Swedish Visiting Cake

What a delightfully simple recipe this turns out to be. Dorie mentions something about ten minutes to bring the recipe together. Usually for me that ends up meaning 30 minutes or more. But, today, ten minutes or less. Another half-an-hour for baking a few minutes to cool and voila - dessert is served.

The cake is moist, rich and delicate. I was unable to flip my cake from the skillet so am serving it au natural - this is no hardship. My skillet was a bit wider than nine inches so my cake is corresponding thinner than might be expected, but it is still very nice. I baked mine for just under 25 minutes and it is perfectly baked. I got a little carried away sprinkling sugar on the top, but that is a minor error.

I may try the apple slice version Dorie highlighted or I may try a different blend of extracts the next time I make this cake. I will definitely bake it the next time I want a quickie non-chocolate dessert. Kudos to Nancy of The Dogs Eat the Crumbs for selecting this week's recipe. As she notes on her blog - you can't go wrong buying the Book.

Mocha-Walnut Marbled Bundt Cake

I seem to be on a roll these days. This week I very carefully measured all of my ingredients, mixed the batter, swirled to a (no doubt) delightful pattern and inserted the cake in the oven. At that point, I turned around and saw the damnable vanilla smirking at me from the countertop!


Aargh! Bat rastard! Out of the oven came the cake. I poured the vanilla over the top and as gently as possible incorporated it into the batter. With my fingers crossed - my God are they cramped after an hour in that position! - I waited to taste the result.


As I feared there are places where the vanilla did not incorporate very well and they taste a bit strange. However, that is just once in a blue bite. Overall, I am quite pleased with this cake. It is extremely moist and both layers are delicious. And, I am shocked to say that my marbling seems to have survived its harrowing experience. Look - I think it is Thomas Jefferson - why oh why did I eat that slice? I could have easily sold that on E-bay and made my fortune. Poor planning, definitely poor planning.


I used my European butter in this cake and I don't know if it accounts for the delightful taste of the white layer, but that layer is really good. I wasn't happy with my ground walnuts. I spun them around, in my food processor, until I feared I was creating walnut butter, but the pieces were still very visible in the batter. They were not so visible in the cake itself, however.


The chocolate layer turned out perfectly baked as well. Erin chose this week's recipe. You can find her version at When in Doubt Leave it at 350. Once you have your very own special copy of The Book, you can find this recipe on pages 180-181.

Coconut Tea Cake

When I saw Dorrie's suggestion that we bake this cake in our Kugelhof pans I gave a small cheer. This makes the second or third time that I have used this pan in the 15+ years I have owned it. Truth be told I've probably owned it for closer to 25 years. I'm pretty sure I bought it when I lived in MD and that was 17 years ago. Time definitely flies.

Alas, when I attempted to remove the cake from the pan it stuck again! I had the same problem with my Kugelhof. This is extremely frustrating, but it was the only issue I had with this recipe. Well, the second issue - the first one involved my memory - or lack thereof. I made this coconut cake without the coconut! I measured it out and then promptly finished mixing the batter and pouring the cake into the pan without ever adding the coconut to the batter. Oh well, I don't like coconut away, so for me that was a plus.

Without the nasty flakes of coconut this cake is not half bad. It still has a mild coconut flavor, from the milk, but it is not overwhelming and you don't have those little flakes sticking to your mouth to gross you out!

Unlike Dorrie I pretty much always think a cake is better with some form of icing. I did not do this, but I think this cake would be very interesting if it were split and filled with lime or lemon curd. Then a thin glaze made with the juice of a lime or lemon would be a very nice addition, I think.

The cake was very moist and all of my tasters were very pleased with what they felt was a delicate hint of coconut.

Our friend, Carmen of Carmen Cooks selected this recipe and has it posted on her blog. You can also find the recipe in the Book!

Dulce de Leche Duos

Yum. I contemplated ending my post at Yum, but that is just not like me - way too concise. On target, but too concise.

I am very VERY fond of dulce de leche. I purchased some from Amazon several months ago and I have made it by boiling the can of condensed milk as well. I am not sure which I prefer - they were both thick and luscious.

I was quite concerned that my cookies would not be round enough to sandwich, but in fact they turned out quite nicely. I used a regular spoon to scoop mine and some of them were on the large side. I think I ended up with just under 60. My cookies turned out very thin and somewhat dark - I like a well-done cookie so that works for me.

I used the remainder of my jar of dulce de leche to fill most of the cookies, but I ran out of leche before I ran out of cookies. I filled the remainder with Nutella. I actually wasn't crazy about that combination. I found it difficult to spread a very thin layer of Nutella and I think it overpowered the caramel taste of the cookies themselves.

I adored the scent of this dough before I formed the cookies and found that baking the cookies a tad more enhanced this flavor.

Excellent choice for this week by Jodie. She has posted the recipe here and of course you can also find it in the book!

Thumbprints for Us Big Guys

These cookies remind me very much of the Linzer Sables we made a few months ago. This could be because I made mine with ground almonds instead of ground hazelnuts - but I am certainly not complaining about the similarity.

