Ooooh, it this the part where we derail the thread into a discusion of gendering colours?
Sorry I'm no help for cake advice, LB.
Definitely needs to have some phallic decorations in the icing.
1: I don't know the guest, but the friend who's setting it up was clear on there being no funny-business with the cake. (She doesn't know the guest well either, and the point is not to mess with them.) Blue, no irony.
3: Again with the no irony or transgressiveness. I'm looking for a favored recipe, not something a pregnant woman who takes What To Expect When You're Expecting seriously will spit across the room when she realizes it has alcohol in it.
Jeez talk about a cold shoulder!
So far we've got a non-blue cake, soaked in alcohol, with phallic decorations. I think it's time to move this thread to some other blog.
Don't have a suggestion for type of cake, but if you are game for fussy decorations (and I remember your beautiful calla lily(?) cake), the loveliest cake I ever saw was decorated with pomegranite seeds. Seems like those would be just as nice against a blue background.
Oh, that does sound pretty. Were they separated as individual beads, or massed to fill space?
LB, this is what a reputation for cake skills gets you. I love that your friend felt obligated to emphasize the "no irony" rule.
A blue fondant with little choo-choo trains!
Do pomegranite seeds go with chocolate? I'm thinking spice cake with pomegranite, but blue frosting sounds very wrong with spice cake.
Do pomegranite seeds go with chocolate
Pomegranite and dark chocolate are two flavors that go together very nicely indeed.
Ack! actually it's spelled with an "a" as the final vowel.
9: Oh, and I like baking -- there's a lot of show-off potential for the amount of work involved. I wouldn't be dragoonable if I didn't enjoy it.
Oh, a very dark chocolate I could see. It's the milky chocolate that cakes usually produce that I was skeptical about. (And I can never spelling "pomegranate" correctly, as has been pointed out to me many times.)
I'll second dark chocolate and pomegranate. yummy! There's a handy trick to getting pomegranate seeds out with a spoon if you don't know it, too. Not fiddly at all that way.
If I remember right, they were separated and laid out in concentric circles. I bet you could use some sort of stencil to guide a design. Massed to fill space could also be a nice effect.
Peeling the pomegranate takes a while. I've heard that soaking it first can reduce that, but haven't tried it.
Boy, that final -ate sure looks wrong, but the Internets says it is right.
chuggachuggachuggachuggachuggachuggachuggachugga chooo-chooo!
Wish I had advice to offer, but I have no skills in that area. It is funny how gendered everything gets with babies, though. Recent drama when I bought a friend's baby girl a green sleeper with little giraffes. Not from my friend, but from my mom, who was seriously worried I was being radical.
17: don't peel it. cut it in half, smack it with a wooden spoon over a bowl while stressing it a bit with the other hand. THey just fall out.
15 -- if you use the "i" spelling it can be hard on the teeth.
LB -- if you are going to decorate with pomegranate pips (which are totally out of season actually -- I'm not sure you can get ripe ones at all now but mebbe Dean & Deluca?) a ganache between the layers might be very nice. Not sure how that would interact æsthetically with blue frosting though.
Yeah. The deal is (I think) that people put a serious amount of importance on being able to distinguish everyone's gender -- the possibility of making a mistake is very upsetting. And adults (and even little kids) put out an awful lot of signals to keep that sort of mistake from happening, but babies don't; with a diaper on, a boy and a girl baby are completely indistinguishable. So it becomes very important to keep them appropriately gender-tagged at all times.
(I used to get mistaken for a boy/man frequently when I was a tall skinny short-haired teenager. People got really upset about it, and really reluctant to change their opinion (that is, I got firmly escorted out of a ladies room once even after mentioning that I was a woman. And my voice is pretty femme.). I got the impression that it was very disturbing for them to realize that they had made a mistake about which box I belonged in.)
21 - We're still getting good pomegranates. Shall I send you a couple?
Maybe make something with blueberries. Blueberry Cream/SourCream/CreamCheese cake. Then cover it with your fancy icing skillZ.
A nice thought, but they wouldn't get here in time -- it's for this weekend.
24 -- Ooo, there's a lemon with blueberry gunk on top cake in my favored cookbook. (It also calls for meringue swans on top, but I may skip the swans.)
