Spicy Cake from a Spicy Lady

I had Elise Logan over at my house the other day, and we baked!  I thought it only fitting that when baking with a spicy author we should make something spicy.  As it happens she had a spice cake recipe that was “to die for”.  I was a little skeptical.  I mean, a spice cake’s a spice cake, right?  Nope.  Apparently not.  This one really is amazing.  I’m not even sure why really.  It’s just the perfect combination of spices and it’s moist and well… fabulous.

Here’s what you need:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 ½ cups granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½  teaspoon nutmeg
• ½  teaspoon cloves
• ½  teaspoon ginger
• ½  teaspoon cardamom
• 1 cup buttermilk
• ½ cup butter, softened
• 1 Tablespoon vanilla
• 3 eggs

As always, make sure your ingredients are all room temperature.  Preheat your oven to 350 and line two 8 inch round pans with parchment.  (Or you can just butter them if you prefer.)  In a mixing bowl, place your flour, soda, powder, and spices.  Not only do they look really cool, but already your kitchen will smell spicy and delicious. 

Whisk those together until everything is evenly distributed. 

Add the sugar and whisk that in as well. 

Add the buttermilk

Butter

And vanilla, then mix until everything is combined.

Scrape down the sides and beat on high-ish speed for 2 minutes.  Turn the mixer down or off and add your eggs.  I know it looks like mine is going at turbo speed, but I promise it was on low. 

Mix until the eggs are completely incorporated. 

I know this is a bit of an unusual technique for making a cake, but amazingly enough, it actually works.  Pour your batter into the pans. 

Get them as even as possible, then drop them on the countertop a few times to flatten them out on the top.

Into a 350° oven for about 35 minutes.  You’ll know they’re done when they pull away from the sides of the pan. 

Allow the cakes to cool completely.  If you have time, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to even refrigerate them for a bit.  It’s always easier to frost a cold cake.  Speaking of frosting… Although this cake could stand on its own without any, (yes, it’s that good) why pass up the chance for cream cheese frosting?  Place two 8 oz. packages of softened cream cheese into a mixing bowl along with ½ cup of softened butter. 

Beat those until they’re nice and fluffy, scraping everything down at least once in the process. 

Add 1 tablespoon of vanilla and mix until it’s completely incorporated. 

Sift your powdered sugar as you add it one cup at a time.  Mix after each cup until you’ve added a total of 3 cups.  Taste it at this point.  Ours needed a little pinch of salt.  Pile a good heap of it onto the top of your bottom cake.  It looks like a lot, but some of it will end up being squeezed out the edges.  Besides, I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as too much cream cheese icing. 

Spread it out to the edge, keeping it level on top. 

Place your second cake upside down on top of that.  If you run a knife around the top and cut off that ridge, it’ll make the next bit much easier.  I was lazy and didn't do that, and had to fight with it while icing.

Next comes the crumb coat.  It is exactly what the name implies… a thin layer of icing that traps the crumbs.  Just spread a thin layer over the whole cake.  Don’t worry about it being pretty or anything. 

Now, into the fridge (not you… the cake.  I know it’s hot and you’ve had the oven on, but if your fridge is anything like mine, you’re not going to fit anyway.)  Pull it out after 30 minutes or so.  Plop the rest of the icing on top of the cake.  Yes, I said the rest.  You have a lot of cake to cover. 

Spread it out to the edges pushing some of it over onto the sides where you can spread it around the outside of the cake. 

Hey, that’s not half bad.  The only thing is that it’s just a little bit boring.  Nutmeg to the rescue!  Grab your nutmeg grater.  If you don’t have one… you really must get one. 

Then grate a very light dusting of nutmeg over the top of the cake.  How pretty is that?  Just a hint of what’s to be found inside. 

Slice yourself a big wedge.  You deserve it after all that.  See, I told you it wasn’t too much frosting in the middle.  It’s perfect! 

Now, before you sit down with your glass of milk and moist, fragrant, spicy cake, you need some spicy reading to go with it.  I did mention that Elise Logan is a spicy writer, didn’t I?  you can check out all of her fabulous works here, including the newly re-released Trusting Destiny! 

