted with white chocolate buttercream and filled with fruit. Nancy topped her cake with sliced almonds, which was a fantastic complement to the white chocolate buttercream.


We had a few other cupcakes as well - my favorite were the white pound cake, filled with raspberry whipped cream, frosted with chocolate buttercream, and topped with a raspberry.

The most interesting creation of the night came from Sasha. She had planned on using chocolate cake, but had to substitute chiffon (which I preferred...the chocolate would have been way too intense!). She made a praline filling, frosted with chocolate buttercream, and topped with caramelized hazelnuts.


We had a buttercream shortage, so I ended up with quite a few leftover cupcakes. I took them home and frosted them Tuesday evening with a chocolate buttercream. I was in chocolate overload -- they are cute, but they are SO rich! Fortunatelty, I work with a lot of chocolate loving women, so they weren't hard to pawn off this morning.

I don't have a recipe today, so I tried to overcompensate with lots of photos. Hope everyone enjoyed!