Cake Archives | Tasty Oasis

Summer Fruits Tea Cake (and 10 Books to Go With It)

July 8, 2015 By Karen

I love the feeling of falling into somebody else’s world, temporarily leaving my own reality to find a place in another. In some ways, I experience that in my work. It’s my privilege as an interpreter that I’m allowed into the most private moments of other people’s lives, or simply that I have the opportunity to walk into situations that I would never otherwise have access to. Although that’s not at the foundation of why I became a sign language interpreter, and certainly not a main reason why I continue to be one, it is a part of what keeps me balanced.

Being in the hospital room as a child is born, in the court room when a divorce is granted, on the course as someone learns to ride a motorcycle, in the classroom where they study to be a priest, a rabbi, a teacher, a lawyer, an historian or an artist, in the office when someone is fired, on the phone for a fight between a mother and her son, or on a stage in front of tens of thousands of people, it’s my honor to gain perspective from other people’s lives.

While my professional access to these experiences might be unique, I know I’m not alone in the desire to immerse myself in other’s stories. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve done that with books. I was the little girl hiding with the flashlight under the covers, escaping into The Secret Garden. I was the teenager devouring trashy novels and Wuthering Heights with equal abandon (which I guess might have been trashy in its day.) In my twenties I called the New York Public Library my second home, and missed my subway stop time and again as Barbara Kingsolver, Isabelle Allende, J. K. Rowling and David Sedaris wove their tales around me. And in my thirties I fell in love with audio books and cookbooks, returned to children’s literature, and began a habit of reading electronically.

I read so much that I can’t keep track of it all without maintaining a list, and so for years…

Snickerdoodle Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Cinnamon Frosting

February 17, 2015 By Karen

Becoming a parent is one of the biggest leaps of faith out there, and Friday marked four years since I crossed that threshold for the second time. When you make that decision, you’re filled with dreams. Dreams of who your child will be, and what your family will look like. It doesn’t matter if you become a parent by birth, by adoption, or by marriage, because all the hopes are the same. You want your kid to be healthy. First and foremost, that’s what everyone says.

So what happens when things don’t go according to plan? My little guy was a preemie, and I’ll never forget the panic I felt when I knew he was coming six weeks early. The heartbreak I had when the nurses in the NICU told me I couldn’t hold him yet, because for him the stimulation of touch was too much. Seeing him hooked up to wires, and confined in a little tiny box, wearing an eye mask to protect him from the harsh lights. But I was so lucky, because that fear was short-lived. After ten days, we took our guy home, a whopping 4½ pounds.

That first year and a half wasn’t easy. Our guy had missed out on key development in the womb, leaving him one grumpy baby. He had no internal way to sooth himself, and so he never slept longer than 45-90 minutes at a stretch. The kid had issues; a smile or a laugh was rare, and that’s exhausting and heartbreaking for a parent. Besides healthy, we all just want our kids to be happy….

Cooked Vanilla and Chocolate Almond Frostings

February 22, 2014 By Karen

Chocolate Almond Frosting, So Good You’ll Want To Eat It Straight

I have a confession: I have never been a fan of the always popular buttercream. I’ve genuinely tried to like it, and have certainly had my share. I’m not known to turn down a cupcake, and the stock topping is always a combination of butter and powdered sugar. Most of the time it is cloyingly sweet, and it just doesn’t get me excited. Let’s be honest, I still gobble it down, but it’s never what I really want. In my early baking days, a friend bought me The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. At the time, the bakery it’s from was all the rage in New York, especially after it was featured in an episode of Sex and the City. It was before cupcakes became a “thing,” and even before the long forgotten donut craze. As soon as I got it, I made their traditional vanilla birthday cake (which is great), and then did what was expected and followed their recipe for traditional vanilla buttercream. I was so disappointed. I mean really disappointed. It calls for EIGHT cups of powdered sugar for two sticks of butter! Remember, I was still new to the whole playing in the kitchen thing, so I followed the recipe exactly, not tasting it as I went along. When all was said and done, it looked beautiful, but I felt like eating it would send me straight to the dentist.

Over the years I have searched for a frosting recipe that actually makes me happy. Some have been better than others, but a few years ago I found the winner on Tasty Kitchen. This recipe looks bizarre though, like nothing I had seen before. It first calls for you to heat milk and flour together on the stove. FLOUR. In a frosting. Once that turns thick (the original recipe describes it like a brownie batter), you let it cool and then beat it to death with creamed butter and granulated white sugar. There is no powdered sugar in this. And the proportion of sugar to butter is a fraction of what you normally find in buttercream recipes. I’ve always assumed this has to be an old recipe, the kind you would find written on an index card in a box at your grandmother’s. (Certainly not my grandmother’s, but maybe yours.) Clearly priced right, with no heavy cream and a fraction of the sugar (2 cups of sugar to 4 sticks of butter, compared to SIXTEEN cups of powdered sugar to make the same amount of Magnolia Buttercream!), I figured that the flour had to be there for a reason. With a few minutes search, I found one explanation on Chowhound. Because the flour and milk are cooked like a roux, this has been referred to as Gravy Icing, and the poster called Making Sense wrote, “The Gravy Icing was terrific in the hot, humid South. In addition to being economical, especially in the lean Depression and War years, it stood up to the heat and humidity in the days before air-conditioning. Buttercreams slid right off a cake and down onto the tables.” This is a no nonsense frosting. (Or icing if you rather, but frosting is typically fluffy and thick while icing is glossy and thin.)…

