Sweet Yet Sour

Lavender Contender

Friday, September 30th, 2011 | Cooking, Wedding Cake Try-outs | 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I blogged about the wedding cake try-outs, mostly because I (and the family) got a little “caked out”.  There was a time when I was making a cake a week and I think it was wearing on us – except for Henry – who loves to point at whatever is on my cooling racks and say, “Cake! Cake!” So I took a little break for a while, but now I’m back on the cake making wagon…

So far in the wedding cake try-outs we’ve had a Sour Cream Filled Bundt Cake, a Caramel Peanut Cake, a Sourdough Chocolate Cake, a Lemon-Raspberry Cake, a Chocolate Ganache Whipping Cream Cake, and a Sourdough Almond Raspberry Cake.  The bride and groom have tried every one and have tried several of the cakes more than once.  We seem to be narrowing down what they like and perfecting each of those that they really like.  The hits so far have been the Sourdough Chocolate Cake, with a combination whipping cream/cream cheese frosting and coconut on the outside and the Sourdough Almond Raspberry Cake.

Here’s the problem, both of these cakes involve chocolate.  We’ve decided after several tries that the Sourdough Raspberry Almond Cake tastes best with a smattering of both chocolate Ganache and whipping cream in between the layers.  So that still leaves me without a “chocolate-free” option.

I decided that perhaps I should return to lemon cake, but find a different version of than the one I made previously.  I also thought I would try making up a sourdough lemon cake, just like I had with the Sourdough Almond Raspberry Cake.  In my searches I found just the cake recipe to get me excited about experimenting with another cake – a recipe for a Meyer Lemon Cake with Lavender Cream.

I decided that I would just follow the “idea” of the recipe (it’s impossible to get Meyer lemons here) and make a Sourdough Lemon Cake, use the recipe’s lemon curd filling and make a lavender whipping cream frosting.  The original recipe calls for a dusting of powdered sugar and the lavender cream for “dipping” instead of frosting and you know me – I like to go whole hog on the whipping cream!

This week I began attempt number one at this new cake.  It was fun to try, didn’t come out perfect, and I definitely have some things that I can work on next time.

First I made my usual sourdough cake batter and allowed it to ferment.  Then I creamed sugar, lemon zest and butter in a bowl.  I then added just a touch of lemon juice to the butter and baking soda and salt to the sourdough batter.  Then I alternately added the sourdough batter and 2 eggs until the mixture was well blended.  After that I put the batter into two 9-inch cake pans that had been buttered and lined with parchment paper and baked them.  The cake baked up fine, if a bit low, and so I went ahead and made the lemon curd for the filling.

After the lemon curd was finished I began work on the lavender whipping cream.  I crushed a tablespoon of dried lavender flowers with my mortar and pestle:

And then brought them to a low boil in a pan with heavy cream:

After that I removed the pan from the heat and strained out the lavender.  I learned that this needs to be done not just with a normal strainer, but with either cheesecloth or in my case, a flour sack cloth. Otherwise, the cream takes on the look of cream with dirt flecks in it and that does not look tasty.  The lavender steeped cream then went into the refrigerator for 2 hours.

Later that day I spread all of the lemon curd in between the two cake layers and then began beating the whipping cream in my stand mixer.  When I thought that the cream had reached the “stiff peak” consistency I stopped the mixer, threw the whisk into the sink and began frosting the cake.  I quickly learned that I had not beaten the cream enough, as it was sliding off of the cake!  So I put the bowl back on the mixer, washed the blade and began beating the cream… again.  Here’s where I made my big mistake, I set the mixer on high and walked away to do some more dishes.  When I came back to the mixer my cream had become chunky and had begun to curdle.  Trust me, there were some words said that I was glad that the children weren’t around to hear…

At that point, I had to give up on the cake and let it sit overnight until I had a chance to make it to the grocery store the next day for some more cream.  I made a second batch, watching the mixer more carefully this time, and finally got the job done and the cake entirely frosted.  I’m thinking that this cream might curdle a little more quickly than normal cream because of the boiling process, so I’ll have to be careful every time I make this cake.

