Catching Up With Friends Over Cake

Dear Friends,

It feels good to be back here after a long hiatus, sharing thoughts and sweets with you. I haven't posted a blog entry since early April, for a variety of reasons. Let's just say that life has been...complicated. The kind of complicated that entails sleepless nights and anxiously huddling together with family to await bad news from doctors. Although dreaming of cakes has been therapeutic for me through it all, I haven't had much time to actually bake or blog. Since there's a whole slice of my cake-life that you've been missing over the past months, this blog entry will feature a mini parade of cakes instead of focusing on just one.

We can start with a cake that I made back in early May, before some of the "complications" started. For the birthday of someone named Jasmine, I was inspired to create this orange blossom honey cake with jasmine green tea frosting.

I just love the color combination of green and gold, don't you? I feel like the gold contributes warmth and the green brings a serene vitality. In fact, "warmth" and "serene vitality" are good words to describe my friend Katie, whose wedding colors were green and gold. Anyway, this cake started with a vanilla sponge base sweetened by the heady aroma of orange blossom honey and flecked with orange zest. Next the layers were brushed with orange liqueur syrup and filled with jasmine-scented matcha green tea buttercream. I used a frosting comb to etch decorative stripes through the outer coat of frosting, then sprinkled some matcha powder and edible gold stars on top. Lastly, I finished the cake with dainty gum paste jasmine flowers and a golden ribbon. The cake turned out tasting rather exotic!

Due to life's complications smacking me in the face, the next cake I made was not until 7 weeks later, for my brother-in-law's birthday. By then it was summer, and you know what that means: peach season! I made a luscious vanilla sour cream butter cake with peach whipped cream filling and vanilla buttercream. There was still a lot of crazy ongoing at that time and I didn't have much time to decorate, so I decided to just add some of those classic gummy peach ring candies for color. The normal nicer grocery stores didn't have them, so I ducked into a dingy convenience mart and stood in a long line of hard-faced men buying cigarettes and condoms. Oh, the things I do for cake! Even though the decor was limited by time constraints, I kind of liked it in the end. The cake looked simple, sunny, and happy, just like summer should be.

Seriously, is there anything more pleasurable than biting into a perfectly ripe, floridly fragrant peach, its sweet-tart juice flooding your mouth and dribbling down your chin? Well, maybe I can think of a few things...but I digress. ;) Whenever I eat a peach, I'm reminded of one my favorite poems from my college English major days, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. There's a part that reads:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.

Now I'd be lying if I said I know exactly what Eliot meant in every line of that poem. Sometimes I wonder if he himself even knew! But my professors taught that the aging speaker was wondering if he had grown too stodgy and cautious to give in to the messy, sensuous experience of eating a peach. I wonder if he also would have been too frightened to take a big, messy bite of this creamy, peachy, oh-so-summery cake.

Next up was another summertime classic, strawberry cake. The base was again a lovely vanilla sour cream butter cake, but this time I filled the layers with a silky strawberry buttercream and chunks of fresh strawberry. Although I'm still a beginner at decorating cakes, I do love the pale pink buttercream poufs and swirls on this one.

I mean, the poufs are just so very fat and poufy. How can you resist? It's like this cake is ringed by the world's cutest mountain range. And I'm always a sucker for romantic swirls through a pale buttercream. I just love those gorgeous swirly buttercream cakes that are featured in wedding magazines, don't you?

I made this cake for a church potluck where there were a lot of people I didn't know, so I nervously offered it up next to the massive feast that was already piled on the tables. It's always a little different to make a cake for strangers rather than for your family, who will faithfully swear that whatever you made is amazing. I think the best compliment I got there was when a guy who didn't know that I had made the cake took a bite of it, jerked his head up, and exclaimed, "Mm, this is good!."

Last but not least, my most recent baking adventure was for a Fourth of July backyard barbecue. I wanted to keep it playful and not too complicated to go along with the laid-back affair, so I decided on cupcakes. Although cupcakes bake up in a jiffy, the challenge was the red-white-and-blue theme of the day. I always feels a little grossed out thinking of the amounts of artificial dye that must be required for the bright hues seen on baked goods around the Fourth. So for these cupcakes, I decided to make three different frosting flavors, strawberry, white chocolate, and blueberry. Most of the colors came from freeze-dried strawberries and blueberries, so I only needed to add a little bit of food coloring to give them a boost.

A few of the people I met at the barbecue approached me to say that the cupcakes were some of the best they'd ever had. Woohoo! And now it seems fitting that I should end my little parade of cakes with a flourish of cupcakes, like a mini fireworks display closing out a Fourth of July celebration. So here they are in order of red, white, and blue (cue the patriotic marching band music!).

