Nectarine Peach Cupcakes with Mango Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting (aka Still Alive!)

It has been roughly 15 months since my last post.  If anybody is actually following this blog, I apologize for disappearing.  There are lots of reasons for not updating but they all boil down to the same idea: life happened.  My job got very busy, I moved, traveled to other countries, got a lung infection that knocked me out for 3 months, my father got meningitis, my sister had a baby, I got called for jury duty, my sister had a baby, and various other stuff.  Unfortunately the jury duty was not for anything even remotely resembling My Cousin Vinny.

When I am stressed out or low on time and/or energy, I end up baking the same set of trusted recipes over and over again.  Last month I decided that it was time to start trying new recipes again so I signed up for a cupcake potluck with the theme of "Summer Cupcakes".  This summer has been very bad in the Bay Area: for all intents and purposes, we are out of water.  There are large wildfires all over the state and the Pacific Northwest, to the point where sometimes the air looks like the smog back in LA in the 1970's.  We are supposed to get a massive El Nino this winter but I'm not putting any faith in the weather predictions.  I did not make "on fire without any water" cupcakes but I was tempted to.

My new kitchen is large but old and very run down, so there's no counter space and very little storage space.  The oven is so old and disgusting that I have to remove the battery in the smoke detector every time I turn it on since it produces enough smoke to set the stupid thing off.  I've cleaned the oven numerous times but nothing can remove the build up due to 40 years of use.  I get a real sense of accomplishment when I produce anything from this oven that looks good, tempered with some serious frustration about how gross and difficult to use it is.

Moving On: Dulce de Leche Cake

All kinds of interesting things have happened over the last few weeks.  For the purposes of this blog, the only important thing is that I'm moving at the end of the month.  Since my stuff will not be delivered until the middle of August, this post will most likely be the last one until September.  That's probably how long it would have taken me to write up another entry anyways.

I decided to try something a little bit different for my last potluck out here, something besides chocolate or fruit tarts like I normally do.  Instead of a Fourth of July themed red, white, and blue dessert, I went a little south of the border and made a dulce de leche cake.

Dulce de leche is basically a very thick caramel that is made by heating sweetened milk until the water evaporates and the sugar caramelizes.  It is usually a dark tan color, and can be flavored with vanilla, cinnamon, or other spices.  It's a standard sweetening option in South and Central America, as well as Mexico.  People put it in their coffee, on muffins, in cakes, etc.

There are a couple of different ways to make dulce de leche.  The most common is to heat up a can of sweetened condensed milk.  This recipe uses the most time-consuming way: cooking it from scratch on the stove.  I'd never tried that method before so I figured I would give it a chance.  The results were just about the same as using the "put the can in boiling water" method.

This cake also has homemade buttercream frosting.  I wrote about making buttercream frosting at home in the post about checkerboard cakes.   The motor in the base of my Cuisinart heated up the frosting as it mixed so I had to put in the refrigerator for an hour or so to solidify properly.

Between the dulce de leche and the frosting, this cake was approximately two-thirds sugar.  I'm not kidding - it was so sweet that I didn't like it at all.  Ironically, several people told me that it was the best thing I've ever made.  I suggest eating a very thin sliver of cake with a nice cup of tea to balance it out.

The cake is a nice, moist vanilla cake and I will probably use the cake recipe for other projects.  The dulce de leche was a massive pain to make and took hours but it turned out nice so I may try using it again.  The frosting was just too sweet.  I dislike buttercream frosting because it's basically just butter and sugar, and there's only so much of that you can eat at one time.  If you like buttercream frosting, this recipe is definitely one of the best I've used, easy to make and has a nice consistency.

If you don't want to bother making dulce de leche and you live near a Trader Joe's, the TJ's fleur de sel caramel sauce is a very good dulce de leche substitute.

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.