The cake itself tastes great, with the bright, even slightly sour, taste of the cake and the curd contrasting so wonderfully with the lavender whipping cream.  The cake was a little “spongy” as Mike described it, and so I’ve decided just to make a normal lemon cake, perhaps even the one from Dorie Greenspan’s book next time I make the cake.  I feel like I’m putting my sourdough to enough good use for the wedding with the chocolate cake and the raspberry almond cake.  I might cut more layers in the cake, spread the lemon curd out a little more thinly (it’s pretty zingy the first day) and might add some of the lavender whipping cream in between the layers as well.  And I’m going to try some different things with the lavender whipping cream to try and make it a little less likely to turn into butter.

All-in-all I really like this cake and am excited to make it again next weekend, when I will be bringing it to a dinner party at the bride and groom’s house.  Here’s hoping that the second attempt turns out even better!

Third Cake’s a Charm

Thursday, July 14th, 2011 | Cooking, Wedding Cake Try-outs | 6 Comments

As much as I love my sourdough chocolate cake recipe,  it’s the only recipe for cake that I have for my sourdough.  A few months ago I searched “sourdough cake” on the internet and disappointingly found that my own blog posts made up two of the top ten hits and none of the rest of the hits were anything of interest.

So, I decided that I would use my baking knowledge and attempt to make up my own sourdough cake recipe.  Raspberries were on sale at the grocery store and I decided to use my new batch of almond extract for a Raspberry Almond Sourdough Cake.

I fiddled around with the recipe for chocolate cake, adding butter instead of oil, reducing the amount of sugar and adding fresh raspberries and almond extract to the batter.  The cake seemed to bake up fine and I made a batch of Ganache and whipped up some whipping cream for filling and frosting.  Topped off with some more fresh raspberries the cake looked beautiful:

Cake attempt #1

I was all set to cut into my cake and find a wonderful array of fresh raspberries and golden colored cake.

Cake # 1 - interior

Aw dang! Do not adjust your computer monitor – that yellow-greenish tinge is the actual color of the cake.  I couldn’t serve a green cake at a wedding!  So, back to the pastry board…

For my second attempt at Raspberry Almond Sourdough Cake I thought if I added fresh raspberries and raspberry puree, the cake might turn a lovely pink.  I pureed raspberries, strained out the seeds and then added the puree to the sourdough batter.  I got a little nervous when I began to stir and the batter started to look a little, well, gray…  But, I poured the batter into the pans and put them into the oven hoping it would all turn out okay.

Nope.

Navy cake

I’m thinking if I can’t serve a yellow-green cake at a wedding, a navy/gray cake with red spots isn’t going to go over very well either…  The cake actually tasted fine, but I didn’t want to waste time or cream frosting it, so for the first time in my life, I threw my cake away.

I took leave of the cake making process for a few weeks until my bride-to-be friend was due to come to our house for lunch.  For this attempt I decided to add fresh raspberries, but also add some food coloring to the batter.  After three drops of red and one drop of blue in the batter the cake was a light pink – which is so much better than navy!  So I baked the cake layers, put ganache and whipping cream in between the layers, added more ganache on top and then frosted the whole thing with whipping cream.  Since this was for the actual bride, I spent a long time trying to get the decoration just right.  I was still delicately placing almonds on the top at 10:30 p.m.

But it was well worth it – the cake was pretty:

Cake 3, decorated

The cake also looked fine once we cut it and tasted great:

Slice of Cake # 3

The only problem with this beautiful cake is that the whipping cream frosting deteriorates pretty rapidly and there were parts of cake showing through the whipping cream the next day.  I’m thinking I may have to either find a way to improve the whipping cream, or switch to butter cream frosting, which holds up better.  More attempts at the perfect cake will be necessary, yum!

A Birthday Cake Fit for Me

Monday, May 16th, 2011 | Cooking, Wedding Cake Try-outs | 3 Comments

A few weeks after Henry was born I determined that when I nursed him a few hours after eating chocolate, he would become fussy and irritable.  He had the same reaction to dairy products, and so for a few months I went without chocolate and had very little dairy.

Which meant that last year for my birthday, I did not have a chocolate cake for my birthday; I don’t think I even made a cake last year – I was so bummed about not having chocolate.  Going without chocolate nearly killed me.  Seriously, I am a borderline addict.  I can go without it, but if it’s around, I crave it and sometimes can’t stop myself from eating a lot. Thankfully, although Henry is not done nursing yet, he is far less sensitive to what I eat these days and I can eat whatever I want and not have to worry about the baby’s tummy too.

