(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

New plan: drop out of university to become cake baker and pastry chef. Become world famous without this cruddy learning thing.

So give me a recipe to try tomorrow, because otherwise I have to go buy buttermilk or cream cheese to try a pound cake recipe and they look kind of pricey (LOTS of eggs, see sixth_light I told you they'd be useful, and several cups of sugar we may not actually have, I told you so again...) Or red velvet cake looks kind of cool...

*sulk* I want cake now. But cool things I found out this evening: so I never knew what bundt cake was (or pound cake, come to think of it) until this evening. But! Bundt cake is apparently just cake cooked in spiral tins like this one. And pound cake is a yellow cake, name coming from the fact that it was originally cooked with a poung each of butter, flour, sugar and eggs.

I find this all fascinating. Oh, America, you are so culturally ubiquitous in the bad way.

Comments

[disturbed-kiwi.livejournal.com]

Louise brought home yogurt cake the other day.

I had not heard of such a thing, but a thing of sweet sweet sticky goodness it was.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Sounds yummy! Recipe??

[kheha.livejournal.com]

I've been looking at this (http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_17884,00.html), though I haven't made it yet....

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Oh, is that the one that was on food_porn a ways back? it looked great then and is still extremely attractive. The only thing I'm worried about is
a) we don't have ramekins. We have texas muffin trays, though, what d'you think?
b) it's even more pricey with pound cake, what with the chocolate, and we don't have any liqueurs. Although oh, god, every time I look at it it looks better.... how much is 6 pounds in grams?

[kheha.livejournal.com]

food_porn?? Must go check it out....

Not sure what a Texas muffin tray is (I'm thinking, 8 oz muffins or something outrageous?), but I think anything should be fine, as long as it can back relative small quantities... Though you need to be able to unmold it, and having multiple cakes in the same tray might make that hard.

6 pounds? You mean 6 ounces, right? For the chocolate? Because 6 pounds of chocolate would be yummy, but probably pretty hard to bake... ;-) Google says it's 6 oz = 170 g. *loves Google*

If you ever end up making it, let me know if it's good. :-)

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

It is a yummy community, literally. ;)

Texas muffins are, yeah, big muffins. As opposed to large cupcake size. I really don't know how they translate to American sizes, to be honest. Hmhmhm, multiple cakes *might* work but probably not. *considers logistics* One cake in each pan would probably be okay, though, and cook twice or something.

AhahaHAHA, yes, I meant ounces (although I actually converted 8 pounds and it's, like, two and a half kilograms of chocolate. Which, wow, yum?

Will do! I did make pound cake today... went okay but I iced it which on reflection may have been a mistake. Ho hum.

[kheha.livejournal.com]

Iced pound cake -- odd, but could be very good in its own way. With lemon icing maybe? =D

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Cream cheese icing, actually. Which is pretty yummy.

...*goes to eat another slice*

[kuril.livejournal.com]

Pound Cake is in 3/4 of all "Meals Ready To Eat" (my estimate). They have Spiced Pound Cake, Pineapple Pound Cake, Chocolate Pound Cake, and I recall having a Carrot Pound Cake. You could see the sugar glisten without much trouble. I wish I could remember how many grams -- maybe half the dry weight is sugar. 50 grams sounds reasonable. It's a wonder that sedentary military personnel who must eat MREs don't become diabetic.

We're forced to eat MREs during all exercises in Korea -- it doesn't make sense for us. It would for Special Forces or Military Police.

You would be amazed how much food in those MREs are thrown away because of that. Don't you know that it is American culture to not care about throwing away perfectly okay food? :-)

Have fun!

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Sugar wouldn't be half the dry weight (it wouldn't be a cake then. I'm not sure what it would be, but it probably wouldn't stand up straight.) Probably a quarter of the weight would be the maximum, and even then it would be extremely unusual. ;)

But, seriously, I do like my cakes to be pretty sweet. If sugar is a concern, I wouldn't make the cake to start off with; which is why I have little patience with diet "cakes" and diet chocolate, because, seriously, if you're going to eat the thing, eat the thing, not a substitute (unless you're diabetic or something, obviously.)

On the other hand, almost all cake like you describe- ready to eat, desert-style cake- is gross and dry and overly sweet in the bad way. Sweet is okay as long as the cake is moist and rich to go with it but without it it's totally worthless, IMO, like a lot of shop-bought cake. (It takes a really good shop-bought chocolate cake for me to be impressed, although shop sponge is usually okay.)

I have to admit, that's less an American thing- although I think America is guilty of it- than a first-world problem. Particularly anything beaurecratic, like camps, military, anything with big groups of people there is going to be a lot of food thrown away. It's kind of necessary to make an excess so that there's enough to go around and to give people who are forced to eat it some kind of choice, so I don't blame them all that much, although it is kind of sad...

[kuril.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll reduce my figure to a quarter of dry weight ;-) They're pretty nasty and exactly as you described. They used to have these fudge-mint pound cakes that actually had some moisture, but those are long gone now. To make the cake worse, they stick in a dissicating pouch. For preservation, I guess.

For formal get-togethers I can excuse food going to waste for the reasons you specified. But when everyone is given a box irregardless of the environment and calorie requirements for the job, it's just disgustingly wasteful. We eat out of the snackbar, because it is there, and it has food that tastes much better (like Korean ramen bowls). Half or more of 5 days worth go straight to the dumpster or sorted and stashed into a drawr for easy picking next exercise. We do trade quite a bit but that can only go so far when there are only two different "menus".

My favorite cake is some sort of German Chocolate Cake. It is chocolate, has some sort of caramel layer, a bit of nuts,... Haven't had it in a long time though. They stopped serving it at the dining hall. Now all they have is carrot cake and peacan pie.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Ew! A dessicating pouch? In cake? What are they thinking? *shakes head in bemusement*

Oh, in the situation you describe that's just dumb, especially if people are just eating elsewhere. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Pecan pie, I've never had pecan pie. :P (It's not a big NZ thing. We have a half-American friend who has Thanksgiving parties but there' usually only pumpkin pie instead of pecan...)