Food on Friday – Aunt Fran’s Chocolate Cake

There are some things that you taste that just taste of childhood.  The taste is so familiar – so a part of your life that it defines a part of it.  One of those tastes for me is the taste of Aunt Fran’s chocolate cake.

Now, I did not know it was Aunt Fran’s recipe - it was just the chocolate cake that Mom always made.  Mom usually made it with a frosting recipe that I did NOT like so I would usually take the frosting off and eat just the cake.  The cake was so moist that I thought of it as pudding cake – though there’s no pudding in it.  This cake defined what a chocolate cake should taste like for me and the texture it should have – which may be why I find most other cakes to be dry.  What I never realized (because I was not the one baking it – Mom was) is that there are no dairy products in this cake.  No milk.  No eggs.

Though I grew up on this recipe I never made it as an adult.  I was always more of a vanilla and strawberry type of kid.  I did not eat a lot of chocolate.  Even my Easter Bunnies were white chocolate.  And when it comes to desserts, we really are more of a cookie family than a cake family.  But while talking to my Mom on Monday she mentioned how she was making Aunt Fran’s chocolate cake and started listing the ingredients.  I thought “Hmmmm, I have all of that at home” and decided to go home and make a cake too since I knew the recipe had to be in the family cookbook.

So here’s the recipe:

That bottom recipe is for the frosting I did not like.  You might like it.  The cornstarch gave it a gelatinous texture that I just don’t like but the taste is fine and it probably goes with the cake.

I have a big family so we doubled the recipe to make the 13 x 9 x 2 size cake.

First I measured the dry ingredients into the batter bowl.

I used cake flour instead of all purpose flour and I used Ghiaridelli cocoa powder.

Then I whisked the dry ingredients to blend them.

Next I buttered, then floured, the cake pan and turned the oven on to start pre-heating it.

I could have dusted the pan with cocoa powder instead of flour but since that did not work out so well the last time I tried that (blotchy dried cocoa powder on the bottom of the cake), I decided to stick with the flour.

Then I added the wet ingredients . . .

and using the hand mixer, blended them in – starting at a low speed and gradually increasing my speed to about medium – until I had a smooth cake batter.

What I find interesting is the addition of vinegar in this cake batter also (it was in the Red Velvet cake recipes too).  In flipping through the family cookbook I found that this is fairly common in my older recipes – though it is through the addition of “sour milk”.  If you don’t have sour milk, then you add vinegar to your milk to make it “sour”.  This has my brain spinning, trying to figure out what is the benefit of adding the strong acid to the cake batters and how that affects the taste, because I don’t discern it when eating the cake, yet it would seem that I should.  Hmmmmm.

Back to the cake.  Next the batter went into the cake pan and I baked it for 35 minutes.

Here is what it looked like when it was done.

The boys mainly wanted it as a base for the extra cream cheese frosting that we still had left over from Chris’s red velvet cupcakes.

Oddly, I still did not like it with the frosting and I ended up scraping what little I had started to put on the cake off, so I could keep the cake plain and just add frosting on the individual pieces for whoever wanted it.

I wanted to include a picture of the interior texture of this cake because that is what really makes it for me.

I love this cake.  Like I said, I bit into this and it tasted of childhood.  This is chocolate cake – what it should look like and taste like.  Thank’s Mom for reminding me that I had this recipe – inspiring me to make it – and bringing me back to our kitchen table on Lawnwood Avenue.  And thank you Aunt Fran.

Hawk Studio – I’m On My Own Today

Chip is running really busy today so he did not have time to stop and help me put together a Hawk Studio blog post – so today I am winging it.

First – here is Chip’s find of the week.  It is a big metal footpress thingy that, once the motor is removed and the tip changed, will be a hole punch for his leather work.

Chip was able to get the foot press mechanism working and he is excited because this will be a human powered hole punch – no outside power source needed.

Also this week, our neighbors in back decided to cut down some small maple trees in their yard – which put my family to work, peeling bark off of some of the limbs for later use in Chip’s rustic wood furniture.

Here’s Markus at work. . .

and Jesse . . .

and Vash.

Vash wouldn’t look in the camera – he did not want to be distracted from his work.

Finally, lets close with a picture Chip took of one of his bags against the siberian irises in our “smile” garden (named for the shape of this particular garden plot).

I love the siberian irises when they are in bloom.  His bag is pretty cool too.

Okay, that’s my Hawk Studio blog for today.  Tomorrow, I am thinking chocolate cake.  Okay, I am thinking chocolate cake right now, but I will post about it tomorrow.  Have a great Thursday.

