Texas Sheet Cake

Continuing with the American dishes. A couple of weeks ago my hubby had his birthday and for that I decided to try this recipe I got from a dear friend in the States. I could not miss out on an opportunity to make this cake as it contained both chocolate and cinnamon together (both of which I adore!)  and I was pretty sure that the buttermilk would do only good things for this cake.

I was not disappointed. This cake was delicious! Wonderful! The frosting could've been a bit firmer but I was pretty sure it stayed so runny because I didn't get the American measurement of it, or maybe I should have let it set a little while longer. Which I was not able to do because this cake smelled so divine! It also could be that it's supposed to be fairly runny? I don't know. Anyway, it did not bother me one bit and I'm sure to make this cake again some time. Which unfortunately won't be very soon, as I've decided to buck up and take a closer look at what I eat and exercise more. The summer really messed up my eating routines... My only chance is to make it and take it - not being the only one eating it besides my husband - and hopefully there will an opportunity like that in the near future.

I'll give you the recipe as I was given it plus giving the Celsius grades. With the amount of powdered sugar I'd just add it as you go until you think the consistency is right.

Chocolate Sheet Cake or Texas Sheet Cake

1 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
2 eggs
2 c. granulated sugar
2 c. flour
1/2 c. butter
1/3 c. vegetable oil
4 tbl. cocoa powder
1 c. water

Preheat oven to 375 F / 190 C degrees. In a large bowl, combine first six ingredients. In another bowl, combine sugar and flour. Bring butter, oil, cocoa, and water to a boil on the stove. Pour over flour mixture and mix well. Add chocolate mixture to the buttermilk/egg mixture. Pour into a greased sheet pan or jelly roll pan and bake for 25 minutes. Frost while warm.

Chocolate Frosting

1/2 c. butter
6 T. milk
3 T. cocoa powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 bag powdered sugar

On the stovetop, combine butter, milk, cocoa, and salt until the butter is melted. Do not boil. Pour into a large bowl and add powdered sugar, until it is to the desired consistency. Should be spreadable. Frost the yummy warm cake, and don't forget to lick the beaters. Enjoy!!

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New York Cheesecake

Here it is... my first cheesecake!

The recipe is from a Finnish blog called Suolaa&Pippuria (Salt & Pepper). It tasted absolutely heavenly! I didn't serve a berry sauce with it, like the blog writer suggested, because having to transport the still warm cake to a friends' flat, where it was eaten in a get-together, was challenging enough. But the cake was just divine even without it! Soft and full-flavored. There wasn't enough biscuit crust, as I used gluten-free biscuits that usually are sold in smaller packages than normal ones, but it didn't make much of a difference.


1 package digestive biscuits
2 tbs butter
2 tbs cinnamon
1 tbs water


600 grams of fresh cheese
400 ml créme fraiche
7 eggs
100 ml (0.4 cups) sugar
juice and zest of 1 lemon
1tbs vanilla sugar


Heat the oven into 150 C/300F. Crush the biscuits in a blender and add melted butter, water and cinnamon. Spread on the bottom and on the sides of a springform cake pan. Beat the cheese soft in a stand mixer (or with a hand mixer). Add créme fraiche and mix well. Add the eggs one by one and mix well in between. In the end add the lemon juice and zest, sugar and vanilla sugar. Pour on top of the crust and bake for 40-50 minutes or until firm. I let it bake for over an hour.

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Strawberry cake with gelatin

First of all, I so apologize for the unforgivable silence. What can I say? I just seemed to need a break. Anyway, I mean to be publishing some recipes in the near future, that have been waiting to be published a long time. And I will probably publish all of them in English. I'm not yet sure, will all my future postings be only in English, but these most probably will. If you have any comments or suggestions to make as to what kind of blog you hope this to be, or to the language it shall be written in, feel free to leave a comment!

