Second Time's the Charm

Edit #2: oh my god it's March.  At this point, there just isn't any excuse for how long this has taken to write up.  The good news is that I have made several other recipes since the Super Bowl potluck.  Hopefully each of those won't take a whole month to get finished.

Edit #1: This used to be a wonderfully amusing write-up of what I made for K and B's Super Bowl potluck. I saved it multiple times, got the pictures exactly the way I wanted them, and even bothered to spellcheck the post.  And then, for some unknown reason, everything except the first couple of paragraphs disappeared.

So the entire post is gone, never to return.  Instead, I will leave you with the best part of it:

That is the team with possession of the ball for the first play of the game loosing control of said ball and then everybody running crazily after it.  It set the tone for the rest of the game.

K and B had a potluck at their new place to watch the Super Bowl.  B was interested in watching because he's from Alaska and the Seattle Seahawks are the closest football team to Alaska, so he grew up rooting for them.  The rest of us were just there to have a potluck and hang out.  Luckily, the Denver Broncos played so badly that we all sat around and laughed at them for 2 hours.  It's nice to have something to bond over.

The "second time" in the title is actually a reference to the fact that I used the potluck as an excuse to fix a couple of recipes that hadn't turned out well the first time but which had promise (and to try something new, of course).  In January, I had tried making a nutella cheesecake and Nigella's gooey chocolate stack.  The cheesecake never solidified but tasted great and the chocolate stack melted but tasted great.  My course was clear: get the great tasting desserts to have the right consistency.  I also made a batch of cookies just in case things didn't work out.

What Geometry Is Good For

At some point, everybody who's taken geometry in school has said, "When am I ever going to need geometry?"  The surprising answer: baking.  You really do need to know about degrees and angles and circles and triangles and rectangles (and various other geometric ideas) to bake and construct certain baked goods.  Listen up, class - today's lesson is on checkerboard cakes.

The idea of a checkerboard cake is that when you slice a piece, the inside of the cake isn't just one cake, but two different types arranged in alternating squares, like a chess- or checker-board.  The first time I saw a checkerboard cake, I actually thought that somebody had taken two cakes, sliced them up into little cubes, and then glued each cube into place with frosting.  I suppose you could make a checkerboard cake like this, but it's much easier to use geometry.

The key is to use circles to make the squares.  Hang on, what?  It's just like being in math class all over again.  To make a checkerboard pattern, you need to have the cake colors alternate.  You've got two round cakes and when you slice out a wedge, you want to see interlocking squares.  But the squares are really an optical illusion.  Instead, you cut out circles of cake and stack them so that the colors switch back and forth both horizontally and vertically.  (Or you can buy a pan that separates the rings for you.)

This sounds complicated but it's easy to see when you look at a picture.

A special pan for baking checkerboard cakes.  One color batter goes in the inner and outer rings, and the second color goes in the middle ring.  Swap colors in the next pan, and then stack the cakes vertically.  Cutting out the rings after the cakes are baked lets you skip using the special pans.

To make a two-layer checkerboard cake with six squares, you need two layers of cake where the inner and outer ring are the same color horizontally and a different color vertically.  You can achieve that part by simply stacking up two cakes like you normally would.  To make the middle squares be alternating colors, slice out a ring of cake from the middle, then switch the middle ring of one cake with the other one.  When you look at them horizontally, they make a pattern: Color 1, Color 2, Color 1.  The other layer will have the opposite pattern:  Color 2, Color 1, Color 2.  Then stack the two layers, and each ring will be sitting either on top or below of a ring of different color:

Color 2  Color 1  Color 2
Color 1  Color 2  Color 1

This is how you put together rings to make alternating squares when a wedge is cut.

See?  Geometry at work.