- Reviewers are surprisingly pleased with the service and selection at chain favorites like Outback Steakhouse, Chili's, and T.G.I. Friday's
- Young, energetic Danish chefs return home after culinary school, and bring with them a unique, fresh perspective
- One author marks her trials and triumphs in birthday cake making over the years, including the dreaded Barbie cake (at right)
- On the hunt for a Chicken Canzanese recipe, circa 1969
- The taco truck controversy marches on
- A quintessential mint julep recipe, perfect for Derby-goers
Posts with tag birthday cake
The New York Times in 60 seconds: Chains, cakes and chicken canzanese
A birthday cake recipe that's a keeper
Being that I'm known in my circle of friends as something of a food lover and able cook, I often get called upon to bring contributions to communal meals or other food events. Nearly once a month, I get tapped to make a birthday dessert and so I'm always on the hunt for a quick, tasty birthday cake that doesn't come from a box. I have a go-to cake for the chocolate lovers but I've always been stymied by from scratch white cakes. They never come out quite right for me and so the search continued.
Until Saturday morning, that is. I needed to make a cake for my boyfriend's birthday party that night, and he had specifically asked for a white cake with chocolate frosting. Simple enough, right? My theory is that when you're working with such a classic combination, you have to do a really great job of it, or it's a let down. I flipped through at least six cookbooks, looking for a recipe that didn't use a pint of cream or require you to separate half a dozen eggs and beat the whites. What I ended up using was the All-Occasion Yellow Cake recipe from the Gourmet Cookbook. It is billed as being "incredibly simple" and it lived up to that promise. It came together quickly, baked up evenly, came out of the pan easily and tasted wonderful. This one is a keeper (and the recipe is after the jump).
The perfect cake for Talk Like a Pirate Day
As some of you who follow these sorts of things may know, Talk Like a Pirate Day is just two weeks (Sept. 19) away (what, you mean to tell me that this isn't a holiday you celebrate in your household?). I wasn't actually planning on posting about it here until I stumbled across the recipe and design instructions for a Pirate Ship Cake and realized that it was a match made in heaven. Now, I haven't made this recipe personally, so I have no idea how hard or easy it is to create at home, but from the picture it seems pretty darn cool.
Chocolate Outrageous Pie
The Perfect Pantry is a great blog, filled with tips for stocking your pantry or kitchen. As webmaster Lydia herself says, there's no such thing as a perfect pantry, but there are certainly things in there you need. And it's The Perfect Pantry's one-year birthday (well, it was yesterday), and Lydia made a Chocolate Outrageous Pie to celebrate. She found the recipe in a notebook filled with old recipes. Full recipe after the jump.
They say it's your birthday (cake)
My birthday was this past Saturday, and I forgive all of you for not buying me a gift. I didn't even have any cake! Though the Mexican food and beer and wine I had more than made up for it.
Cake is something I don't eat much of, for both weight reasons and I'm not much of a baker and don't really think about buying one. But a good chocolate cake with a tall glass of cold milk is one of life's great pleasures, and AOL food has recipes for various birthday cakes (scroll down to "Great Cake Recipes") you can try. They go as far as to say that birthday cake has surpassed apple pie as America's greatest guilty pleasure.
I don't agree with that, but there are some good cakes here, including Chocolate Walnut Cake, Kentucky Butter Cake, Linzer Cake, Flourless Sponge Cake, and something called Kitty Litter Cake.
Berlin's KaDeWe celebrates centennial with megacake
What's a luxury department store to do when it hits the century mark? If it's Berlin's KaDeWe, or Kaufhaus des Westerns, the answer is simple. Let them eat cake, and lots of it. Yesterday the store served up an enormous 20-foot tall cake to celebrate its 100th birthday. As you can see here, the confection's lowest tier was adorned with a replica of the store, including marzipan customers, complete with shopping bags. An enormous cake is especially fitting for the luxe KaDaWe given that it has a renowned food hall. With 164,042 square feet of selling space, the store also happens to be Europe's largest.