This cake I made for a wonderful get-together with friends in August. The recipe is from a Finnish site Pirkka. On top of the cake I have raspberries, I had not looked at the recipe carefully enough before shopping for ingredients and took only a liter of fresh strawberries, which went into the filling. I had some fresh raspberries however and thus I decorated the top of the cake with them.

16-20 servings

Ingredients:

Cake:

2 eggs

100 ml / a bit over 4 cups sugar

3 tbs boiling water

3/4 dl / 2.5 oz flour

2 tbs potato flour

3 tbs cacao powder

½ tsp baking powder

Moisturizing:

50 ml juice, for example blackcurrant

Filling:

1000 ml fresh strawberries (or 500 g defrosted strawberries)

100 ml / ca. 0.4 cups sugar

300 ml double cream

250 g milk curd

3 tsp vanilla sugar

2-3 tbs lemon juice

On top:

ca. 50 ml strawberry jam

100 ml fresh strawberries

150 ml blackcurrant juice

100 ml / ca 0.4 cups gelatin/jelly sugar

1. Heat up the oven to 200 C / 390 F. Grease a pringform cake pan (about 24 cm / 9.5 inches in diameter) and sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Measure the flour, cocoa powder, potato flour and baking powder and stir together. Boil the water. Beat the eggs and sugar into a thick light foam. Add the boiling water into the egg foam little by little, stirring the whole time. Sieve the flour mixture into the foam in a few patches. Mix on the lowest speed of the mixer. Pour the matter into the pan. Bake in the lower part of the oven for 11-13 minutes. The cake is done, when it comes off from the sides of the pan.

2. Let the cake cool for a moment and take it off the pan and let cool on a rack. Wash the pan and cut pieces from baking paper in order to line the pan. Cut the cooled cake into two same sized round pieces and lay the bottom part on the bottom of the pan. Moisturize the cake with the juice.

3. Slice the fresh strawberries for the filling. Sprinkle half the sugar on top of them. Let the leaf gelatins soak in cols water for at least 10 minutes. Whisk the cream, add vanilla sugar and put in the fridge to wait. Mix together the milk curd, strawberries and the rest of the sugar. Heat up the lemon juice in a small saucepan. Add the dry squeezed leaf gelatins into the juice and let dissolve. Let the mixture cool down a bit and add into the milk curd-strawberry mix and stir well. Add the whisked cream in and mix well. Pour the mixture into the pan. Place the other half of the cake on top and let set over night in cold.

4. Take the rim of the cake pan away as well as the baking paper piece lining it. Spread a thin layer of strawberry jam on top of the cake. Cover the top with sliced strawberries. Prepare the jelly according to the instructions in the package. Spoon it over the strawberries first little and then as a thicker layer. Let the cake set in a cool place for a little while. Serve.

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Mud cake with licorice bits

I made this cake for Midsummer and we enjoyed it with fresh raspberries. I took the recipe from another Finnish blogger. This was yum and exactly what we needed to have in the mids of all the rain. Something that is warm, full and fresh at the same time.


100 g butter
150 g dark chocolate

150 ml sugar
2 tsp vanilla sugar
3 eggs

150 ml of flour
½ tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Any sort of soft licorice


Melt the butter and chocolate on a low heat in a saucepan. When the chocolate is completely melted, take off from the heat. Add the sugar and vanilla sugar and stir. Add the eggs one at a time and stir in between.

Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the wet ingredients into the dry ones and mix well.

Cover a ca. 22-24 cm in diameter baking tin with baking powder and grease it. Pour the batter into the tin. Drop the licorice bits in and on top.

Bake the cake in 160 C for about 30-40 minutes until it has set so that it (barely) holds together. Do not bake the cake to be too dry, it's best when it's moist.

The blogger, whose recipe this is, stated that the cake is best when it has had time to cool down some hours or over-night. We just ate it as it came out of the oven. The rest was eaten the next day, both versions were really good.

