Cake Slice Bakers - November 2012: Shoo-Fly Cake

It so does not seem like a month has passed. To me it feels like an eternity has passed, but a really slow eternity. I—I guess I just don’t know what to feel. Autumn is my very, very, VERY close second favorite season with winter being my absolute love. When October 1^st hit, it seemed like I had an eternity to make, bake, and create all these lovely fall desserts and now fall is almost over and I haven’t even made a dent in the seasonal things I wanted to make. Why does fall only have to be 2 months? Why? It’s awful. But I guess there is always next year.

Anyways, lets talk cake. November is almost over and that means I get to share not only cake, but I also get to reveal this year's super secret book for the Cake Slice Bakers. Drum roll please… (this is where you beat your desk or lap with your hands and make a berrrrrr sound).

This year’s chosen book is Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. The cover is absolutely adorable and elegant, but also sweet and simple. The book promises “timeless recipes for cupcakes, flips, rolls, layer, angle, bundt, chiffon, and icebox cakes for today’s sweet tooth”. I honestly can’t wait for this year. I’ve only read 40 pages of the book and I already have so many cakes I want to try out. The book is a little on the pricy side, but so far I think it’s completely worth it. Wanna know why? Because the first cake I made was a complete success!

For the month of November the bakers and I decided on the Shoo-Fly Cake; it’s listed under Hasty Cakes. The batter was thick, yet runny, probably because it uses the melted butter method instead of the creaming method. The end result was a beautifully tall and moist cake. This cake is so, so delicious. Eating this cake is basically like eating a gingerbread man only in cake form. To be honest, I don’t think the crumb topping does much for the cake. Sure it tastes wonderful and makes for a pretty topping, but I think some sort of cream sauce would go better with this cake. I’ll have to try some stuff out.

I did make a few modifications to the cake though, and I just thought I would mention them because some of the girls were talking about sunken crumbles and leaky cake pans.

The first change was the amount of crumble topping I used. I only made half the batch listed below and I only used about half of what I made. So basically I used ¼ of the recipe below. Oh and I totally forgot to mention something: I completely forgot about the crumble topping until after the cake had been in the oven for 2 or 3 minutes. So I just quick took it out, sprinkled some of the topping on and back into the oven the cake went.

Second, I used a little less than ¾ cup of molasses. I was getting impatient with the flow of molasses and I stopped about a tablespoon or two before the ¾ mark. The recipe also calls for unsulfured blackstrap molasses; I used mild molasses because, like pumpkin, I can’t stand the smell of it until it’s baked into delicious goodies.

Third, I ran out of unbleached all-purpose flour, so I made the cake with white whole-wheat flour and used 1 cup of white whole-wheat flour  and 1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour in the cake.

The last change I made isn’t really so much of a change. I used warm decaf coffee. The book doesn’t specify what kind of coffee and since I don’t drink it, I borrowed a little bit of my roommate’s decaf stuff.

I’m not sure if these changes made the cake come out any different, but I thought it was worth mentioning it, just in case.      

Please go check out how the other girls did this month by clicking here.

Shoo-Fly Cake

From Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson

Makes one 9-inch round cake

Ingredients

Crumble Topping   

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

¾ cup unbleached all-purpose flour

4 tbsp. unsalted butter, room temperature

Cake

2 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

2 tsp. ground ginger

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

1 cup (192 g) sugar

1 ½ sticks (12 tbsp.) unsalted butter, melted

¾ cup unsulfured blackstrap molasses

2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

2 eggs, room temperature

1 cup warm coffee

Directions

Whisk together the brown sugar and flour in a small bowl. Rub the butter into the mixture until coarse. Place the bowl in the freezer to chill while you make the cake.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Line a 9 inch springform pan with a parchment round and grease with cooking spray.

Sift together the flour, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl; set aside. In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, butter, and molasses until smooth. Beat the eggs in one at a time. Stir in the vanilla. Using a rubber spatula, fold in the flour mixture in three additions, alternating with the warm coffee in two additions. Mix until the batter is smooth.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Sprinkle chilled crumble over top of the cake (you may need to break the topping up a little bit). Place the pan in the oven and bake for 38-42 minutes or until a toothpick comes out relatively clean when inserted in the center.

Cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack for 30 minutes. Release the sides of the pan and slice the cake to serve.