Me and my sweet tooth are holding out for one of New York City's great retail destinations to whip up a similar cake for a special occasion.
[via Spluchster]
Oatmeal candy cake
When I was growing up, we begged my Mom to make her "Candy Cake", as she called it. I'm sure it was a trick on her part to get us to eat more oatmeal (something I wouldn't normally touch) but I could have cared less what was in it because it tasted so good. This past weekend we were celebrating my brother's birthday and she made it again in lieu of a regular birthday cake. I had forgotten how much I loved it until I had the first bite. I'm not a huge dessert fan, but I have to admit that I had several pieces. It is super-easy to make, though you may have to adjust the cooking times slightly based on your altitude.
Bring 1 cup of brown sugar and 1/2 cup of butter to a gentle boil. Remove from heat and add 1/2 tsp. baking soda, 1 tsp. vanilla, a dash of salt and 2 cups of oatmeal (oat flakes). Stir until blended and pour into a greased pan. Bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Cut into squares and let cool.
Sometimes this cake will crumble, but if it does simply sprinkle over the top of ice cream or yogurt, or add some dried fruit/nuts and make some granola.
Trail of crumbs leads to sticky fingered thieves
It looks like Hansel and Gretel aren't the only ones who tried to advantage of crumbs to lead them to where they wanted to go. The police in Sylva, North Carolina were able to use a very literal - not just literary - trail of cake crumbs to track down two thieves who attempted to break in to the police station last week.
The two suspects damaged the door of the station in their attempt to gain entry and, when they couldn't force the door, instead stole a sign, some flags and flagpoles before making their getaway. The door to the station was "smeared with cake and frosting" and a trail of the same sweets led along the main street, leading away from the station. It didn't take long before the detectives found their way to the two suspects, who "had cake all over them."
As you might expect from two people who smear themselves with cake and try to break into a police station, the pair had been drinking (heavily) at a birthday party in a nearby restaurant. Witnesses identified the suspects as having been serving the cake to partygoers, and then later also spotted them with the stolen goods.
Cooking Live with Slashfood: Buttermilk Cake with Praline Icing
What is a birthday party without a birthday cake? A disappointing celebration, that's what. Any dessert can be appropriate for a birthday if you stick a candle on top, but a lovely cake doesn't need candles to be appropriate - especially if the birthday boy/girl doesn't want to think about how many candles should be topping of that cake. This cake recipe is from Cooking Light and is a lovely, easy-to-make layer cake.
The cake itself is light and moist, and the frosting is fantastic. The brown sugar mix melts in your mouth and develops a slight crunch on the outside as it sets. I had to double the original recipe to make enough frosting to cover the cake and a tiny bit left over that was a great dip for some pretzel sticks. I would make the icing alone again and serve dipped pretzels as a salty-sweet snack food, but I wouldn't hesitate to make the whole cake again, either. I just need another occasion.
Continue reading Cooking Live with Slashfood: Buttermilk Cake with Praline Icing
Birthday Contest Winners and Food Porn
Thanks to everyone who participated in our Birthday Cake Photo Contest and helped make Slashfood's first anniversary a memorable one, though of course it is the daily readership that we appreciate, and not just the submission of a photo! It was very difficult to choose a winner from all of the excellent entries, but after much deliberation, the winning photo was the above photo of a birthday cupcake submitted by Disney Mike
The runner up was the slashed apple cake submitted by Bonnie, who got bonus points for making an extremely appropriate cake for the occasion. To take a look at her cake, and at a handful of the other entries, just click past the jump. You'll have to view the whole photo pool to see all 47 submitted photos, though!
Birthday Cakes, Cookbook of the Day
Most families have one person who is responsible for baking the cakes for birthdays and other occasions. It might be a grandmother who bakes her famous coconut cake everyone loves or an enthusiastic child whose greatest love is elaborately decorating sheet cakes made with box mixes, but there is always one. When you are that one person, sometimes you run out of ideas. Even grandma must get tired of her coconut cake every once in a while.
Birthday Cakes: Recipes and Memories from Celebrated Bakers is a good book to get inspired by.
