A Spot of Orange: Yellow Cake, Chocolate Frosting Revisited

I had a leftover white cake mix from when I made the birthday cake for my favorite local Monkey Boy, and I don't much care for letting those things take up space in the pantry, unless there's nothing else I can do. But today, while waiting for laundry and paint (well, varnish) to dry, I had the opportunity to play in the kitchen, again.

Aside from the cake mix, I had a little fresh orange juice…well, actually, more than a little. I had neglected to grate off the rind from them before I juiced them, so I hadn't really thought the process would serve all that well, except that I still had a bowlful of clementine tangerines (not cuties brand, but about the same size and sweetness), all of which could be peeled and tossed into a salad for tonight's supper, so there I had what I needed.

So, I baked a cake and frosted it, using up a few leftovers.*

Cleaning house, with real gusto.

Preheat oven to temp recommended on mix box (mine said 350º F). Take out butter and cream cheese for frosting, let warm up to room temp. If it's a cool day, soften slightly in microwave oven. Do not allow to melt!

For the cake

Ingredients:
1 box of your favorite white cake mix (I usually prefer Aldi's, but today's was a Major Name Brand with pudding in the mix. Still, any good mix will do in a pinch)
1 cup plus 1 Tablespoon fresh orange juice
1/3 cup canola oil
3 eggs (or, for lower cholesterol, 4 egg whites)
1 teaspoon tangerine rind, finely grated


Mix cake ingredients according to instructions on box, substituting orange juice for water and adding in grated rind. Pour batter into well-greased cake pan lightly dusted with flour. Bake according to box instructions, until a toothpick or cake tester comes out of the center clean.

Cool completely, remove from pan.

For the frosting

Ingredients:
1 brick (8 oz.) cream cheese, softened to room temperature
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened to room temperature
1Teaspoon finely grated tangerine rind 
1 lb (4 cups) confectioner's sugar (powdered sugar)
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 Tablespoon orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla

While cake is baking, cream butter and cream cheese until light and fluffy. Mix in fruit rind. With mixer on low, add 1 cup sugar, mix well. Add 1-2 Tablespoons cocoa power, mix well. Add another cup powdered sugar, mix, add more cocoa, and continue mixing and adding portions until all blended. With mixer on high, gradually add in orange juice and vanilla, keep mixing until frosting is lightly fluffy.

Cool in refrigerator at least 1/2 hour before applying to cake.



*This cake comes out somewhere between light and fluffy and dense as a pound cake. If you want a lighter, fluffier version, use a no-pudding-in-the-mix variety and add an extra egg white.

DECORATE! DECORATE! Cupcake Cone Daleks

So, Monday afternoon I'm supplying the cake, the extra treats, and the decorations for a party celebrating a monkey-boy's seventh birthday. The event will take place at his grandparents' house, a few blocks from where I live and bake. The activities include watching an episode of Doctor Who and then building cupcake Daleks.

In order for a riot of boys to do something like building an army of alien killer robots

there has to be a lot, A LOT of preparation, or chaos is the only thing they will generate.  After all, we are talking about sticky foods, spatulas, and an enclosed area (forecast is for thunderstorms, so there will likely be no romping in the garden). At any rate, rather than let them do as much damage as the same number of Daleks would, I've assembled the parts ahead of time.

The first stage is to get ice cream cups.

I had wanted to find some chocolate wafer cups (to make all-chocolate Daleks), but, for some reason, nobody in my area had any of them. Dang it, don't people in retail know that chocolate is a necessity, especially in these uncertain times? Well! Instead of leaving in a huff, I bought a box of colored cups, 

and l left in a minute and a huff.*

Other than that, almost everything I needed was in stock in my own cupboards. I'm a regular boy scout, I am. 

In case you're not certain what you'll need to have in your kitchen cupboards for a project like this, here is a list of all ingredients:

• cake batter, either your favorite recipe or a favorite box mix.
• food coloring
• simple whipped frosting, either your favorite recipe or from a little tub†
• little pretzel sticks
• m&m minis
• helmets. 

That last one is the hardest to come by. I've considered using chocolate-covered cherries or other straight candy domes, but they all end up looking more square than rounded, so the Dalek doesn't look very… Dalek-y. At last, though, I found, at a Big Lots store, some of these chocolate-dipped marshmallow-topped chocolate cookies

Which looked a little less dented on the cover of the box,

but I decided I could live with it, and just let the boys pretend our Daleks had just been in a big battle.