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Tosca cake

After a long pause in writing I finally have a new post for you. Baking hasn't been very active during this year, mainly because teacher training is taking up so much of my energy from time to time, that any extra activities, no matter how pleasant, have been quite minimal. My winter break, this week, has been spent, not to baking, but executing slight renovation plans for out bed room. We tore down the old wallpapers and added a coat of paint instead. For a job well done I rewarded us with this tosca pie on Thursday evening.



Temperature: 175 C

2 eggs
1 ½ dl of sugar
2 dl of flour
1 tsp of baking powder
1 ½ dl of melted butter or oil
½ dl of cream or milk

On top:
100 g of margarine or butter
1 dl of sugar
2 tbl of flour
2 tbl of milk
1 ½ (50 g) of flaked almonds

Grease and flour a ... cake tin of about 24 cm in diameter. Beat the eggs and sugar into a foam. Add in the flour and the baking powder, grease and liquid. Beat and spread the batter into the tin. Bake in the lowest level for 20-25 minutes.
Meanwhile prepape teh topping. Put the butter, sugar, flour and flaked almonds into a saucepan. Heat and stir carefully. Add the milk when the butter has melted. The mixture should be fairly thick. Spread the topping on the cake.
Move the cake in the middle rack and let bake at least another 15 minutes or until the topping has taken a little color.

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The birthday cake for a licorice fan

My husband's favorite candy is licorice. For a baking enthusiast, first girlfriend, now wife, this caused minor problems in the beginning. Chocolate, which is my favorite, is so much easier to use in baking than licorice. After the first couple attempts it even seemed that licorice is not suited for baking. Since then my eyes have opened to the possibilities and last Friday when I baked my husband his birthday cake, the theme was licorice. I adapted the licorice muffin recipe by Kinuskikissa.

1 ½ dl of milk
6 Kick bars
150 g of margarine
1 ½ dl of sugar
2 eggs
2 ½ dl of flour
2 tsps of baking powder
2 ½ tbls of cocoa powder
1 dl of Tyrkisk Peber crush
1 Lakumatto

At first I greased and sprinkled the cake form with breadcrump and took out the margarine from the fridge to soften. If you don't have Tyrkisk Peber crush, I would crush the candies at this point. My advice would also be to cut the Lakritsimatto in pieces at the same time and not do as I did, which was nearly forgetting the whole licorice bar.

Next I cut the Kick bars into pieces and put them in the saucepan with the milk. I used non-fat milk, but others are fine too as well as cream. I let them heat up mildly until the licorice had melted into the milk, which took surprisingly long. I let the mixture cool down, but the milk was still somewhat warm when I mixed it up into the batter.

I foamed the margarine and sugar and added the eggs. I mixed the dry ingredients and the Tyrkisk Peber crush and added into the batter with the licorice milk.


According to Kinuskikissa's recipe the batter makes 12-20 muffins and because of that I was confident that with the same amount of batter I could make a cake. In addition, I didn't make the frosting, because my plan was to serve the cake with vanilla ice cream.

I kipped the batter into the cake form and sprinkled the pieces of Lakritsimatto on top and pressed them deeper with a fork.

I baked the cake in lower part of the over in 175 C for roughly 40 minutes.



The result was loved by the birthday boy, which made the baker a happy wife indeed. We didn't miss the frosting as the soft vanilla ice cream replaced the need and complemented the flavor perfectly. Kick-milk provided ab all-round licorice flavor. The pieces of licorice inside the cake soften to wonderful lumps, that you can't see but will taste. The Tyrkisk Peber also gave a nice salty and strong touch. The biggest flaw of the cake was that it was so fulfilling that you couldn't possibly eat more than one piece, but thinking positively, now we have a licorice dessert waiting in the freezer for two more times.

After such a delightful experiment I'm also happy that the favorite candies of both of us seem to be well suited together. The first time I baked with licorice I made muffins with an ordinary white batter. Later I have discovered that cocoa and chocolate indeed go well with licorice.

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