I may do that.
Second thoughts: I think pomegranate + chocolate is too fancy for a baby shower. (Plus pomegranate is yonic so not ideal for a boy's cake.) Choo-choo trains, probably better.
Good Lord, meringue swans? What cookbook is this?
26 -- phalli are easier to mold out of meringue than are swans.
22: sure, that's part of it. It's also part of socializing kids to gender roles. If I'm buying things for kids, I always go for neutral colours when I can. Something like this request you have is different, because you couldn't make a point of it without it being an affront.
Rose Levy Berebaum's The Cake Bible.
It's not so much a cookbook as a fetish object at this point. I leaf through it wondering when I will find myself compelled to make the weirder possibilities.
Merringue swans? Yowza. Here's a pretty lemon-blueberry cake.,/a>
26: that would work....sounds yummy.
Lemon and blueberry is an excellent combination. I vote for that one. Swan-free.
32: That first link is an attempt at precisely the cake I was thinking of. If I omit the swanage, it shouldn't be too tough.
The raspberry dribble looks altogether too much like swan-blood for my comfort. I wouldn't be able to eat that cake.
This shouldn't be too hard: blueberry mousse cake.
I wouldn't be dragoonable
Nor would you have been dragoonned [sic].
I think the cake linked in 35 is very, very pretty!
Blueberry blood dribble, presumably. The dirty little secret of blueberries is that they aren't really blue, or at least not on the inside, where it counts.
Hey! Perhaps the ideal combination of phallicity, maternity, and blueness: Bake a "Marge's hairdo" cake!
Maybe a little Bart figurine on top.
Torta de mil hojas is a yummy, different kind of cake that might be fun to make. It's not really a cake so much as a cake-shaped pastry. Warning: Recipe in Spanish, but easily understood with the help of Google Translation. 'Manjar' is dulce de leche, which may not be easy to buy but is easy to make.
Oh, but that cake isn't really compatible with blue icing.
It does look good, but Google Translation only gets me so far.
5 flour cups 12 yolks 2 clear ones 1 cotoots of brandy (2 spoonfuls) 100 gr. of mantequilla (4 spoonfuls) ½ kg of manjar 1 beaten cream cup the rallado Coco (optional) Sift the flour and you form a crown on the table to knead, add mantequilla moderated, the yolks, clear and the brandy. Form a flexible and smooth mass well kneading it. Extend and usleree letting it very thin (1 or 2 mm) and cut redondelas with the help of a plate of approximately 25 centimeters in diameter and puncture them with a possesor so that not aglobe. Enharine the furnace tin and distributes mass discs. Take to regular furnace (375 F - 190 Cs) by 8 to 10 minutes. They cook very fast and they do not need to gild itself too much. To mix manjar with the cream and to cover each leaf with this preparation, until forming the cake. To scatter to manjar by on the cake and the flanks. To dust the rallado Coco or to grind rest of the leaves and to dust them to decorate. He is recommendable to prepare the cake the previous day so that it is easier to cut it.
I'm guessing manjar is the dulce de leche, and that 'clear ones' are egg whites. But I'd still worry about heading into a new recipe with that.
16: Are you actually going to share that secret of getting the pips out of a pomengranate with a spoon, or are you just going to taunt us with it?
Hi there,
What about a coconut cake? There's a really lovely, really easy receipe in the big Cook's Illustrated cookbook--it bakes up very cakey/tall and looks like something that involves whipped eggwhites but does not. They suggest a coconut frosting, but I've always used other kinds...or you could make a blue base for a coconut frosting, so it would look intriguingly/disturbingly blue and fuzzy.
Ooo, blue coconut would be completely Muppety. This may get settled by whether Buck's been shopping today -- I called him to put frozen blueberries on the list, but if he hasn't been yet, the coconut may win out.
You were right about the rest of the ingredients, but maybe it's not that easy to read the translation without knowing what the original says. Here:
Sift the flour and form into a mound on the table, add melted butter (mantequilla), egg yolks and whites, and brandy (optional). Knead well into a flexible, smooth dough.