Conspicuously missing from this cake parade is a cake for my own birthday, which just passed. I learned the hard way last year that making my own birthday cake while frantically running around hosting my own birthday party is an act of sheer insanity! This time, my husband and I hosted a low-key gathering while I enjoyed thoughtful gifts from friends and two slices of a chocolate chiffon cake from my family. During the birthday weekend, my family also treated me to my very first gel mani-pedi, a posh afternoon tea, a scrumptious meal, and loving gifts. To top it all off, my husband surprised me with a fun-filled day at Disneyland! He even managed to incorporate one of my favorite activities, watching a musical. I was truly blessed with an abundance of love this past weekend.

In the midst of all the wonderful things over the weekend, there was one long shadow: the fact that my dad wasn't there celebrating with us. Of all the life complications I've alluded to, the biggest was that in May, my dad fell more than 12 feet from a ladder and broke both of his legs. The X-rays of my dad's fractures were the worst ones I'd ever seen. He underwent surgery and a long, harrowing hospitalization that was a haze of pain medications and blood transfusions, then went home on oxygen and in a wheelchair. His second surgery left him with more metal in his legs than Wolverine. For several weeks, my siblings and I went daily to help him with medications, feed him, clean him, etc. He was completely debilitated, bed-bound, and depressed. I'm thankful that his injuries weren't worse, and that he is slowly recovering. But my dad's accident and its ongoing aftereffects have left me feeling weary and depleted.

I'm including the photo above to cheer myself up, not because it's so perfect and Instagram-worthy, but precisely because it is not. This is actually the lemon strawberry cake I baked for my birthday last year, when I decided out of the blue almost exactly one year ago that I was going to learn how to bake cakes. Looking at this cake, I notice the pretty ombre colors and cute flowers, but also how crooked the edges are, and how rough and bumpy the frosting job is. I barely had any clue of how to wield a spatula back then.

I'm still a beginner who's barely scratched the surface on how to make a beautiful and delicious cake, but this photo reminds me that I've come a long way in the past year. And that's what's important in life, isn't it? Not to beat yourself up for being imperfect, but to be thankful that you're trying every day to become a better version of yourself. To learn that a cake, and a person, should be yummy on the inside and not just on the outside. Today I'm trying to find peace and trust that all of life's complications are just a part of my journey of becoming yummier. Won't you join me?

Thank you for sharing the sweet life with me.

Blessings,

Michelle ^_^

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Dr. Cakebake's Prescription

For J. Alfred Prufrock's Peach Whipped Cream Frosting

*** I couldn't resist naming this frosting in honor of T.S. Eliot's peach-fearing poem character. There are too many recipes in the cakes above to share them all in this post, so I'll just share my favorite one for now. This peach whipped cream frosting is so airy, so summery, so inundated with the fragrance and flavor of ripe peaches, that I guarantee you will want to eat it straight out of the bowl. The gelatin in the frosting will help prevent the whipped cream from melting at room temperature for a few hours. Like any perishable food containing cream, this frosting should be kept refrigerated when not in use. If you use this frosting in a cake, remember to take the cake out of the refrigerator 1-2 hours before serving time to let the frosting soften a bit.

4 cups cold heavy whipping cream

6 tablespoons of granulated sugar

3 sheets of gelatin (you can purchase them here)

3 packages (1.25 oz each) of freeze-dried peaches (I purchased mine at Target)

powdered sugar (optional)

1) Chill stand mixer bowl and whisk attachment in freezer for at least 10 minutes.

2) Soften the gelatin sheets in 6 cups of cool water for 5 minutes.

3) Place 3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream and the 6 tablespoons of sugar in a small saucepan over low heat. Stir to dissolve the sugar until the cream is barely simmering, then turn off the heat.

4) Remove the gelatin sheets from the water and wring out the excess water. Add the gelatin sheets to the hot cream and stir until the gelatin is dissolved. Pour the cream-gelatin mixture into a heat-resistant bowl and allow it to cool to body temperature.

5) While the cream-gelatin mixture is cooling, pour the freeze-dried peaches into a food processor and process into a fine powder. (Make sure there are no silica or other desiccant packets that get poured into the food processor along with the peaches.) Pour the peach powder through a fine sieve and discard any larger chunks that do not pass through the sieve.

6) In a separate bowl, mix together 1 tablespoon of the powdered peaches with 1 tablespoon of heavy cream, forming a paste. Continue mixing the powdered peaches with heavy cream in a 1:1 tablespoon ratio until all the peaches are used.

7) Next place 2 1/4 cups of cold heavy whipping cream into the chilled stand mixer bowl and whip at medium speed using the chilled whisk attachment. Whip until soft peaks start to form, then stop.

8) Stir the bowl of cream-gelatin mixture from step 4 (it should have cooled to body temperature), then slowly pour it through a fine sieve into the whipped cream with the stand mixer on medium speed. Continue whipping the cream until stiff peaks start to form, then stop.

9) Add a quarter of the peach paste to the whipped cream and whip at low-medium speed until incorporated. Repeat with the remaining three quarters of the peach paste. It is optional to add powdered sugar a teaspoon at a time until desired sweetness is reached. The peach whipped cream should be very stiff at this point.

10) Place the peach whipped cream in an airtight container and chill in the refrigerator immediately, until ready to use.