Anyway, now to the construction of your invading army. 

The first thing you are going to want to do is to set out your ice cream cups. My box of ice cream cups had eighteen in it, but the recipe I use makes two dozen cupcakes. This is only a problem if you lack ambition. Either put set up some cupcake papers or those silicone cups, or get an eight-inch cake pan or brownie pan, butter it up or line it with parchment, and set it amid your workspace. Then stand your wafer cups up, either on a cookie sheet or each in its own cup of a muffin tin. 

Next, to make the cupcakes, follow your favorite recipe or the instructions on your box mix to make  a basic cake. If you're going with coloring the cakes as I did, stick with a white cake, because you want your colors to come out intense and cheerful. (But feel free to use your favorite chocolate cake. It won't be seen once you build the Dalek.) If adding color to a white cake, once the batter is mixed, divide into as many bowls as you have colors (the standard mix provides about 5 cups of batter, so do your math on that). Add food color until it reaches the desired tint. 

Spoon batter into bottom of wafer cups, until it nearly fills, to just under a centimeter from the top of the cup. When all the cups are filled, pour any remaining batter into the cupcake papers or the small cake pan (it will not be a thick cake).

Bake about 15-18 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of one comes out clean.  

Allow to cool completely.

Many of these will have domes upon their tops.

You do not want this lovely effect, because you are going to invert the cupcakes, so, take a sharp, serrated knife and cut away the extra cake tops so that there is a nice, flat surface. Set the cupcake down on parchment or waxed paper. (The dots you cut away may be saved for a later project or just nibbled the heck out of.)

Once it is on its paper, it is now ready for little hands to mess with it. 

Let them slather frosting around what would have been the base of the cup, but is now its top (this means the sides and the top). Have them stick a helmet on it. Then, it's a matter of setting in rows of those m&m minis (each Dalek will need at least 18 to 24 dots, depending on how tightly the child arranges his rows of dots.

Then they can dip one end of a pretzel stick into the remaining frosting, attach a weapon arm, break another pretzel in half (or bite a couple of them off so they're the desired length) and dip ends of those pieces into frosting, and attach them so they look, more or less, like this:

Admire, and then INGURGITATE! INGURGITATE! INGURGITATE!


*Thank you, Groucho Marx.

†I made a several batches of white "buttercream" frosting, combining 1/3 cup water (plus a little extra as needed), 1/3 cup solid vegetable shortening (Crisco), and 4 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar, then added most of a packet of unsweetened Kool-Aid plus matching food coloring to make some frosting for the party. It's tart and tangy and probably not for adult taste buds. But I love the stuff. The Demonstration Dalek, though, is, as you can see, made from pre-fab frosting.

Christmas made easy

The Bat, the Geezer and I hosted Christmas dinner for what I like to call our "Volunteer Family", a group who, with no genetic ties to us more recent than, probably, the time of the birthday celebrant, still chooses to remain close to us and call us family.  Because these are people whose company we greatly enjoy, we don't like to waste a lot of time hiding out in the kitchen while they are here, so we plan our menus accordingly.

Dinner, yesterday, was a great big beef sirloin roast, a loaf of Challah, steamed sweet corn, five-cup salad (brought by the matriarch of the Volunteers, who also brought dessert: pumpkin pie and a giant Sam's Club apple pie, for which we provided the whipped cream), and twice-baked potatoes.

The potatoes raised eyebrows and smiles. Our logic in serving them was simple: if you make them ahead of time, all you have to do is bake them.  You don't need to make any gravy, no fussing over last-minute details.  Simply bake, assemble, and re-bake right before you want to serve them.

The funny thing is, every time the Bat & I make these things, we get remarks like, "Mine never taste as good.  They always come out kind of boring."  And we think we may have discovered the biggest problem for most people.  It's always about ingredients.

If you make anything in which cheese is a major ingredient (breads, chicken pot pie, or twice baked potatoes), ALWAYS use sharp or extra sharp cheeses. Delicate flavors disappear when you bake them into things, unless you pile on extra, at which time the original recipe's texture suffers.

We prefer Tillamook's extra-sharp cheddar, and you can stay with that, or you can use the flavor you most like, whether it be blue, Swiss, or some exotic variety.  It's fine to experiment, as long as it's a cheese of strong character.

