Cake | Gourmandistan

Bourbon Ball Trifle tastefully twists a Kentucky Derby tradition

April 23, 2016 by Michelle

The first Saturday in May is fast approaching and our thoughts are, once again, turning to the Kentucky Derby. Over our years of Derby partying, Gourmandistan has sampled plenty of bad bourbon balls. For those of you unfamiliar with this Kentucky candy, the bourbon ball was the invention of Ruth Hanly Booe, who began making candy in our state capital, Frankfort, after leasing a bar idled by Prohibition. While it’s possible that making candy in an old bar put the idea of liquor-infused candy into her […]

Categories: Cake, Chocolate, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Kentucky Derby, Recipes

Does aging make banana cake with coffee buttercream, chocolate and walnut praline better?

February 28, 2016 by Michelle

Perhaps it was the praline that prevented Michelle from immediately warming to this cake. After announcing to Steve that she was going to make something sweet out of a small bunch of overly ripe bananas, Michelle quickly thought of pairing it with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache, but struggled for a bit to find a way to insert a nut-laden layer as well. Steve did manage to raise a bit of interest with the idea of a baklava-esque layer of […]

Categories: Baking, Cake, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Recipes

King-size apple cake keeps us intrigued, well-buttered

December 8, 2015 by Steve

We have been enjoying this simple, old-fashioned apple cake from Susan Herrmann Loomis’ 1991 Farmhouse Cookbook for several days. Long before she began making everyone jealous with her tales of Rue Tatin in a small Norman town and rural French cooking, Loomis traveled across the U.S., interviewing farm wives and collecting their homey recipes. This “King-Size Apple Cake,” from one Alice Berner of Big Sandy, Montana, is a winner. It may be the seasonally-appropriate mix of cinnamon and allspice bumped up with some nice quality cocoa, but it’s most likely […]

Categories: Apples, Baking, Cake, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Old cookbooks, Recipes

“Vintage” burnt sugar cake with maple cream cheese frosting updated with pecans, salty chocolate

November 23, 2015 by Steve

Michelle recently picked up a copy of Julie Richardson’s Vintage Cakes from a bookstore remainder table. Richardson, a baker in Portland, Oregon, based many of the book’s recipes on a trove she found when taking over the 50-year-old bakery building she now occupies. Others come from old cookbooks and corporate marketing departments. It’s a charming book. This particular burnt sugar cake dates from “before the days of vanilla and almond extracts, gaining its deep flavor from burnt sugar syrup.” Richardson paired the […]

Categories: Baking, Cake, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Nuts, Recipes

walnut-apple-calvados-caramel cake says “autumn,” avoids awful pumpkin spice

October 11, 2015 by Steve

Gourmandistan enjoys autumn, and does not generally stand in opposition to cinnamon, cloves or nutmeg. (OK, Steve admits to being somewhat more averse to cinnamon than most people.) But we do not understand the current appeal of pairing the season with something called “pumpkin spice.” We are in awe of the marketing and social forces that have combined to make whatever constitutes “pumpkin pie” flavoring almost ubiquitous, but we wish more people would seek alternative “fall” flavors that are all around them. Apple, for one. It is […]

Categories: Apples, Cake, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Recipes

Plum buttercream further plumbs depths of fruit-based deliciousness

August 21, 2015 by Steve

Michelle’s discovery that most any fresh fruit juice can be used to flavor buttercream has created a bit of an unusual cake boom here in Gourmandistan. While handing over a hoarded, frozen slice of our white cake with wild blackberry buttercream to her mother, Michelle casually created another cake, this time with chocolate and red plum buttercream. The juice came from a batch of plums we luckily spotted on a recent market trip. We snatched them up to make jam (and several cold and […]

Categories: Cake, Chocolate, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit, Jams & Preserves, Plums, Recipes

Wild blackberry curd and buttercream make a lovely wedding (cake)

July 23, 2015 by Michelle

The wedding that eventually led to Gourmandistan happened many years ago, and it has been quite a while since we’ve attended anyone else’s. However, a combination of Michelle’s imagination and Steve’s perspiration recently led to one of the best wedding cakes either of us has ever eaten—and we didn’t have to get dressed up to do it. This year’s wild blackberry harvest was not that wonderful. February’s ice and snow smashed many canes flat; the oddly cool temperatures and torrential rains that followed didn’t […]

Categories: Blackberries, Cake, Chocolate, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Recipes, Vegetarian

Impossible Apple Cake with Maple Ice Cream

November 10, 2014 by Steve

We have mentioned this Caramelized Apple Cake before, because Michelle has tried to make it several times every apple season for years with little (OK, at least one) real success. The recipe pages in Susan Herrmann Loomis’ Cooking at Home on Rue Tatin have all sorts of scribbles covering them, adjusting the amount and thinness of apples, ingredients, mixing instructions and more. Time after time, it’s turned out underdone, overdone or just odd—but the damn thing keeps haunting us with its buttery, caramel […]

Categories: Apples, Cake, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Ice cream, Recipes, Vegetarian

Meet your new King, Chocolate Elvis Cake

April 19, 2014 by Michelle

Elvis Presley has many, many incarnations. Swivel-hipped Ed Sullivan-censored Elvis. Terrible movie star Elvis. Television-shooting, fried peanut butter and banana sandwich-eating Elvis. Black leather-clad Comeback Elvis. Sweaty sequined Vegas Elvis. Dead Elvis. Some see Elvis as a racist, others as a messiah. Gourmandistan saw Elvis as cake. Our story begins like so many in Gourmandistan, with a bit of food about to go off. In this case, it was bananas, which Michelle (as she often does) starting thinking about making into a […]

Categories: Bananas, Cake, Candy, Chocolate, Cooking, Food, Nuts, Recipes, Vegetarian

Gourmandistan

A fabled land of farmers, farm shares, fancy (and not so fancy) restaurants, family meals, food projects and more.

Category Archives: Cake