Natural Dyeing – Organic Wool Show and Tell

Okay, another busy work week has me behind on my craft work, so most of my yarn production has been involved in re-skeining the yarns I have already dyed to prepare them for the next show at the end of June.

One of my bases is a DK weight organic wool yarn.  Today I am going to show you the colors I have in that yarn so far.

The first skein was dyed using ground cochineal bugs – which gives me my wonderful pink/rose tone.

There is a tonal varigation in this yarn that you may not pick up so well in this light.

For the next skein, I did a varigated pink and purple using cochineal and logwood.

This is one of my favorites.  Again, there are tonal varigations in the yarn as well as color varigations.

Next is a skein using black walnut that came out fairly light in color.

I haven’t decided if I am going to keep this one at this color or use it as a base to add some varigation to it.  It was a cold water dye and did not pick up much color.  I was surprised by that.

Side by side you can see that Sandlewood gives a more rust/orange tone.

These pictures still don’t fully show the warmer yellow tones in the yarns.  Curse you cloudy days.

This one I may have shown you before.  It is the fustic base yarn overdyed using a tye dye technique with cochineal that Jesse suggested.  I like this one too.

And finally a brazilwood – which started red and rinsed out to a deep wine color.

Re-skeining takes time.  If the wool goes through alot of rinses and there is some partial felting it can be a nightmare.  Often I will start by taking the dried rinsed yarn, winding it into a ball and then skeining it into the hank that I will keep it in for display and sale.  I skein it using my Kromski niddy noddy.

One full round on the niddy noddy is 70″ so I multiply the number of times I go around the niddy noddy by 70 and then divide by 36 to get the number of yard of yarn in each skein.  I have mill ends so there are no set yardage amounts by skein because they vary.  It also takes longer because I think that the yarn shrinks by a little bit during the mordanting/dyeing/rinsing process.  I say this because I use my wool winder to create the original hanks of yarn that I then dye, yet when it is all done, the yarn is just a little too short to fit back around my wool winder for me to skein it.  It definitely goes faster if I can put the yarn back on the wool winder before re-skeining.  Hmm.  Something to ponder.

So that’s all for today.  I have to get back to work.  The good news is that there is currently plenty of work to keep me busy.  Yay work!!

Hope you like the colors we are getting with these dyes.  Makes me smile. 

Food on Friday – Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Christopher’s favorite cake is Red Velvet Cake so of course the plan for his graduation was to make him one.  Unfortunately Chris was fighting off a rough cough/cold thing last week so he asked me to hold off on the cake because he wasn’t sure he would be well enough to enjoy it.  Well, we had to have something special for the day, so I decided to make cupcakes instead.  That way he could have a little something that day and be able to save the rest for later in the week when he felt better.

The recipe we used I found on the Food Network recipe site and you can find it here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/red-velvet-cupcakes-with-cream-cheese-frosting-recipe/index.html

I still had some buttermilk in the frig that I wanted to use up and this recipe used it.  I will tell you up front that the cupcakes seem to be a little dry but the frosting was so tasty that no one cared.

Markus decided that he wanted to help on this recipe – which upset Jesse a little because he likes to do every recipe, but there really was not enough to do on this one for more than one kid helper, so Markus had this one on his own, with a little help from me.

So, lets start with the ingredients you will need.  For the cupcakes you need the following:

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
• 1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
• 2 large eggs, room temperature
• 2 tablespoons red food coloring
• 1 teaspoon white distilled vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the frosting you need the following:

• 1 pound cream cheese, softened
• 2 sticks butter, softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4-5 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
• Chopped pecans and fresh raspberries or strawberries, for garnish

First we took our dry ingredients . . .

and we sifted them together through the metal strainer (I haven’t had time to go out and buy a new sifter yet)

Then we put the wet ingredients into the batter bowl . . . which Markus beat with the hand-mixer at a low speed until it was well blended and smooth.

Then we added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients . . .

mixing until we had a smooth cake batter – which obviously has alot of red food coloring.

We filled our parchment paper muffin cups about 2/3rds full . . .

 and into the oven they went at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.  While they were cooking, Markus and I made the cream cheese frosting.

This was super simple.  We put the butter, cream cheese and vanilla in the bowl . . .

and Markus got back to work with the hand mixer.

In the meantime, I sifted the powdered sugar through the strainer.

Then we added the sugar to the cream cheese mixture to make the frosting.

