RECIPE: My just-because cake

I would say that, by and large, cakes are meant for special occasions only. Chimney cakes are for very special occasions, and tree cakes are for very, very special occasions. There are exceptions, to be sure! But you can't really whip out a homemade baumkuchen and claim it was a just-because-i-felt-like-it cake.

Here is my go-to recipe for an unpretentious cake, welcome at any table for any reason. I bake this all the time, with all varieties of fruit, for all varieties of events. Certain aspects of the cake that give it an Old World feel—namely, the texture, the appearance, and the use of Lactobacillus cultures as a leavening agent. Yeah, when was the last time you saw that in a recipe from the last fifty years? I like to make up a story to go with the cake, like one where I found my great-grandmother's recipe cards in longhand Yiddish, and I was the only one in the family who cared enough to find what secrets they held, and I had to enlist the aid of the septuagenarian delicatessen proprietor down the street. In truth, it's just some mods from a 2002 recipe by BBC Good Food. I changed the leavening agent to yogurt because I'm a goofball.

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Sam's any-fruit, any-occasion cake

Ingredients:

• 175 g almond meal
• 175 g all-purpose flour
• 175 g sugar
• 175 g butter, softened (about 1.5 sticks)
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 250 mL active culture yogurt (about 8 oz)
• 400+ g fruit (your choice!)

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 160 °C (355 °F).
2. Mix the non-fruit ingredients well. If there are little chunks of butter, it's just fine. The batter should be thick and not pourable.
3. Spoon half the batter into a well-greased 9 inch cake round or pie pan. Lay down a layer of fruit pieces, then spoon in the rest of the batter. Maybe put extra fruit on top, if you have it.
4. Gorge on the raw batter because it's sooooo gooooood
5. Bake for 45-50 minutes. The crust will probably turn golden brown by the 30-minute mark; at that point, cover it with foil so it doesn't char on top.
6. Let cool completely. Serve with love!

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Golly, this makes me want to bake another one already! I'm thinking I'll use kiwi fruit and strawberry yogurt.

I love my new apron and my old cake recipe! https://t.co/MzAd3mYXo9 pic.twitter.com/rIYmmKWwQi

— Baumkuchen Blog (@rotisseriecakes) November 13, 2015

Spitcake + Fruitcake = Spurftcake

There's an old medieval recipe for trayne roste at Historic Food dot Com! It strikes me as a hybrid spitcake, in that it's prepared a bit like baumkuchen and a bit like chimney cakes. A prepared stripe is wrapped around a spit, like chimney cakes (though here the stripe is made of fruits and nuts, not yeast cake). Then batter is dribbled onto the cake while it turns by a fire, like baumkuchen!

Historic Food claims the trayne roste is a direct ancestor of the gâteau à la broche, which is neat if it's true. Blanched almonds and dried nuts are threaded on a thread as long as a man is tall. That gets coiled around the spit and drizzled with a batter made of flour, wine or ale, ginger, sugar, saffron, cloves, salt, and other spices. AND THAT'S HOW YOU TRAYNE ROSTE.



A trayne roste, nearly done. [source]



Slices showing the cake anatomy. [ibid.]

Another interlude: 15-minute chocolate cake

I made a cake in the microwave. It took about 15 minutes, and it was so good that my cooking instructor literally stole the recipe from me so she can make it for her family. I take that as a good omen.

It's based off of this recipe but there are a few glaring changes. For example, I tripled the quantity of sugar used. This is not a typo.

So, ingredients:

• 1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1 cup regular granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 7 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 tablespoon sour cream

So, you melt the stick of butter and add the sugar and stir well. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, and baking powder. Let the butter and sugar cool a little bit so the eggs don't cook when you add them in. Mix in the eggs and the sour cream. Add all that to the dry ingredients and mix until as smooth as possible.

Pour into a microwave-safe bowl that's been buttered and floured on the sides or something, some measure to prevent sticking. Cover it tightly with plastic wrap and then cut some slits to allow steam to escape. Microwave it for 3-4 minutes. I ran mine for 3:30 and it turned out beautifully.

Oh, and be sure to let it cool before you take it out of the bowl or else it will crumble and you will be sad.

Interlude - Kek Lapis Sarawak

It's finals time and I've almost graduated from high school, so baumkuchen machining has been shelved for now. However! I have made minor progress. I now have a working propane camp stove which, despite having a lame burner, might have the regulator I need. I also learned that one of my Internet Friends has a grandmother with an antique German baumkuchen oven that she still uses from time to time. More will come of these developments later.

For now, however, I have an interlude. You see, baumkuchen isn't the only cake baked in a special way. It's not even the only cake baked on a rotisserie: similar or nearly identical cakes exist in Serbian, Croatian, Swedish, Lithuanian, and Czech cultures. Other cakes not made in the traditional manner (I really need a better term for that, don't I?) include cakes resembling flatkuchen or cake-rings molded to make giant cake cornucopias with fruit inside. Even others, such as Vietnamese bánh, are steamed or fried.

But possibly the most impressive untraditional cake (Hey, "untraditional cake". That's kind of an okay term. Maybe I'll think of a better one before the end of the post.) is the Malaysian Kek Lapis Sarawak. It is many precisely cut layers of cake cemented together to make a smartly arranged pattern or picture. The woman responsible for making these famous, Rabiah Amit, has already published three recipe books. They're all in Malay but dammit, it is tempting to buy them! If I could learn to make these and good baumkuchen I could become an untraditional cake messiah.


(Original image from www.keklapissarawak.com)

How does it taste? Well, I'm assuming it tastes similar to its simpler English variant, Battenberg cake, a tea cake which I have made a few times and which I can assure you is terrific. It bodes well for Kek Lapis Sarawak.