So what does a chocolate addict do when she makes her own birthday cake?  Why she makes a chocolate cake with ganache and whipping cream of course!

My birthday was a weekday and also coincided with Mike’s monthly home-brewers club meeting in the evening.  For lunch on that day, I ordered pizza and my parents, my sister, nephew and Mike all came to our house for a brief lunch followed by Key Lime Pie from Whole Foods.  (My sister, as you may recall has a wheat allergy, so she can eat things like Key Lime Pie and just not eat the crust and I ordered a gluten-free pizza for her lunch.)

After lunch I was left alone with the kids again and so while they napped I started the sourdough cake batter fermenting.  Later on in the afternoon I made the chocolate cake and then after the kids went down for bedtime, I pondered what do with frosting the cake.

Left alone and without anyone to ask, “Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” – I decided to go all out and make a ganache and whipping cream cake.  I cut each chocolate cake layer into two and in between each one I layered ganache and then whipping cream.

Building birthday cake

Once the cake was built, I put whipping cream on the sides and then piled a whole bunch of ganache on top.  I attempted to have it gracefully “slop” over the sides, and it looked pretty good.

Finished birthday cake

But it tasted even better! The whipping cream gracefully cuts the bitterness of the dark chocolate in the ganache and the cake was even better the next day when everything had sort of mushed together.

Piece of cake

I didn’t save a piece of this in the freezer for the wedding cake try-outs, although it could be a contender.  It was incredibly decadent, and I just wasn’t sure if this has a place at a casual summer wedding…  Thoughts?

Lemon Cake – Fit for a Wedding?

Thursday, April 28th, 2011 | Wedding Cake Try-outs | 6 Comments

Although it’s probably not fit for a future king and queen, my next attempt at a wedding cake was certainly delicious and decadent.  We’ll just have to see if it’s fit for our much less formal wedding next summer.

Having as yet only made cakes involving chocolate in the wedding cake try-outs, I felt the need to try something with no chocolate for my next entry in the contest.  So, I returned to Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours” book and settled on her cake which she titles, “The Perfect Party Cake”.  It’s a lemon cake with raspberry jam filling, lemon meringue butter cream frosting and coconut. It sounded lovely and looked like it might be a pain in the ass – which it sort of turned out to be – but it was worth it.

I won’t include the recipe here, but the lemon cake is not just your average lemon cake.  It involves cake flour, lemon zest and Dorie’s recipe asks for four egg whites.  The cake itself wasn’t that hard to make, but the lemon meringue butter cream frosting also requires four egg whites.  I’m sure it’s just me, but I hate wasting eggs like that; I’m unlikely to do much with the extra egg yolks; so instead of using the four egg whites in the cake, I simply used two whole eggs and said a little prayer about not making any high altitude adjustments.

The lemon meringue butter cream frosting is certainly the most complicated portion of the cake; it involves slowly heating the egg whites and some sugar while whisking constantly, allowing it cool briefly and then adding lemon juice and 3 (!) sticks of unsalted butter and whipping it into a nice thick frosting.  For the raspberry filling I used a raspberry jam that I warmed up in a pan briefly to make it easier to spread and then put it through a sieve to get out all of the seeds.

After the cake was made, I sliced the layers (I still don’t have a cake slicing kit – but my birthday is coming up…) and started assembling.  First a cake layer, then raspberry jam, and then the frosting.

Building cake layers

After completing the assembly, I frosted the whole thing with the remaining lemon meringue butter cream frosting and then, per Dorie’s instructions, finished it off with coconut all over the cake.

It was very pretty, but doesn’t look much different on the outside from the Redemption Cake.

Finished cake

(By the way, I have now made the Redemption Cake again, just so that this time I had some slices of it to put away in the freezer for my bride-to-be friend.  The first cake disappeared a little too quickly.)

But on the inside, it was a whole other story.

Cake insides

The cake was lovely and light, and contrasted well with the frosting and raspberry filling.  The lemon flavor was not overwhelming, and could actually have been a little more lemony for my taste, but I also don’t want to overpower people – there’s a fine line.

