Hello everyone! Welcome to my first weekly Yoga of Baking post. What is this Yoga of Baking? Let me tell you!
I love baking. It is my yoga, my meditation. I bake on a weekly basis. I make cakes and cookies and brownies; the traditional kind with eggs, white flour and butter. I drool over dessert cookbooks and admire baking rockstars like David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich an Dorie Greenspan.
Every Sunday, I’m going to share my baking adventures with you. Imagine we are friends in real life and I’ve invited you to come over for cake and conversation. Sounds good, right?
This week I’m serving up Brown Butter and Vanilla Bean Weekend Cake from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking Chez Moi: Recipes from My Paris Home to Your Home Anywhere (that is an affiliate link). It’s a simple cake, baked in a loaf pan. I cut it up and served it with a hot fudge sauce (also from Baking Chez Moi) and whipped cream.
I am always a bit nervous when I’m browning butter. It can go from nutty goodness to burnt disaster in seconds. Fortunately I managed to get the timing right and the results made my house smell so good. I would wear brown butter as perfume if that wasn’t a weird and creepy thing to do.
This was the first cake I baked in my new rental apartment and I learned that the oven here runs hot, really hot. My cake was definitely overcooked even though I reduced the cooking time by several minutes.
You can see the brown edges here, they displease me…
Fortunately, hot fudge and whipped cream help cover up that little flaw.
I don’t have a toaster, but I imagine this cake would make excellent toast with butter and jam.
Since I don’t have permission to post the recipe, you’ll have to check out the book!
Okay, enough about the cake…how do you feel about Orcas? I think they are pretty amazing! You should watch this video of an up close and personal Orca encounter that was making the rounds on the local news. It’s pretty awesome!