Portmanteaus: Canmoneesecake and Doffins

Portmanteau recipes have become really trendy in baking circles ever since the cronut became so popular.  Ridiculously popular, really - the wikipedia article for cronuts says that people were selling them on the black market for $100.  A black market for upscale New York City bakery items.  My mind is officially boggled.

Now that I'm going to a monthly potluck (thanks, M and S!), I've got a regular schedule for experimenting.  This time I scrolled through my enormous collection of untried recipes and selected the first two that caught my eye: candied lemon cheesecake and sugar doughnut muffins (aka doffins).  I hadn't tried any portmanteau recipes before this so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon.  Who doesn't want a sugar doughnut muffin?

I've also been making lots of cheesecakes lately.  Although I don't really like cheesecake that much, I do enjoy making cheesecakes.  It's a win-win: I make it and somebody else eats most of it.  This recipe was intriguing because it included candied lemons, which I've been wanting to try making for a while.  It also has a crust that isn't made out of graham crackers.  The question of what to use instead of graham crackers if you're outside the US has been discussed by lots of people (1, 2, 3, 4) so I figured I'd give that a try as well.

With the exception of the candied lemons, both of these recipes were very easy to make (almost).  I put together the doffin batter while the cheesecake was baking and still had time to wash the dishes.

The cheesecake had a really nice, light texture.  I'm planning to use this recipe and swap out the lemon zest for other flavors (matcha green tea, cocoa, vanilla).

The only snag was that the ingredient list for the cheesecake didn't list the amounts of the ingredients very clearly.  The crust is made with biscotti, and the recipe said "12 biscotti".  How much is 12 biscotti?  I had mini-biscotti instead of full-sized biscotti and I started off using 24 biscotti and then kept adding until there was enough crust to cover the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan.  I have fixed the recipe so that it has volume, mass, or weight measurements.

I'm Too Poor For Your Recipe

Every cookbook and blog tell you the same thing: use high quality, fresh ingredients for the best tasting results.  This makes sense and I completely agree.  But there is a line between high quality ingredients and break-the-bank ingredients.  Certain blogs (no, I won't name them) assume that you have both access to quality but expensive foods and the bank balance to possibly waste a large quantity of said expensive foods.

"Take a quick hop over to Nepal and hike to the Lumbini Buddhist monastery.  Trade the monks for yak butter specially prepared according to the ancient rituals.  P.S. You need two cups of butter for this recipe."

No, thank you.  I will just use the regular, straight from the farm to my local farmer's market butter that is still kind of expensive but worth the money to support local farmers.

For this month's potluck, I tried two new recipes.  One was completely reasonable and used ingredients that I can get at my local supermarket.  The other one was also completely reasonable if you bake or cook using mostly pre-made stuff.  I am snobby enough that I will make my own whipped cream instead of using "whipped product".  This recipe was probably pretty cheap when made using Duncan Hines cake mix, etc, but became pretty expensive when I made almost everything from scratch.*  The good news is that everybody said both recipes tasted great, which is the most important part.

* Okay, so my complaint about how expensive the ingredients were for this recipe is due to my insistence on using expensive ingredients and not on the recipe itself, but let's forget about that so I can complain some more.

The first recipe was raspberry bars, although the original changed recipe used blackberries and the original original recipe used blueberries.  There weren't any blackberries at the store so the main ingredient changed.  People said that the crust was great and that the bars tasted very strongly of raspberry.  I like blackberries better than raspberries so I'll probably remake this one when blackberries are in season, or I may try this using cherries.  I also like this recipe because it shows the type of evolution that recipes undergo when we use in-season ingredients.  You can see how the basic structure and dough part of the recipe stay the same, but we all used different fruits.

The second recipe was a chocolate-nutella mousse stack cake.  If you love Nutella like I do, this is the cake for you.  This recipe also had very little from-scratch baking in it so my version has a similar result to the original but a very different set of steps.  People said that the Nutella mousse was fantastic as frosting, that the taste and texture was amazing.  They also said that the cake was great but the Nutella mousse got more compliments.  I would have felt better about all of this if the cake hadn't broken in the middle.

Cakes weigh a lot, so when you stack them up they need to be strong enough to hold up the layers on top of them and to stay together when stacked on top of other cakes.  Many cakes are moist and lovely but not strong enough to either hold up layers or stay together on top.  This cake recipe produced exactly that type of cake: moist, soft, and easily broken.  Stacking layers with this cake will work if you don't slice each cake into two layers.

Tea Sandwiches and Angel Food Cupcakes

When I moved to DC, I thought that it was an East Coast city that got snow regularly and that it had the infrastructure to handle snow.  How wrong I was.  This city can't handle more than an inch of snow.  Normally I just make disparaging comments comparing DC to Chicago, but at the end of January I ended up cooking for a baby shower twice due to DC's lack of snow skills.

My friend Y was pregnant and her due date was the second week of February.  I met Y at work and became friends with her and C, who are both great.  So C and I arranged to have a baby shower for Y.  We sent out invites, reserved a room, assigned various people to bring food and/or drinks - the whole shebang.

Three days before the baby shower, we found out that there was a major storm heading towards the East Coast.  The weather people were predicting 6 to 12 inches of snow in one night.  But then the predictions began to be downgraded and nobody was sure how much snow we would get.  C and I decided that we would do the baby shower and if work was closed due to massive snowfall, then we would just have some extra food at home to eat instead.

In the end, we got no snow at all but work was still closed down.  Why?  Because they got a half inch of snow.  Seriously.  So I was stuck with 36 angel food cupcakes and a whole bunch of tea sandwiches, all of which needed to be eaten in the next day or two.  I ended up having a spontaneous get-together at my place with a bunch of friends to eat all of the baby shower food, and then I made it all again the next week.

It all worked out in the end. Y had her baby three weeks early, a couple of days after the rescheduled shower.  But I learned a hard lesson about DC: the idea of snow makes everything shut down.

On the other hand, I can assure you that it is really easy to make angel food cupcakes and tea sandwiches.  Trust me, I made them twice in a week.

Holiday Parties Galore: Fantastic Holiday Party Cake Recipe

Having two jobs means that I've basically got double of all of those job-related things that crop up in life - specifically, I had three job-related holiday parties to go to.  If they had been spread out through the month of December, it would have been fine.  But not only were they in the same week, they were also in the same week as four other holiday parties that I had already said I'd go to.  To be blunt, the second week of December kicked my ass.

I wasn't planning on going to both holiday parties for Job 1, but I miscalculated: when you bake cakes that people like, they want you to come back for other potluck parties.  I got ambushed by the secretary to the Deputy Director a couple of days before one of the parties, and while I was making excuses about why I wasn't going, the Deputy Director popped up and said that he'd loved my cake last year and would I please bring it again this year.

This would normally be complimentary, but I'm pretty sure that the Deputy Director of a federal agency the size of ours doesn't know me from Adam and certainly didn't remember what cake I'd brought to a potluck party with hundreds of people that happened a year earlier.  But his secretary remembered and he's a good boss who tries his best to keep her happy, so I got commanded to show up with the cake.

They got a bit of a surprise when I mentioned that it was a lime-zucchini cake.  Zucchinis are a secret baking weapon: full of water to make cakes moist but they have a weak taste that can be overridden by any citrus fruit.  Lime-zucchini cakes just taste like lime, and nobody can tell that there's zucchinis in it.

Zucchini cakes are just like carrot cakes, where a mild tasting vegetable that holds a lot of water is used to produce a very moist cake.  If the idea of a zucchini cake freaks you out, just remember that lots of people love carrot cakes and don't think that there's anything wrong with using carrots in a cake.