The recipe calls for 4 cups of powdered sugar, but it needed more because the resulting frosting was a little too soft at room temperature. That is why I adjusted the ingredients to 4-5 cups of powdered sugar.  Maybe the heat of the day affected it so start with the four cups and be prepared to add more.  We resolved it by putting the frosting in the frig until it hardened up a little bit – about 10 minutes.

Anyway, back to the recipe.

We took the cupcakes out of the oven . . .

frosted them . . .

and then I took some strawberries, sliced into each one so that they fanned out (which the boys were sooooooo impressed by) and put them on top of the cupcakes.

You can kind of see that the frosting looks a bit drippy . . .

but they still came out well.

Everyone liked them in the end.  When I told Chris that I thought they were a little dry he said that the frosting so made up for it that he didn’t care.  So if nothing else, hang onto this frosting recipe.

In searching, most of the red velvet cake recipes were pretty much the same.  Seems that vinegar is an essential component along with a small amount of chocolate.  I just need to figure out how to give it a more moist texture – I’m thinking that the addition of a pudding mix might do it, but I have to think upon this more.  I don’t really want to add a pre-packaged ingredient.  Hmmmm.  Lots to ponder in my search for a better cake recipe.

Have a great holiday weekend everyone.  I am off to work.  It has been non-stop this past week and I could really use the long weekend – which will include the annual Boy Scout procession in the Memorial Day parade.  Lets hope it doesn’t rain. 

Natural Dyeing – Madder

Madder has a long history of use as a red dye – a color which I have yet to attain.  The color is contained in the root, which is usually ground to release the dye.  I have considered planting madder plants but it would take 3-5 years before I could start harvesting the roots and, while I can be patient, I did not want to wait that long before I started working with madder, so I went to Aurora Silk and bought a pound of it.

Tips to know for madder.  It needs an alkaline/hard water to draw out the reds.  Also, if you apply too high a heat it will turn brown.  Finally, you need a high ratio of root to yarn weight to attain a good deep color.

Then we get to what I did.

The first go around I soaked 2 ounces of madder root in alcohol and 2 ounces of madder root in water – put the dye into dyepots, added enough water to fill the pots and then added my yarn.  I heated to around 120 degrees for an hour and did not discern a real difference in the resulting color.  Both were a light coral/peach tone.  Here is what we got from this first round. (The lighter tone is from an exhaust bath)

I also did a two tone that came out lovely by leaving half of the yarn hanging into the dye pot longer than the other half.  Here is what I got.

I love the tonal variations in the yarn – something that just seems to occur naturally when dyeing with plants.  Or maybe I just am not good enough to get solid colors but that’s okay.  I love these colors.

Now I still was not getting red so I tried using 4 ounces of root and going total cold water – and it did not work.

I put the root in a stainless steel pot for this one.

I filled the pot with hot tap water to get the process going - which I had done the last time.  Note to self – next time add an alkali additive at this point.  I am going to do that with the next batch and will let you know if it works out.

Because I was in search of a red, I left the root to soak for several days without adding heat.  I am thinking now that I left it to soak for too long because the resulting color is muddy and I am wondering if it started to get moldy in there.  I strained the dye through my metal strainer into another pot and added my wet alum mordanted yarn.

The color that I was getting was a beigey/taupey yucky color.  I decided to add a low heat and then remembered that the water needed to be alkali, so I added some washing soda to the mix to up the alkali level.  The resulting yarn, however, was a disappointment.

The color is muddy and there were some parts that contrasted with a deeper red - but not well enough to create a usuable varigation.

These pictures are after dyeing but before re-skeining, which is why the yarn looks so messy.

I took the second skein I dyed and stuck the ends in some brazilwood to cover some of the red splotches in the yarn and too see what I would get.  Here is the second skein.

This might look okay in the finished product but I won’t know until it is rinsed and re-skeined.

I am going to keep working with the madder root.  I still have a half a pound of root to work with and obviously more experimentation is needed.  In some ways I think I rushed this last round.  I only had Saturday to work on dyeing yarns so I went with what I had and had too many things going I think.  Time to slow down and think this all through before next weekend’s dye pots get going.

Here is what I also did last week.

I finally rinsed the logwood/brazilwood/cochineal yarn.  Here are the pictures pre-rinse and post rinse.

Next week I should have it skeined.  The colors after rinsing are a bit more muted.  What surprised me is that the brazilwood stayed brighter than I thought it would - less wine and more red that I anticipated.  Hmmmm.