Roll into layers that are 1-2mm thick and cut out round discs with a dinner plate. Pinch the edges with a fork to prevent them from puffing up. Flour a baking sheet and bake the discs at 375F for 8-10 minutes, they cook quickly, don't let them get too dark.
Mix the manjar with the cream, cover each disc with the mixture and stack them into a cake shape, then use the rest of the mixture to cover the cake and the edges. Add grated coconut if desired. The cake is easier to cut if it sits for a day after being made.
I like this cake, the dough as you can imagine is crackery and bland, which goes well with the rich and sweet manjar. The easiest way to make that, as you might know, is to boil a sealed can of condensed milk until it caramelizes, but if that sounds too potentially explosive to you, it can also be made by reducing whole milk with sugar. There are plenty of recipes in English for dulce de leche, anyway.
I will try to find a link, but I recently had a cake made with a big pregnant belly and a sign pointing down that said "One Way."
What was the meaning of the caption? That things should only be ejected from one's vagina, and not introduced into it?
That things should only be ejected from one's vagina, and not introduced into it?
That would be crazy, Cæ. Ping pong balls don't just spontaneously generate in vaginas.
I think it must mean "get this thing outta me!"
And possibly "never again. Go 'way, Jose."
That would be crazy, Cæ
Well, and hence the request for clarification...
I vote blue coconut. It always bugs me that blueberries in no way resemble actual blueness, plus blue coconut seems more babyshowerish, for some reason.
Blue coconut would fit in nicely with the "Marge's hairdo" theme.
55 -- more effective than a "one way" or "do not enter" sign, would be a set of those spikes that prevent you from backing up -- what are those called?
"Warning: Severe Cock Damage"
62 -- f'realz? Google does not recognize that term.
Coconut cake is delicious. I would like some right now. (Not in my vagina, however.)
("Did you mean: catssss")
65: No space left, what with all the ping pong balls. Anyhow, Cheerios are the preferred vaginal insertion food.
63: I dunno. I mean, you're already deflated by the time you back up, anyway.
Caltrops, yes!
I don't think I've ever pronounced that word out loud.
Isn't coconut relatively unpopular, as food items go?
65 is an example of why to read comment threads backwards.
69 -- spikes would be equally unpleasant for a flaccid me.
(Not to mention, there's a good deal of "backing up" going on prior to actual withdrawal.)
(Not to mention, there's a good deal of "backing up" going on prior to actual withdrawal.)
You need to learn from this guy. Quick in, quick out, no one gets bored.
no one gets bored
Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!
Do you think coconut is more or less unpopular than blueberries? I wonder. Besides, coconut cake is totally a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
more. some people hate coconuts. nobody hates blueberries, although some people don't detect any flavor from them.
nobody hates blueberries
That is just not true.
A blue coconut-frosted teddy bear would be too too sweet. And you could sneak in a lump of frosting to indicate it was a boy teddy bear.
I once made a cake in honour of the opening of the first public baths in NYC [not coincidentally, a friend's birthday] that was blue-frosted [water] with a pink-iced banana and two Hostess Sno-Balls peeping up from the waves.
I worship Rose Levy Birnbaum, in all her baking avatars, may her ovens never heat unevenly.
Caltrops are classically the tetrahedral spiky things scattered on a battlefield to cripple horses. Is the term also used for the severe tire damage things? Live and learn.
I used to make Cookie Monster cakes for my kids. We had a sheet-metal mold that made it easy. Lost it in some previous move, alas.
A Cookie Monster cake is a fine thing, esp. blue. And you don't have to go with coconut--you can get a lot of the texture from frosting alone.
Plus, you can sing "C is for caltrop, that's good enough for me!" While eating it.
Caltrops are classically the tetrahedral spiky things scattered on a battlefield to cripple horses.
That's so depressing.
82: That ben knows this, or that caltrops are no longer used to cripple horses?
I'm sure caltrops are still used for that purpose anywhere that horses are still used for military or police purposes and there's any kind of real resistance to the military or the police. They could also be used against vehicles with rubber tires (or people, for that matter).
Sometimes I wish I'd gone into a historical field just to use cool old English words like "caltrop".