I do like the coconut on the exterior, but I wasn’t sure when I tasted it that it was entirely necessary; there so much else going on with the lemon, frosting and raspberry it seemed a little superfluous.  But, the first thing that I did with this cake was cut a huge piece that I saved in Tupperware in the freezer.  The reviews of the engaged couple were great and apparently the groom-to-be loves both lemon and coconut, so if this is one of the cakes, I’ll be keeping the coconut.

So, what do you guys think?

Redemption Cake

Friday, April 1st, 2011 | Wedding Cake Try-outs | 7 Comments

After the Caramel Peanut Topped Disappointment, I decided to put down Dorie Greenspan’s book for a while.  (It’s not you Dorie, it’s me!)  I decided that perhaps what I needed to do was work with a cake that I know and work on my cake skills.

I was craving the combination of chocolate and coconut for some reason so I resolved to make a chocolate cake with whipped cream frosting and coconut.  (Although in homage to “When Harry Met Sally”, and their wedding cake, I briefly considered making a coconut cake with chocolate sauce on the side.)

I need to work on my cake layer cutting skills; I have yet to master cutting a cake layer exactly in half – it’s always wonky.  And I don’t work much with whipped cream frosting – I’m much more of a ganache or buttercream kind of a girl.

So I began with my go-to chocolate cake recipe, my mom’s sourdough chocolate cake recipe.  Nellie, my sourdough start, has been recently enlivened by a new trick; I took her out of her ceramic container and let the start sit on the counter for about 24 hours in a bowl.  After the start fermented for that time, I used it, fed it with some more milk and flour and then put it back into the refrigerator.  Apparently this helps the yeast get all warm and happy; they do seem to have enjoyed their vacation away from the cold.

Anyway, the sourdough cake recipe is pretty easy (if you have the start):

Sourdough Chocolate Cake

1/2 cup of sourdough start

1 cup of tepid water

1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

1/4 cup dry milk powder

1 cup of sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

3 oz bittersweet chocolate chunks or chips

1/2 cup of vegetable oil

2 eggs

Sourdough start note: Prolonged contact with metal and plastic has been known to badly affect sourdough start.  If you are working with sourdough start, preferably keep it in a ceramic container and use only wooden spoons for stirring the start.  It’s fine if it only has brief contact with metal bowls and spoons, and once it’s mixed with other ingredients, it’s fine.  Hence, for this recipe I use a plastic bowl and a wooden spoon for mixing.

Mix together the start, water, flour and dry milk powder and set aside in a warm place for 2-3 hours.

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and butter two 9″ cake pans.  Dust with flour, tossing the excess, and then line the bottom with parchment paper.

When the sourdough start mixture has fermented to the point where it is showing small air bubbles, add the sugar, salt, vanilla, cinnamon and baking soda.  Meanwhile, melt the chocolate with the oil (I generally throw them together in a microwave proof bowl and microwave on high for 1 minute) and set aside to cool briefly.  Add to the cake batter when it has slightly cooled:

Sourdough cake batter - adding chocolate

Beat in the eggs when the batter has cooled enough that it will not cook the eggs.  Divide evenly between the two pans and bake in the oven for about 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

While I mixed the batter together, Henry “helped” me by going through one of the cabinets and tossing everything on the floor.

Henry "helping"

The cabinet holds all of our Tupperware and the kids’ cups and utensils, so it’s generally a great place to put him if I need to get a little work done. That is, until I need to spend a few minutes cleaning up everything from the floor, but it’s a small price to pay.

After the cake was done baking I set it on racks for 10 minutes to cool before removing them from their pans.  When the cake had entirely cooled I made a whipped cream frosting by whipping 1 cup of heavy cream, a little bit of coconut extract and about 6 tablespoons of sugar until it formed heavy stiff peaks. (I ended up having to make a second batch, since there wasn’t enough – oops!)

Then I very carefully cut each cake layer in half, frosted in between them, then frosted the whole cake.  After that I gently pressed sweetened flake coconut around the whole outside of the cake.

Finished cake

I didn’t do too badly on the cake layer cutting, but I need to work on it; what this picture does not show is that the other side is still a little wonky.  But that’s okay, because this cake was so good I’m willing to make it several more times so I can work on my skills and eat this cake.  The cake itself was light and airy, the whipped cream frosting was not heavy and the coconut added a nice touch.

Yum!