The book is packed with stunningly beautiful cakes, recipes to go with them and stories from bakers who moved from being "the one" in their family to making a career out of something that they loved to do. Recipes come from cooks like Alice Waters, Julia Child, James Beard and Alice Medrich. They are cakes that will take birthdays and other celebrations to a new level, not just variations on the same old thing, so if you're up for the challenge of tacking something new, like a Princess Cake, you will be well rewarded when it is met with oohs and aahs at serving time.
Slashfood's Birthday Cake Contest Reminder!
With only a few days to go until the deadline, you still have time to enter Slashfood's Birthday Cake Photo Contest. The deadline for entries is midnight on Wednesday, August 23rd, at which point the photos will be judged and we'll pick a couple of winners!
We're happy to report that we have some really fantastic entries up right now, so take a look at the Birthday Cake Contest Flickr group when you have a chance.
If you haven't entered yet, what are you waiting for? All you need is a camera (preferably a digital one) and some kind of birthday cake. You could even go to your favorite neighborhood restaurant and tell them it's your birthday so they'll stick a candle on top of your dessert for you. Just upload the photo before the deadline and you'll have a chance to win one of two great prizes. The winner will receive a copy of The Cake Book, and the runner up will get Crazy About Cupcakes.
Snakes + Cake = Snakes on a Cake
"At 30,000 feet, snakes aren't the deadliest thing on this plane"... not if there's a cake involved, anyway. The picture shown here is small, but this birthday cake is based on Samuel Jackson's upcoming movie, Snakes on a Plane (due to potentially offensive language, the full cake is after the jump). Somehow, "snakes on a cake" has more of a ring to it than the original title, though it is clear that the movie would have to be much shorter - on account of a cake being much smaller than a plane and able to accommodate fewer snakes. This is a great choice of birthday cake for a movie buff.
Read on to see the whole cake up close.
Slashfood's Birthday Cake Photo Contest
August marks the one year anniversary of Slashfood's launch. Somehow, it seems longer than that - but that's a good thing! While we were thinking of ways to celebrate, we decided that instead of trying to collect gifts, we would have a contest and give one away to a reader.
We love food porn from our other blogging friends, and we're not half bad photographers ourselves, but we know that some of you readers are just as good if not better. So, Slashfood's Birthday Cake Photo Contest is a chance for you to show off your skills by taking the best photo you can of birthday cake. Chocolate or vanilla, cupcake or layer cake, frosted or cream-filled... the options are endless, but it would be best if you top if off with a candle for us.
Once you have taken your picture, you have to upload it to our Birthday Cake Contest Flickr group by midnight on Wednesday, August 23rd. We will judge the photos and announce the winners on Friday, August 25th. Be sure to add a description to your photo once you've listed it on our Flickr group stating your name, or the name you would like us to announce. We will contact the winners via Flickr
The prizes? The winner will receive a copy of The Cake Book, and the runner up will get Crazy About Cupcakes.
Building the Army a birthday cake
The US Army celebrated its 231st birthday with cake. A very, very big cake. The ingredient list included 540 eggs, 100 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of butter, 30 gallons of milk and 30 pounds of sugar and it took 17 chefs about 1 week to create. How did it work? It was constructed from layered individual sheet cakes - 50 of them, to be precise. 35 gallons of icing were used to cover and decorate the cake. The finished product was 8.5 feet long by 3 feet wide and weighed more than 250 pounds. It was served at the Pentagon June 14th to approximately 1,500 people.
Elsewhere in the country, individual divisions had their own celebrations with even more cakes.
Granted, this cake - which is still very impressive - doesn't come close to rivaling the world's largest birthday cake, which was built last year in Las Vegas and used 30,000 half-sheet cakes and 40,000 pounds of frosting. The end result was a cake which weighed in at 65 tons.
There is one more cake close-up after the jump, as well as a picture of the world's largest birthday cake.
May is National BBQ Month and National Hamburger Month
Cupcakes, not for dessert (unless beef is your idea of a treat)
Because eating French Fries in the car is so tough