The Only Chocolate Cake You Need

February 21, 2014 By Karen

There’s never a wrong time for chocolate cake. It’s one of the easiest things I know how to make, which is lucky because it’s pretty much my answer for everything. A birthday? Chocolate cake. End of the weekend blues? Chocolate cake. It’s Tuesday night and I forgot that I need to bake for the teacher appreciation lunch at school tomorrow? Chocolate cake!

Chocolate cake: as simple as it comes

But I wasn’t always that person who whips up a cake from scratch without thinking twice. When I began baking, I was a recent college graduate living with my brother in a tiny Manhattan apartment. Our kitchen was almost nonexistent, and luckily I had the city to thank for every type of delivery or take out just down the street. I had no need to cook, and frankly, I didn’t know how to. I felt intimidated by the idea of creating an actual meal, and that discomfort prevented me from trying. But I have a sweet tooth, and so I found myself spending a small fortune every week on afternoon treats to go with my coffee or tea. Now if I were smart about it, I would have started cooking to avoid the expense of so many meals out, but I decided my first step to easing the financial burden would be to bake a batch of something on my own. At the time it seemed to make sense.

Who knows what I started with, but I began experimenting with different recipes, relieved that the science of baking meant I could just follow a good recipe and mostly find success. I began turning out batch after batch of scones, muffins, cookies and biscotti. I loved how the apartment would smell, and the satisfaction I felt when a tray of macaroons came out of the oven, lightly browned and chewy, with chocolate melting throughout the coconut. It was magical that such goodness could be achieved with less than ten minutes of effort and only a few dollars. And best of all was the joy I felt when I could share these creations with friends. I would take an extra orange poppyseed scone along to an interpreting assignment for a colleague, or knock on a neighbor’s door with a dish of homemade marshmallows, or show up to a friend’s apartment with a pan of brownies, and I can promise you that I never received a scowl in return. Getting something homemade makes everybody happy, even if the scone’s a little too dry, or the muffin’s a little too flat. Perfection isn’t required to make someone smile, and that takes the pressure off.

As the months rolled on, I found my confidence in the kitchen growing. I realized it isn’t a great tragedy if I burn the bottom of the cookies. I relaxed, and I started having fun. I allowed myself to tinker with ingredients and cooking methods, making things my own. I left my safety net of desserts and ventured into “real food, ” reminding myself that the worst case scenario was that I could toss a disastrous dish and call downstairs for pizza, and the only loss would be a bit of money and my time. But with every mistake I gained new knowledge, and so I never even saw that time as wasted. Who cares that the stir fry I tried ended up soggy and steamed? I learned not to crowd the pan and to use higher heat the next time. I still had plenty of food for dinner, the sauce was good enough, and it was absolutely healthier than Chinese takeout.

My life has changed a lot since those early days experimenting in a galley kitchen. While interpreting a graduate school class, I met Brian, and we got married in 2005. We moved to the suburbs the following year, had two amazing boys, and now both juggle working full time with keeping our house running and family activities organized. I make a priority of keeping home cooked food on the table and in the lunch boxes, and some days I succeed at that more than others. For me, being in the kitchen is the fun part, and because I know the output is worth the effort and appreciated, I do it with pleasure.

But let’s get back to what’s really important: chocolate cake. Celebrating a 7th and 3rd birthday within the last month, there’s been a lot of cake in our house. Really, a crazy amount of cake. To make a Lego brick cake for one and a Mickey Mouse cake for another meant three 9″ X 13″ cakes, two 8″ round cakes, four 4″ round cakes, and cupcakes on top of it all.

Chocolate and More Chocolate Makes Every Celebration Better

But having a recipe that you know always works, requires nothing fresh from the fridge, and can be prepped in the time it takes the oven to preheat makes this cake a little too easy sometimes. No melting chocolate in a double boiler, no fancy mixers needed to cream butter. Add to that it’s actually vegan, tastes even better on the second or third day but is still moist and tender on day five (making it ideal to mail to a friend with a new baby across the country), it’s pretty much perfect. Oh, and did I mention that when you add your wet ingredients to the dry, the batter actually starts to bubble and sizzle like the best fifth grade science fair project, the almighty volcano? It’s amazing….