Whew!  Look at that cover!  I told you it was spicy!  Enjoy!

What’s your favorite spicy sweet food?

Muffin Win!

I really needed something to go right today.

Today was one of those crappy days. I didn't sleep well last night, we started double iterated integrals in calculus class and the prof warned we're going to speed through it toward the final, the grocery store told me they wouldn't exchange the buttermilk I accidentally bought for the real milk I really wanted (some stupid rule about not exchanging perishables after they leave the store.... um, I didn't notice when I grabbed it, how the hell am I supposed to notice before I get home??), it's quarterly report time at work, the line up at the post office was ridiculous and then the clerk took like 10 minutes and three phone calls to find the right form (yes, Recipe Guy, I mailed your headphones back to you), I forgot to get eggs on the way home and had to go back out for them, and then the applesauce I'd been planning on turning into muffins had turned into mold.

If I had railroad-train pajamas, someone would probably make me wear them.

Gah!

It was 8 pm and I hadn't even had dinner, nevermind finish the assignment that's due in my mechanical engineering class tomorrow.

And so, I decided to wing it.

Again.

I have now decided that March is wing it month. No clue what I'm going to make next week, but I'm sure as hell not going to have a recipe handy when I start.

So, with no applesauce, and utter determination to make muffins, I came up with these:

Oatmeal Date Muffins

What you need:

• 1 c quick oats
• 1 c flour
• 2 tbsp ground flax seed
• ½ c sugar
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp cardamom
• 1 c chopped dates
• ½ c butter, melted
• 1 c plain yogurt
• 1 c pear juice (or apple, or orange, or even milk)
• ½ tsp vanilla
• 1 large egg

What you gotta do:

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Holy crap I remembered. Win! This is looking good already.

Put all the dry ingredients (oats, flour, flax seed, sugar, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, and cardamom) into a big bowl,

And mix them together.

In another bowl stir together the yogurt, egg,

vanilla (crap, there’s no vanilla in the ingredients pic), and butter.

Now, I wasn’t sure I’d need the juice, but once I had the wet ingredients all together I figured the mixture wasn't “liquidy” enough. It seemed too... gloopy.

So I decided to add ½ c of pear juice.

That helped. More liquidy.

Now the dates. They’re so sweet that sugar has started to form on their surfaces.

These things are sticky and sweet. If they were hot, you'd have Def Leppard in your head now wouldn't you?

They’re also really soft and easy to chop up. And if you use the same butter knife that you used to cut up the butter, and to level the flour in the measuring cup, you only have to dirty one knife. What? I had to use an extra bowl, I’m going to conserve any way I can.

Pitted dates. Yup, pitted. See the pit? Bastards.

Once you’ve mashed/chopped a packed cup of dates… hm. Add to dry or wet? I opted for wet. But the wet bowl was a little on the small side, and it was tough to bust up the packed cup…

So I just dumped it all into the dry ingredients and started stirring.

About half way through, I realized I didn’t have enough liquid. This is where I added the other ½ c of pear juice. This is a dangerous thing to do. (not easy to photograph either)

I've had to add liquid at the end of a muffin recipe before and what came out of the oven was more like a hockey puck than it was a muffin.

When you make them, put all the juice into the wet bowl.

Mix the wet into the dry just enough to get it all combined. The dates seemed to break up nicely as I stirred. The reaction between the baking soda and yogurt had already started and the batter was nice and fluffy.

Divide the mixture into 12 muffin cups.

Bake for 20 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean. If you don’t have toothpicks, and I never do, spaghetti works just as well.

Let them cool in the tin for a few minutes before taking them out to finish cooling on the rack.

I was a little worried about how these would come out since I had to add that emergency ½ cup of juice at the end, but OMG muffin win. These things are soft, dark, moist. Just barely sweet, and with nice chunks of dates.

And since Taneasha's always piling muffins up into little pyramids, I thought I'd try too...

So, what went right for you today?