"cake" news and stories

Blood-orange season in Sicily makes many of us long for plane tickets to Catania, where the delicate, sweet Tarocco variety grows and rarely travels beyond the Italian border. However, we have options -- Spain provides us with the tender and sweet Sanguinello and California offers the ruby-colored Moro variety. Let the juicing begin -- or just plain peeling and eating.

Recipes abound. Fennel pairs well with blood oranges, in a salad with pomegranate and Pecorino. You can use it in an intensely flavorful marinade for a pork tenderloin, or try a dessert of pound cake with blood-orange glaze. Martha Stewart suggests mixing the juice with citrus-flavored vodka and simple syrup for a blood-orange martini.

If you'd like to know more about the magical blood orange, read this terrific Saveur magazine story by David Karp (a.k.a. The Fruit Detective).

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool to get a shot of having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

We know it's beside the point. We know we shouldn't care. But we can't help it: When the contestants on Ultimate Cake Off saw through layer after layer of sheet cake, carving those gigantic confections into castles or grand pianos or dirigibles or whatever they're trying to replicate, we cry a little inside.

We think to ourselves, couldn't you do something with all that cake you're throwing away? Maybe a nice trifle? Maybe we could get a bite? Maybe you could start a Pastry Imperfections for the Homeless (PIFTH) charity or something?

There was a time when we were in awe of the careful art of cake decoration: The sculpting of delicate fondant flowers, the geometric applications of buttercream, the stacking of fluffy sheets of vanilla cake into gravity-defying architectural wonders.

But now we're starting to worry. There's a fine line between art and madness, and in 2010, we've crossed over into full-blown obsessive-compulsive pastry disorder.

Between the Food Network and TLC, cake mania has reached insane heights -- literally. Like figure skating or Donald Trump's buildings, the bigger and kitschier, the better. A cake isn't a cake unless it spins like a ferris wheel, contains more sugar than a refinery and looks like a teetering game of Jenga on steroids.

Don't get us wrong, we love the pyrotechnic hipster creativity of the Charm City staff on Ace of Cakes. And the acquired-taste Cake Boss has its moments of sweet-tooth ingenuity. But the success of these big-city eccentrics is bringing all of the cake crazies out of the woodwork.

Photo: sassyradish, Flickr.

In an enticing alternative to the usual coffeecake breakfast sweet, this nectarine tart serves the same function but with an extra dose of fresh fruit. Not only is the yellow cake perfectly golden, unctuously buttery and studded with luscious nectarines, Flickr user sassyradish heralds it as also being "moist, light and laced with vanilla and almond."

In this recipe adapted from the September issue of Gourmet, the shopping list calls for the usual pantry baking staples to be paired with the sliced fruit of your choice -- perfect for last-minute brunch-time entertaining.

Check out the elegantly simple recipe for yourself at blog Sassyradish.

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool to get a shot at having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

Bacon-slab cake. Photo: debbiedoescakes, Flickr.

When is a savory slab of bacon not a savory slab of bacon? When it's a deliciously sweet, sugary cake merely masquerading as a salted and smoked side of pork.

This bacon-slab "groom's cake" from Flickr user debbiedoescakes is entirely sweet and, even better, entirely edible, right down to the cutting-board base. It makes our mouths water for both, and forces us to ask: Which would you rather -- cake or bacon? Or cake that looks like bacon?

[Via Flickr]