I was shocked by the recipe - could there truly be so few ingredients? No eggs - no liquid, other than the piddling little extracts? Careful rereading showed this to be true. So, I beat and blended and was happily surprised. I suppose I could have done a better job of blending in the nut/flour combo - some of my cookies were rather dry when I was forming them - but all of them (at least the ones I have tried so far) have been excellent to taste. One of the cookies was so dry it just fell apart while cooking. It was, because of this, far more brown the other cookies. As I expected, I liked this very much. Hey - I eat singed toast it should not be a surprise.

I made my cookies a tad on the larger size at first and then realized how low my yield would be so on the last two sheets I made the cookies considerably smaller. I ended up with about 52 cookies, so I did all right in that regard.

I have never made thumbprint cookies before and was wary of pushing a hole through the dough. This concern caused me to make my initial holes too shallow and while baking the cookies rose to make the indentation very faint. While they were cooling on the sheets I went back through them and pushed the dough down to make a deeper indentation. That worked quite well and on the last batch I did much better.

When I was younger my mother would make a cookie called the split second which is very similar to this cookie. There is some difference in the amounts of butter, flour and sugar used, but the recipes are very similar. The main difference between the split second and thumbprint is that you take your split second dough and separate it. You then form each section of dough into a log. Then you press an indentation into the log and fill that indentation with jam. I don't remember my mother ever heating the jam - and these cookies were filled before baking. They are sliced on the diagonal when they come out of the oven. They look like little jewels when they are done. She always said the name came from the speed with which the cookies came together. I found this photo of those cookies on the Taste of Home website.

Jam-filled treats are not my favorite but I filled these with some fantastic blackberry preserves and some three-fruit marmalade so they are rather tasty. I tried melting some chips into one batch (as Dorie did for the small guy thumbprints) but they did not really melt. I think I will make a ganache tomorrow and refill those cookies. I would also like to try some made with a different extract (other than the almond) and fill the cookies with a correspondingly flavored jam. And, of course, I deeply regret not filling any of these with lemon curd. I did think about it, but decided to stick with the fillings I previously discussed. Lemon curd would have been so much more successful than the chips.

This week's recipe was selected by Mike and can be found at his Ugly Food website. Despite his protestations I am not buying that he is, in fact, an ugly dude. All of the recipes are neatly organized and contained in BFMHTY, a book all should own.

Dorie's Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

I omitted the nuts from my cookies as my sister prefers her cookies blank. I then ended up with cookies that spread an inordinate amount across the pan. I am not sure if I made some other type of error or if the nuts hold the dough together longer.

The dough might have benefited from a visit to the freezer or the refrigerator, but I baked them right after mixing the dough. Next time I will try giving them the cold shoulder for a little while before I bake them up. I believe I may also take Dorie's suggestion and put some ready to bake balls in the freezer for some upcoming chocolate chip emergency. An actual cookie would satisfy that need so much better than a handful of chips!

Their appearance is simply an aesthetic issue, however, the cookies themselves are very good. I baked the first batch for 12 minutes, the next for eleven and each subsequent batch for 10 minutes. I already know I prefer my goods darker than does Dorrie and the color of my cookies reflects that.

I used a combination of chocolate disks and various left-over chips for the chocolate and was happy with how that turned out as well. The cookie portion is crisp and buttery and the chips are plentiful. Combine this with a nice hot cup of coffee or tea or an ice-cold glass of milk and you have a great snack.

This week's recipe was selected by Kaitlin and is posted on her website. Or, of course, you can find it in Baking From My Home to Yours.

Mini Milk Chocolate Bundt Cakes

I made these last night in my Pampered Chef mini-bundt pan - six wells. It produced some incredibly thin bundt cakes. So thin, that I am tempted to make ganache and sandwich it between two of the cakes!

So, today I made the cake again, but this time I used only four of the wells. Apparently this cake compresses quite a bit as it cools because once again, the cakes are thinner than I expected. They looked like they filled the mold when I took it out of the oven, but after five minutes of cooling they had pulled away from the sides and were about 1/4 - 1/2 inch lower than earlier. They are cute, I will give them that.

They were also very easy to put together. My only dilemma was the milk chocolate. Personally I never eat milk chocolate and at first I thought I would not have any in the house. Then I remembered that I had purchased a large bar from Trader Joe's a few weeks ago. I pulled it out and fortunately had just enough for both batches.

I topped the cake with some leftover peanut butter frosting that I had on hand. It was leftover from some peanut butter chocolate chip cupcakes I made last week. The chocolate flavor was extremely mild, so the peanut butter flavor was far more pronounced. I also dusted one with confectioner's sugar for its photo op.

I liked the "swirl" addition - I used the nuts and cocoa. However, since my cakes were so thin, it was more like a crust than a swirl. I will definitely bake these in a smaller pan the next time - or I will double the batter for the not so mini-bundts I have.

The cake was nice and moist, though the outside was a bit dry. I attribute that to the thinness of the cakes, it was not unpleasant.

You can find the recipe at Kristen's blog, I'm right about everything or in the Book!