But here's our base recipe, with which we play (and, if you don't need quite so much potato for your meal, these babies can be individually wrapped and frozen):

Twice-Baked Potatoes

Ingredients:

Six large russet potatoes
butter to coat

8 Tablespoons butter (one stick), divided
2 cups plain, unsweetened Greek-style yogurt
2 cups freshly-grated extra-sharp cheddar cheese, divided
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
1/4 cup ranch-style dressing

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400º F. Scrub and dry potatoes, cut off any blemishes, plus trim off one end.  Pierce each potato repeatedly with fork or narrow knife. Coat with butter.  Place directly on rack in the oven, bake approximately one hour, or until tender, turning once.

Remove from oven.

While they are still hot, cut potatoes in half and scoop as much of the "meat" of the potato into a large mixing bowl, being sure to leave a little to help the skin retain a bowl shape.  Set the potato-skin boats on a cookie sheet or jelly-roll pan.  Add half stick (4 Tablespoons) butter, all the yogurt, 1 cup cheddar cheese, 1/4 cup parmesan, and ranch dressing. Mix completely, until cheese is all melted in.

By tablespoons, return filling to potato skin shells, in moderately-heaping proportions (if you are feeling fancy, you can use a press for fancy textured tops, but I like the rustic look).  Allow to cool in refrigerator a few hours, or overnight.

Before re-baking:

Preheat oven to at least 325º F (we just bake them alongside whatever meat we're roasting).

Melt 1/2 stick butter in small pan or microwave-safe dish. By teaspoon, drizzle over the top of each potato boat, especially making sure any of the "meat" which had been remaining to shape the boat gets a touch of it.  Don't worry if some dribbles over the edge of the boat, because it will help keep the skin crispy.  Top with remaining mix of cheeses (if you like, you may add other cheese varieties, here). Place in oven at least 20 minutes, until the potatoes are hot and cheese topping begins to bubble.

Serve hot.  (Makes 12)

What a Maroon's Macaroons

Dark chocolate bottoms, dried cherries or pecans on top... the best of all worlds!

Bugs Bunny gave us the label. I reckon it fits, most days. I'm too often the slow, dim one when I set to work (I like to believe it's the result of medications, but, then, when everybody else in the family is comfortably qualified to join Mensa, and I just barely scraped by on the exams -- due to neglect of math -- it's probably not just the drugs speaking).

So, when I bake, I don't want to have to pretend I'm a Ph.D. in chemistry. Keep It Simple, Stupid, is the motto I've tried to live by as mush as possible. So, to the macaroons.

A few things to consider: we don't have a really good baking supplier in our region -- the nearest one is more than an hour's drive away. So, when I want finely shredded coconut, instead of those long, pretty strands that make such nice birds' nests for Easter, I have to toss my long shreds into a blender or food processor & turn them to near-dust. It's not an onerous task, but it does add an extra step to the otherwise brainless activity. And, of course, if you like chocolate, you may want to melt a pound or two in a double-boiler, so you can dip these puppies. I prefer semi-sweet or dark chocolate on my own, but I know a lot of milk choccie lovers, so go there if you must.

The Macaroons

Ingredients:

1 can (14 oz.) sweetened condensed milk

1 bag (14 oz.) finely shredded sweetened coconut flakes

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (preferably powdered, but any good variety will do)

Your preferred toppings (I have chosen tart dried cherries and pecan halves)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325ºF.

In a medium or large mixing bowl, combine condensed milk, coconut, and vanilla.

Using a small cookie scoop or a nice, rounded teaspoon, drop onto parchment-covered cookie sheet. (I usually spray the cookie sheet with a little oil to prevent slippage as I'm setting up.) Try to keep them as neat as possible.

If you want to go all fancy, top each one with a bit of your favorite not-too-sweet fruit or nut.

Pop those babies in the oven for about ten minutes, or, until they start turning golden-brown.

Allow to cool.

At this point, you can also dip them in chocolate, if you so desire. I found that, when one makes the cookies larger, they tend to go all floppy in your hands, so, to make them more manageable, I "painted" some chocolate onto their bottoms using a small spoon, and then let them completely cool on parchment before serving.

Then, if you want to keep a few to send out for Christmas, you'd probably be wise to hide them from Pop.