There's a new building nearby that is terrorism-proofed to a hilarious degree, and I never miss a chance to describe it as "the building with all the bollards around it." Bollards! Caltrops! Portcullis!
During the Vietnam war, my division had a static display of devices encountered in the field. Punji sticks, mentioned in the Wikipedia article of course, in fact our training areas had several "Vietnamese" villages, filled with traps and fields of fire, but the static display also had devices that could only have been caltrops. The Wikipedia article refers to Japanese usage, so that may account for them being encountered in SE Asia.
Is the plural of Portcullis Portcullisses or Portculles? Or something else?
86 -- were the caltrops fashioned of bamboo?
The most delicious white cake I have ever tasted is a cardamom cake. The person who baked it is not going to be responding to enquiries in time to provide her recipe, but this:
http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,196,148180-234193,00.html
sounds similar (rich white cake heavily fragrant with cardamom). And of course the blue icing doesn't taste any different for being blue.
85: If it helps at all, you could always apply the word 'caltrop' metaphorically. For example, those awkward word groupings you get in Heidegger: clearly caltrops for the mind. Intended to lodge part way along the semantic tubules. Causing much pain.
Those would be more like candiru for the mind.
LB, if it's not too late for the cake, I was thinking classic Victoria sponge with a whipped cream filling and a simple sugar icing. There's going to be trouble if you introduce a flavour that doesn't taste white. Perhaps vanilla or almonds might be OK. You could always invert the colouring and make the sponge blue. There's a chance no one will notice that this is unusual.
Blue is definitely tricky. Makes me think of those cakes people buy for the office when it's their birthday. The ones enrobed with hydrogenated whale fat, or something. But you will avoid this by making something fresh and lovely.
I was thinking classic Victoria sponge with a whipped cream filling and a simple sugar icing. There's going to be trouble if you introduce a flavour that doesn't taste white.
How come?
91: I don't want to know how they would get in there.
'Caltrops' captures the symmetry and artificiality better, I think.
I had a kidney stone once. Unacceptable.
93: I think he means (and is likely to be right) that the combination of non-edible-colored blue food and a strong flavor will be disturbing. Blue chocolate will taste wrong. If the cake is neutral flavored, then the blue won't be a problem.
93: Obviously a matter of taste, but I just don't like the idea of looking at blue food and tasting, say, chocolate. Am I alone here?
94 -- through the ears, obviously.
97 -- I don't like chocolate in colors other than dark brown or pale yellow.
(I can't really think offhand of any blue food I like, frankly.)
(I guess the blue corn chips -- those are more purple than blue though. Ditto blueberries.)
48: My reading comprehension is ON today. Thanks, Soubz.
Blue chocolate will taste wrong. If the cake is neutral flavored, then the blue won't be a problem.
Blue is already wrong, though. In nature, it means you're about to eat mold, at best. And a truly neutral tasting cake is kind of yucky: it just tastes like sugar and fat.
103 reminds me that I like Stilton.
Sorry, didn't mean to kill the food enthusiasm by leaning hard on the disgust button ...
Anyway, the classic Victoria sponge isn't neutral; it's flavoured with vanilla. Flour (self-raising), eggs, butter, sugar ... vanilla.
... a mixture that drops off a spoon when you give it a tap on the side of the bowl. If it seems a little too stiff, add a little water and mix again.
Half an hour in the oven: cakes should be springy to the touch. Can't go wrong.
it just tastes like sugar and fat.
Sounds good to me!
Obviously a matter of taste, but I just don't like the idea of looking at blue food and tasting, say, chocolate. Am I alone here?
Not quite alone. I'd have a hard time thinking 'this will be chocolate' while seeing blue, but if the underlying cake were chocolate, but the icing was buttercream or something but blue, it wouldn't bother me.
Blue coconut would bother me, but I think it might be that I'm not a huge fan of coconut. I like the flavor, but not the texture (it's possible I've never had edible coconut.)