I also did an iron mordanted brazilwood as I wanted to see if I could get away from the wine colors I got with the alum mordant and see if I could hang onto the reds a little longer.  Here is what I got before rinsing.

This picture is with the flash – it is darker in tone in actuality, but it is a grey day outside so there is no chance of getting a truer color in today’s light.  Sorry.

I also did a phenomenal cold water soak purple logwood.  All of the pictures I tried to get today just turned out blue – and it is a deep rich purple.  Here is what I got right after I took it out of the dye pot - but the photo is still bluer than the yarn.

Sorry – its the best I can get of this color.

I also played with a cold water sandlewood soak that I nuked to set the color.

I did not like the resulting solid color so I started experimenting.  I put one end in an ammonia dip (alkali), one end in a vinegar dip (acid) and the middle in some iron mordant.

Yeah, I know.  High Tech.

The resulting colored yarn turned out like this.

The ammonia end turned a darker brown.  The vinegar end made it just slightly orangier but not much and the iron almost seemed to leach out the color.  Hmmm.

After it started to dry, I again decided I was unhappy with the result, and stuck an end into the madder, but got no change, so I then put it into the iron mordanted brazil pot and ended up with this.

I’m not sure if I love it, but I like it.  Sandlewood can take a long time to rinse so the verdict is out on the final product.

The rest of this week is going to be devoted to re-skeining all of this.  It is a little out of control.  Next Saturday will be rinsing these and hopefully working on green.  IF I get a little more caught up with work.  Chip has been busy filling orders so I don’t know where we stand on a Hawk Studio blog post for tomorrow but I have lots for Food on Friday.  Have a great Wednesday.

Christopher’s Graduation – I had the BEST time!!

I know that Mondays are usually for my project report, but yesterday was one of those spectacular days for a Mom that trumps everything else.  My son graduated from college with honors with a degree in Public Policy!!

We had a beautiful sunny day with the temperatures in the 80s.

There were thousands of kids.  He attended the State University of New York at Albany – which is a university near and dear to our hearts.

Gram lived just a few blocks away from the school and I spent alot of time there growing up.  As a teenager I would go and sit in their library periodical room and read magazine articles about the politics of the late sixties and later I would use their pianos in their music rooms to practice playing because I did not have one.  After Chris was born I returned to Albany and got my undergrad degree from there.  Today I watched my son do the same.

There were two ceremonies due to the size of the graduating class.  The first ceremony was the university wide ceremony – which was so big it had to be divided into two days.  There was an entire graduation Saturday for half of the graduating students and then the other half graduated yesterday – Sunday.  There were alot of people there.

We were in the first third of the rows of people if that gives you any idea of how many folks were there.  The students sat in the front rows waaaaaaaaay ahead of us.

The commencement speaker was Judge Judy.

Seems that her 3 sons all graduated from SUNY Albany so she has a connection to the school.  Her speech focused on telling the kids that you only have one chance to make a first impression.  (Toothpaste commercial?)  Gratefully it was short as the kids sitting in black robes on a warm sunny day with no shade were getting uncomfortable.  Chris was somewhere in this group of graduates, but the rows were so deep there was no chance of finding him in there.

Finally, the announcement was made that they had graduated and the confetti fell.

Then on to the second graduation – which was much smaller and allowed for the personal recognition that should go along with a graduation.  This was the graduation held for the students in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy – which is the college within the University that Chris attended.  This was held at the downtown campus in a much smaller and air conditioned auditorium.

Here I could find Chris among the graduates.

Here I got to hear my son’s name be called and watch him walk across the stage.

 

I will have to wait for the professional shots to arrive of his actual receipt of the rolled up paper they give you until they mail you your diploma because my camera shoots too slowly, but this worked for me.  I was in Mommy Nirvana during this day.  I was and am soooooo very proud of my son.

I have very simple goals in life for my son.  Be an asset – not a liability – in the world.  Be a positive force, not a negative one.  Chris grew up to be a man who is compassionate and caring as well as extremely intelligent.  I am so very very proud of him and thank the powers that be on a daily basis that I was given a being such as him to spend my life with and knowing.  I love you son.  Thank you for giving me one of my very best days ever!!

Food on Friday – Chocolate Sponge Cake – Happy Birthday Chip

Chip’s birthday is in May and this year the boys and I decided to make his birthday cake for him rather than run to the store and get one that would probably taste better and definitely look better.  But this cake had all that extra love poured into it so I knew Chip would appreciate it more no matter how it turned out – which is good because I will tell you right from the start that I think it came out a little dry, but I am going to tell you what we did and hope that cooks much more creative than I can figure out what we did wrong.