Now that’s a “Redemption Cake” and for me, definitely a contender to be one of the wedding cakes…

Caramel Peanut Topped Disappointment

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 | Wedding Cake Try-outs | 5 Comments

While flipping through Dorie Greenspan’s book, “Baking: From My Home to Yours” in search for another cake for the wedding cake try-outs, I happened upon, “Caramel Peanut Topped Brownie Cake”.  Sounds delicious, no?  You should see the pictures too! It looks delectable!

I decided to try it because it looked fun, not to mention yummy, and I have a fear of caramel that I’m trying to get over.  What better way to do that than to make some and throw it on top of a brownie cake?  And I thought it might be nice and casual for an informal wedding…

But, as you can see from the title of this post, in the end I was not happy with the results.  I think it was a combination of factors that induced my disappointment: A) I didn’t change the brownie cake recipe for the altitude because I wanted to see how it did without altering it, and B) I got a little over zealous on the caramel and may have laid it on a little too thick.

I’m sorry, but I won’t be sharing the recipe either, because frankly, for something that sounds like it’s just a brownie cake with caramel and peanuts on top, it was pretty complicated (the entire recipe took up two pages in Dorie’s rather large book).  Suffice to say there’s some melting of chocolate, butter and sugar, whipping of eggs, corn syrup, etc., some dry ingredients and voila! (Not really.) Here’s a nice picture of when I added the melted chocolate mixture in with the eggs:

Eggs and chocolate

After the cake baked, during which it unsurprisingly rose and then fell, I had to let it cool, flip it out of its spring form pan, clean the pan, remove the parchment paper from the bottom of the cake and then replace the pan around the cake.  See why this took two pages? And we haven’t even gotten to the tricky making of the caramel…

The caramel, which I watched like a nervous hen, did turn out nicely. And I learned a new trick, to test the color of the caramel to make sure it is a deep amber by putting some of it on a white plate.  After the caramel was done, I threw a cup of peanuts into the caramel, stirred them around, spooned them onto the cake and then dripped more caramel on top of all that.

Completed Caramel Peanut Topped Brownie Cake

It looked lovely and inviting, but it was 4 p.m. and there were kids to feed and put to bed. The picture above, by the way, was pretty close to the cake pictured in Dorie’s book, except hers seemed to have a lot more peanuts.

So we tried the cake about 8 p.m. after it had been sitting for several hours.  That’s when the real disappointment began.  The cake was not terribly moist and the thick layer of caramel had become pretty hard and chewy; it was very difficult to eat.  We actually decided that we didn’t want to eat any more of it and it sat for several days untouched until I gave up and threw it out.

Cake slice

For me, this one is not a wedding cake contender, although I do think I could make it better the next time by modifying the ingredients for altitude and not being so heavy-handed with the caramel.  It was difficult to make and took up most of an afternoon – which was fine since Mike was home – and didn’t seem to stand the test of time.  Although I may be able to make a cake on the day of the wedding, I’d rather not; I’d rather have the ability to make at least one of the cakes the day before and not have it disintegrate into a denture wearer’s nightmare…  Thoughts my readers?

Cake, Cake and More Cake

Thursday, March 24th, 2011 | Wedding Cake Try-outs | 5 Comments

A beloved friend who is getting married in June of 2012 has asked me to make a few cakes for her informal wedding.   The wedding is going to be held in her parent’s backyard, the groom will be wearing his best jeans, and her Aunt and cousins are making the food.  Sounds lovely to me!

It’s an honor really and I am going to enjoy making cakes for her.  So far, she hasn’t been specific about what she wants, just not the “traditional” wedding cake. She has been very clear about staying away from the highly decorated high layer cake with man and woman on top…  Since we all know I’m no cake decorator, that won’t be a problem, but I do want to make a few nice cakes.  I’d like to have a nice mix of things so that people who are chocolate people can get some chocolate and people who don’t like chocolate (despite having something seriously wrong with them!) can have an alternative.

In preparation for the wedding, and since I have more than a year before my deadline, I’m going to start a new blog series called “The Wedding Cake Try-Outs”.  I’ll be making a different kind of cake as often as I can, documenting the process and then writing a blog post about the cake.  I’m sorry that most of my readers are too far away to do tastings as well – but I do want you all to express your views about whether or not a specific cake is something you would like to have at an informal wedding.

