She Done Found Herself A Good One

Yes, yes I did. I done found myself a good man. A very good man. For valentine's day (which we celebrated yesterday) he got me my very own digital camera. Dude! We spent most of the night screwing around with the camera and trying to top each other's perfect cake picture. Who's a good boyfriend? The Stinky is The Best Boyfriend. sigh.

Feb 15, 2006
Occasion: Valentine’s Day!
Name of Cake: For The Love of Quickbreads, and The Love of The Best Man I Know
Constituents: Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese Frosting, Peanut Butter Orange Bread with Chocolate Ganache Glaze

pumpkin bread

(2/13) For Valentine’s Day, since I finally have someone to celebrate it with, and he’s someone who LIKES to celebrate it, I thought I’d bake him up a couple of cakes. (And, because I really love him. That’s really the reason. Everything else is just an excuse.)

I say a couple of cakes because when he gave me his list of favorite cakes last month I realized what he really likes are quickbreads. He likes dense, moist cakes that sometimes sneak in vegetables so you think you are being healthy. Of course, WWPF, honey instead of white sugar.

I bought new WWPF.

I decided on pumpkin bread because 1. duh, yummy, and 2. it goes well with cream cheese frosting, which leads us to 3. fuck yeah, yummy!

The other one, the curious peanut butter orange bread, was exactly that: curious. I gotta try it. And glaze it in ganache. I have some sad excuses for ganache in the freezer; I’ll just reheat those.

(2/14) Peanut butter orange bread in the oven. Used WWPF, and ¾ cup honey instead of ½ cup sugar. Honey isn’t as sweet as sugar, so that’s why I used a little more. Honey also has more moisture than sugar so that should really make the bread moist. The batter was tasty, so I have high hopes for the rest of it.

Heh, well. Where is my (nonexistent) digital camera when I need it? This quickbread looks a lot like a dead camel.

10 minutes after the cake came out, the middle sunk like quicksand. As I turned it out of the pan, the cake. completely. fell. apart.

I know why it did; I didn’t want to have to put the extra batter in another pan so I just poured all of the batter into the loaf pan—which filled up the pan to within ½ inch of the top…so a bunch of batter spilled over the side, the bottom burned, all the sides baked, but the middle stayed very….wet.

(I don't know if you can tell from the picture...but the inside is like, totally mushy. Like, undercooked mushy.)

So, when I made the pumpkin bread (1 cup honey, 1 1/3 cup milled cane sugar, WWPF) I anticipated too much batter and prepared the muffin tin and made pumpkin bread muffins…which I burned. But the pumpkin bread looks and smells great. I filled the pan 2/3 full like a normal person would.

And yet again, I made the cream cheese frosting from the recipe I got off the internet, and it is still THE BEST and easiest cream cheese frosting on the planet. Especially after disregarding the note to use AN ENTIRE box of powdered sugar and using ONE CUP sugar (partially light muscovado)…which eliminates the need to thin out the frosting with milk. Good stuff.

And, curious: I defrosted some glaze or ganache I had stashed in the freezer, and of course it looked like it had separated, but when I reheated the stuff it seemed to have come together quite nicely without separating. So I glazed the dead camel; now it looks like it rolled in the mud before it took the stairway to heaven.

(2/16) I would have preferred to have had the orange flavor be more in the background and the peanut butter take more of a center stage. Right now it is the other way around. Maybe less zest, more peanut butter? Or maybe less zest alone would do it.

No complaints about that pumpkin bread with the cream cheese frosting, except that more frosting would have been good.