The idea for this cake came from Bon Appetit, and we used their recipe which you can find here:  http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2012/03/chocolate-sponge-cake  This recipe was in an article that said that you can tell how good a cook is based on how they make three basic recipes and this was one of them.  Sigh.  I guess we are not as good as we had hoped but let me tell you what we did.

First – here is the list of ingredients you need.

• 1tablespoonunsalted butter, room  temperature
• 1/4cupnatural unsweetened cocoa powder plus  more for pan
• 1/4cupcake flour
• 4large eggs, room temperature
• 1/2cupplus 6 teaspoons  sugar
• 1teaspoonvanilla  extract

Chocolate Icing

• 3/4cupheavy cream
• 1cupsemisweet or bittersweet chocolate  chips (do not exceed 61% cacao)

We started by preparing our pan.  We put a sheet of parchment paper on the bottom of a 13 x 9 x 2 pan, buttered the sides and the paper to grease our pan and then dusted it with cocoa powder.  It looked like this.

Cocoa powder does not move across the pan as easily as flour does so I had to use my fingers to try to break up the clumps.  Hmmmm.  I may need to practice this a bit more.

Next was sifting the flour and cocoa together.  They said to do it through a fine mesh sieve but my sifter just looked a bit dusty to me after sitting in the cupboard for too long, so I pulled out my wire mesh strainer and a wooden spoon and “sifted” it through that three times.

Hmmm.  That’s not much flour for a cake.  But lets keep moving.

Next we made our two egg mixtures – this is where Jesse jumped in to help.  We cracked two eggs into the batter bowl and then separated two more eggs, putting the whites in one of our pyrex mixing bowls and the yolks into the batter bowl with the first two eggs.  Jesse then got to work with the hand mixer beating the egg yolks while I added the sugar and vanilla.

I get such a kick out of working with Jesse on these blogs.  He will be working intently, and sometimes even grumpily, but when I pull out the camera to take a picture of what he is doing he flashes me these huge smiles - love it!  And yes, he is doing this with the bowl on a stool.  This is because Chip moved my cupboard that was under the electrical outlets last year and then got busy and hasn’t built a new one to replace it yet – so we use the stool to hold anything we have to plug in.  Not the best option but it works.  In this house, you learn to be flexible because life just happens at a slightly faster pace than we can keep up with.

Next we washed the beaters and Jesse got back to work – this time beating the two egg whites until they were foamy, at which point we added more sugar, (okay, this is sounding better) to the egg whites and continued beating until soft peaks formed.

So now we had our components – the egg whites, the egg batter and the chocolate/cocoa dry ingredients.

I pulled out a spatula and started the “folding” process – adding half of the egg whites to the egg batter, then half of the dry ingredients, then the rest of the egg whites and then the rest of the dry ingredients, until we had our cake batter.

This looked promising.  We poured it into our cocoa dusted pan and put into the 400 degree oven for 12 minutes.  (Maybe I should have only done 10 minutes?  Maybe that extra 2 minutes dried it out?)

The cake looked pretty good when it came out.

Not so hot when I flipped it out of the pan (still too much cocoa powder in the bottom of the pan – Sigh)

We made the frosting (super easy – just stir chocolate chips into scalded heavy cream) and then made a filling because the recipe does not include a filling – though there was probably enough frosting to do a thin strip of filling between each row and a thin frosting – but that was not what we were going for.  So we whipped up some more heavy cream and cut up some strawberries for the filling.  We cut the cake into thirds cross-wise (resulting in a 4″ x 8″ cake), spread the whipped cream and then a layer of strawberries in between the layers, frosted it with the chocolate frosting and added Happy Birthday candles and it was ready to go.

Once we had the cake at the table, and the Happy Birthday Hat on the birthday boy, we were ready to roll.

Chip blew out the candles and we cut the cake.

The vanilla ice cream helped to cut the heavy chocolate of the cake and frosting.

I will say that, though I thought it was kinda dry, there was nothing left by the next morning and the birthday boy was happy.

Happy Birthday my beloved husband.  I am so happy to celebrate that you were born.

I’m not sure what we are making next week – probably a red velvet cake in honor of my beloved son who is graduating from college.  (Woo Hoo!!)  Now back to that vest I am knitting to try to have something to show you on Monday – right after I finish writing this brief . . . sigh.  Well, onward and upward.  Have a great weekend.