Strawberryland, A Trip Down Memory Lane

So, I’ve been trying to write this post for weeks…Between work and freelance and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it’s been tough to find the time to write, edit, polish Pegleg, etc. So without further ado, I present a Strawberry Shortcake journey…

Gluten Free Frannie is one of my co-workers. It was her birthday this past week, and if you can’t tell by her name, she has Celiac. Since we couldn’t pick anything up from the neighborhood bakery that she could eat, I decided to try my hand at something special for Frannie. Frannie had mentioned how she really wanted a gluten free strawberry shortcake for her birthday, but her mom couldn’t find one. A light bulb went off in my head – I can make a strawberry shortcake. After all, Strawberry Shortcake was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. I had Strawberry Shortcake sheets and curtains AND it was awesome (especially because I was about 5). So I honed in on my inner child and started doing some Strawberry Shortcake research.

Growing up, when we had strawberry shortcake, it was made with pound cake. So I figured that’s how I’d make it. Upon further research, I found that “traditional” strawberry shortcake is made with biscuits. I’m not down with things that are too traditional, so I went with the pound cake anyway.

The elusive pound cake – one of my favorite desserts growing up. One of the first recipes I ever made on my own was a lemon pound cake with a sugar lemon glaze from the Joy of Cooking. Traditional pound cake requires – a pound of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs, in a loaf pan; it sounds pretty intense, but is ridiculously delicious. However, to make it without gluten proved to be more difficult than originally imagined.

So I found some recipes. Most of them were made in a Bundt cake pan, which totally goes against any sort of pound cake in my book – so those were out. Then there were the ones that were complicated, with at least 7 different kinds of flours and crazy pan techniques. Finally, I settled on a recipe I found on The Art of Gluten Free Cooking Blog. The first try, I followed the recipe to a T, and while it tasted good, it was not perfect. So then I tried it again, with some minor recipe substitutions and it came out way better. It doesn’t taste like the pound cakes of my childhood, but it was a great substitute. It was light, a little crumbly, and not as heavy. The one thing I would NOT recommend changing is using a good quality butter. I used Kerry Gold Unsalted Irish butter. It’s not cheap, but there are so few ingredients in a pound cake it makes it worthwhile to use the best.

So here’s the original recipe:
Pound Cake – Take One
2 Sticks + 2 Tablespoons Unsalted Butter, good quality – don’t skimp!
1 ¼ Cup Granulated Sugar
4 Large Eggs
2 ½ Teaspoons Pure Vanilla Extract
1 Cup Sweet Sorghum Flour
½ Cup Corn Starch
½ Cup Tapioca Flour
½ Teaspoon Baking Powder
¼ Teaspoon Kosher Salt
Zest of 1 Lemon

Preheat oven to 325°F then butter a 9 x 5” bread pan and set aside on top of two cookie sheets.

Cream together the butter and sugar on high speed for five whole minutes. While the butter is creaming, whisk together the flours, baking powder and salt. Then grate the lemon zest right into the dry ingredients and set aside. After your five minutes is up, add the eggs, one at a time, being sure to whip for a full minute after each addition, scraping down the sides of the bowl and the paddle as needed.

Once the eggs are fully incorporated, lower the mixer speed to medium and add Vanilla extract and then the dry ingredients all at once and rotate for three to five minutes more. Then the batter looks very aerated and is the color of clean limestone, it is ready. (However, my batter didn’t come out looking like limestone, but it was smooth.) Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake at 325°F for 50-60 minutes or when a knife inserted into the middle comes our clean. After 25 minutes of baking, check on your pound cake. If it has begun to darken rather quickly, loosely cover with an aluminum tent and resume baking.

Here’s where I think I went wrong – my butter was a little too cold. I don’t feel like it creamed well enough. At 325 degrees the cake took about 2 hours to cook. It was a long wait, and not one I had anticipated. The cake didn’t dump well – at all – or in one piece. It was really frustrating.
For Pound Cake – Take 2 – the cake came out much butter.

Here’s what changed:
First, I sprayed the loaf pan with cooking spray, instead of just using the butter on the pan.
I used all the same ingredients, except for the Corn Starch, I substituted Potato Starch for it. It gave it a similar texture only a little better. I melted all my butter before creaming anything. I also bumped up the oven heat to 350 degrees. The cake only took an hour and ten minutes which was much more reasonable.
For the strawberries:

Slice two cartons of strawberries. Put them in a bowl and add about a ¼ cup of sugar to them. Stir up the strawberries and let them marinate. They will get juicy and slightly sweet.
To serve – Cut a slice and spoon the strawberries over it. Add a little whipped cream to top it off.

The pound cakes, while good, did not taste like ‘traditional’ pound cake. It definitely needs an embellishment – strawberries, ice cream, citrus glaze, etc. But I would make it again and thank goodness I figured out how to cut down the cooking time!

Ugly Dolls Take the Cake

So my friend Barb’s birthday was this past weekend. She’s been really stressed out about work and such, on top of being mad at me for not saving her a Whoopie pie, (I’m serious about that too), so I decided to make her a phenomenal birthday cake. It took a lot of brainstorming…

At work we carry Ugly Dolls. They’re all the rage! Especially since Sasha Obama carried Babo’s Bird on her back pack to school. We all have a soft spot in our hearts for these Ugly Dolls. They each have a unique story and are just a big ball of plush goodness. Not to mention this toy sprouted from a love story between a long distance couple, the search for the perfect job, and an awesome sewing machine. After reading all the stories on each Ugly Doll and taking into account little fingers and weird ears and what would be manageable on my part, I decided to go with Wage; the first/original Ugly Doll. Then I spent about three days figuring out what type of cake I wanted to make. I wanted to make layers for sure AND I wanted to do a strawberry. But what layers went in between the strawberry? I toyed with the idea of pineapple (which Barb nixed), and then chocolate chip, but finally settled on lemon. So it would be strawberry layers and lemon layers. Originally, I was going to do four layers, but since I really like odd numbers, and decided it would be way too tall to manage I would make three layers – 2 strawberry and one lemon.