A very belated coconut cake comment: the essence of the Cook's Illustrated one is that it contains both coconut extract and creme de cacao (that disturbing glop that some people, inexplicably, add to mixed drinks). If you've ever read any Cook's Illustrated receipes, you know that they always follow this format: "When we think of [item] we often think of [delicious description]. But too often, [item] is greasy/flavorless/heavy/crumbly/overdone/tough. So the Test Kitchen did [twenty elaborate things] in order to find a receipe for [item] that is [delicious description] as it is meant to be." There's just this strange (Gnostic? World full of sin, only the elect will know how the coconut cake really works?) quality of spiritual striving to those cookbooks.
But it is vitally important not to trust all of their cakes! If they seem wildly implausible, they probably are, like the butter cake for which you blend 12 (!) tablespoons of butter into the flour...cake? Yeah, right, if by "cake" you mean "greasy pancake".
creme de cacao (that disturbing glop that some people, inexplicably, add to mixed drinks)
One is told that this drink (made, of course, with quality cdc) tastes like art deco.
110: You forgot the time-saving variation: "But too often, [item] takes too long to make. Is it possible to make a delicious [item] without all of the creaming/rolling/horse-flogging/basketweaving? We found out."
I love the New England minimalist earnestness combined with the flat-out geekery of cooking a recipe 100 times to reach the Platonic ideal of, say, cake. The problem comes in when their ideal of Cake doesn't match yours.
The ones enrobed with hydrogenated whale fat, or something.
I *love* those cakes.
LB, you're not making the inside of the cake blue, are you? I'm just thinkng that dark chocolate brown and baby blue have been a very fashionable decorative color combination for a couple of years, so a dark chocolate cake with blue coconut frosting would be not only delicious but frightfully stylish.
Mr. Breath had already bought the blueberries, so it's blueberry lemon cake so as not to waste them.
Waste? If you didn't make a cake, you'd throw the blueberries out?
Weird.
No, but they'd sit in the freezer, which is cluttered enough already. I don't like storing food that I don't have specific plans for. (Buck, on the other hand, is a goddamned squirrel. Given his druthers we'd join the LDS just for the mandatory food storage. Drives me insane.)
Why wouldn't you just... eat the blueberries?
OK, so the blueberries go into the lemon cake mix? And then there's icing with a complementary tint of blue?
Lemon cake, lemon icing, blueberry topping on top.
So, the blue is a natural blue. What can I say?
Lemon-blueberry is a yummy combination. It won Pie Contest once.
1) I love Cook's Illustrated. It's not just the New England earnestness. It's the pure empiricism of it. Did this recipe come down through the family, handed down from mother to daughter? Who gives a damn? If it tests bad, change it, a little or a lot. Keep changing it until it works.
2) I too am a goddamn squirrel. My wife teases me about my Strategic Mineral Reserves of various foodstuffs. No, I don't hoard tungsten or petroleum, but whenever I find e.g. good quality butter on sale I buy several pounds for the freezer. And it's good to have a few extra jars of peanut-butter; it's not going bad this year. Canned milk? You need that stuff for baking, or if there's a blizzard. And canned soup--how can you go wrong having a few extra in the back of the cupboard?
No temptation to go mormon, though.
So, the blue is a natural blue.
Indeed, a blue so natural that it is actually purple. However, people will totally go along with the idea that being made of blueberries fulfills the requirements for being blue.
You probably don't live in an NY apartment. When we hit the lottery and move into a four-story brownstone with a butler's pantry, Buck can store all the food he wants, more power to him. Until then I will gripe.
125: Myself included. I really thought they were blue. A sort of dark blue. Perhaps I am a colour nominalist. Then again, I've long thought that UPS trucks are dark green (people say they're not).
all purples have to be a bit blue anyway, so it's all good.
A raw blueberry is indeed dark blue on the outside. A cooked blueberry, or blueberry juice, however: purple. But I am firmly on the side of calling anything blueberry blue for the domain of food, much as red hair is frequently a color that would not count as red if it were, say, construction paper.
i know i'm missing the point cos i'm answering the questions seriously, but still...
whenever i need a recipe or cooking inspiration i go to this site (full disclosure: the blogger is a good friend of mine).
her sweets and cakes recipes (with pics!) are here (and yes, she's a friend, but she's also a better cook than i'll ever be).
I made the lemon blueberry cake linked in 32 (the one with the swans, except that I left the swans out) and it was really good. I recommend it to anyone who likes lemons or blueberries.