I’ve decided to rely heavily on a book I received a long time ago for Christmas and have yet to touch, Dorie Greenspan’s, “Baking: From My Home to Yours”.  I adore Dorie, she’s always on NPR and seems like my kind of cook; sometimes she follows the recipe and sometimes she just throws stuff into a bowl and prays. And honestly, there are some beautiful looking cakes in the book that have been tempting me for a while.

My friend has a favorite of my cakes that I will also be making and putting up for a vote; it’s a layer cake of chocolate sourdough cake, a layer of chocolate mousse that I add gelatin too to stiffen it enough for it to be molded into a cake layer, either fruit or whipping cream in between the layers and a frosting of chocolate ganache.

But I have plenty of time for that, so I began with a recipe from Dorie’s book, “Nutty, Chocolaty, Swirly Sour Cream Bundt Cake”.  I picked this cake almost entirely on the basis that I had all of the ingredients and also that I thought I could get it done during the 1 hour I have to myself while both kids nap in the afternoon.

Dorie Greenspan’s “Nutty, Chocolaty, Swirly Sour Cream Bundt Cake”

For the swirl:

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped or 1/3 cup mini chocolate chips

1/3 cup plump, moist raisins (dark or golden) or dried currants

2 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

pinch of nutmeg

pinch of salt

For the cake:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 3/4 cups sugar

grated zest of 1 orange

2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 large eggs

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup sour cream

I made the following modifications to the above ingredients: I used pecans not walnuts (I’m allergic) and I reduced the sugar in the cake to 1 1/2 cups for the altitude.  (High altitude cooking generally requires a reduction in the moisture in cake recipes, either by reducing the sugar, eggs or other liquids, otherwise cakes will, as I have learned countless times, sink in the middle. Granted, a bundt cake sinking in the middle isn’t really possible, but it will create a nice cavern in the center of the ring.)  Also, I didn’t have an orange, so I used some of my pure orange oil instead, about 1 tsp.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Butter a bundt pan and then dust with flour, shaking out the excess flour.

Mix all of the swirl ingredients together in a bowl and set aside. (It looks delicious all by itself!)

The cake filling

Whisk all of the flour, baking powder and salt together in a bowl.  Add the sugar and zest to a mixing bowl (I used my electric mixer) and rub them together until the sugar is fragrant.  With the paddle attachment beat on medium speed for 4 minutes.  Add eggs one at a time, beat for one minute after adding each one and then add the vanilla.  Slow the mixer down to low speed and add in the sour cream.  Add in the dry ingredients until they are incorporated into the batter.

Put 1/3 of the batter into the bundt pan and then evenly sprinkle in half of the filling.

Adding in the filling

Then add the remainder of the batter to the pan.  Make an indentation in the center of the ring of batter with the back of the spoon and then add in the remaining filling in the indentation.  Fold in the batter on the sides of the indentation.  (This is really tricky and I didn’t get it right; the batter is thick and it was terribly difficult to make an indentation, let alone fold it over the filling.)

Bake for 60-65 minutes, or as Dorie instructs “until a thin knife inserted deep into the center the cake comes out clean.”  Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes before un-molding it from the pan.   Dorie suggests sprinkling the cake with powdered sugar once it cools, but I’m not a fan of that.   Next time I might make a glaze with some orange juice, powdered sugar and little melted butter, but it was a beautiful cake without anything at all on top:

Finished Cake

I think that next time I will put less batter in before the initial filling addition, since the filling swirl seemed to be mostly at the bottom of the cake; I would like it a little more in the middle.  Also, I think next time I will reduce the amount of sugar in the filling mix itself.  With the nuts, raisins and chocolate chunks a good portion of the sugar sank to the bottom of the bowl and seemed like a waste.

Slice of cake

I have to admit, I love this cake and will be making it again, whether or not I make it for the wedding.  The smell of the orange, chocolate and cake that filled the house was wonderful and the taste of the cake was even better.  Mike didn’t feel that the raisins were necessary in the filling, although he sure loved the cake and ate a lot of it, but I liked the contrast in the filling between the crunchy nuts, melted chocolate and soft raisins.

For me, this is a contender for the wedding because it is pretty simple – I got it done while the kids napped – and yet there are wonderful complex flavors.  If any of you want to come over and try some, just let me know and I can whip up another one lickety-split!