Now I could have just made a sheet cake and frosted it to look like Wage. But that would be too simple. While I was pressed for time, and did decide to use boxed mixes to get the cakes off the ground, I wanted to carve Wage out of cake. Duff on Ace of Cakes does it all the time. Sure he went to pastry school, sure he has an entire bakery of ammunition, AND is a trained professional with trained assistants, but it didn’t look that hard…

What was I thinking?

It was the most ridiculously difficult thing ever. Maybe if I had started with something easier, like carving out a trapezoid, or an oval or something, I would feel differently. Maybe if I had had enough powdered sugar and wasn’t too lazy to go to the store to buy more (it was raining), I would feel differently. Maybe if I had three jelly roll pans that were the exact same size and I hadn’t had to use the same pan to cook three separate cakes, I would feel differently. Maybe if my oven was a little less crappy and my cakes would have been perfectly flat, I would feel differently. Maybe if it hadn’t been super windy when I walked the cake to Barb’s house and it looked like the Ugly Doll was crying, I would feel differently. AND maybe, just maybe, if I wasn’t such a perfectionist, I would feel differently.

But for my first time carving a cake, I think I did pretty well, especially since it wasn’t an Easter egg or a heart.

Since I have all this vellum paper lying around, for obvious reasons, I free handed a template/pattern of Wage. (Obviously, parchment paper will work too, or if you’re awesome at carving and can do it without a template, that’s huge…) The most difficult part was cutting out the area between the arms and the body and between the legs. I used a serrated bread knife, but there were still a lot of crumbs. I read all about how you should refrigerate your cake before you carve it and it will help on that, but my anxiousness to finish this sucker and my excitement to take a knife to the cake took control of my common sense.

So, here’s the recipe. It took me like 4 hours or more to get this off the ground, but it was worth it and it looks really fun.

Recipe:
Strawberry Cake – This recipe was taken from Food Network’s Paula Deen
Makes one cake layer

1 box white cake mix
1 – 3 oz box of strawberry flavored instant gelatin
1 package (10-15 oz) of frozen strawberries, thawed and pureed
4 large eggs
½ cup of vegetable oil
¼ cup of water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray jelly roll pan with Pam. In a large bowl mix together the cake mix, gelatin, pureed strawberries, eggs, oil, and water. Mix with an electric mixer until smooth. Pour into prepared jelly roll pan. Bake for about 19 minutes. Let it cool in the pan before dump out. If you’re going to make two layers you will have to double the recipe.

Lemon Cake – The recipe was taken from Duncan Hines Cake Mix Magic Book
Makes one cake layer

1 box lemon cake mix
1 – 3 oz box of lemon flavored instant gelatin
4 large eggs
¾ cup vegetable oil
¾ cup water

Preheat oven the 350 degrees F. Spray jelly roll pan with Pam. In a large bowl mix together the cake mix, gelatin, eggs, oil, and water. Mix with an electric mixer until smooth. Pour into prepared jelly roll pan. Bake for about 19 minutes. Let it cool in the pan before you dump it out. If you’re going to make two layers you will have to double the recipe.

“Buttercream” Frosting
1 ½ cup powdered sugar
½ cup of unsalted butter, I zapped mine a little bit
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1 tablespoon of milk

Mix the sugar and butter until creamy and blended. Add vanilla extract and milk. Add the necessary food coloring to make sure it matches your favorite Ugly Doll. Beat until smooth. Add more powdered sugar to make frosting stiffer if you’d like. To frost three layers, I tripled this recipe and still didn’t have sufficient frosting. But I ran out of powdered sugar and was too lazy to go back to the store. The first batch I separated out and left some white frosting for the eyeballs and teeth and then dyed the rest blue for the apron. For the orange body I doubled the recipe and didn’t have enough to take care of the sides.

Assembly:

Spread a little bit of frosting on the bottom of the pan where you’re going to carve and serve the cake, it’s going to help keep it from moving about. Stack the layers on top of each other (strawberry – lemon – strawberry), with a layer of frosting between each layer of cake. I only sparsely did the frosting because I was running low, however, you can make it as thick as you’d like. You can also use the frosting to even out the layers, which can be super helpful. My cake had a slight tilt.

Once all the layers are stacked, before you frost the top of the cake, place your template on the top and use a serrated bread knife to cut your cake out. If the paper doesn’t want to stay put, use toothpicks to anchor the template. Don’t toss your leftover cake. I smooshed mine into a tupperwear, it might not have been pretty, but it was still delicious.

Frost your cake away…For my eyeballs I used one of those little black icing tubes from the grocery store. I couldn’t find my pastry bags for this baking adventure, so I tried putting the frosting (for the eyes and apron) in plastic baggies and snipping the ends. I think this would have normally worked if I had used a better quality baggie, but they just ripped at the seams.

So this cake was all about learning. And here’s what PP and I took away from this:
-Carving a cake is hard work, if you’re going to do it, do your research AND listen to your research. Put your cake(s) in the fridge. Line the bottom of the place where you’re going to be doing your carving with parchment paper so there aren’t crumbs EVERYWHERE!
-Make sure your pantry is stocked and don’t feel too lazy to go to the store.

It was an awesome cake to make and everyone enjoyed it, so even though it didn’t come out perfectly, here at Pegleg Penny’s Test Kitchen will still put a little star in our “success” column.