Cake Slice Bakers - September 2013: Butterscotch Cream Roll-up

It is waaaaay past the 20^th, but I finally took the time to sit down and write this post.  And I just want to thank to wonderful ladies for being patient with me.

Last month the other members of the Cake Slice Bakers and I made the Butterscotch Cream Roll-up Cake. I actually made this a week before the due date, but school (as always) has kept me from posting. Like just this past week I had two tests, back-to-back. I have been at school from 8am allllll the way to midnight every single day studying for these tests and attending classes. It’s ridiculous!

But luckily all my tests this week are finished and so I’m taking some “me” time and getting my stuff together. This weekend will be filled with studying too, but hopefully not at rigorous.

Anyways I have a small announcement before I get down to the sweet delicious cake part of this post. The Cake Slice Bakers are almost done with Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson, which means we are starting a new book come November. So if you are interested in joining the lovely ladies and I please e-mail Paloma at love(dot)for(dot)coffee(at)gmail(dot)com. Also, please mention my name if you do decide to join because we are having a little contest, and you want me to win, riiiight?  Also if you don't know if you want to join just yet, we have started this new thing that 6 months into the book we will open a small window for people to try out the group, so there is a chance then if you can't make up your mind now.

Ok, so cake time! First off, in order to make my hectic life a little simpler I just made this cake look like a regular jelly-roll cake instead of the elaborate spiral thing.

This cake took me two slices to finally appreciate the amazing flavor. At first I didn’t really like the cake; I thought it was ok, but not the best from the book. I decided to give the cake another chance the next night and oh my gosh my taste buds were in Happyland. The butterscotch whipped cream in the center is so light and soft it was like biting into a cream-colored cloud. The cake itself didn’t have much flavor, but it serves as a good vehicle for the whipped cream filling. The best part was definitely the butterscotch sauce! I only made half of the cream filling, which meant I had over ¾ of the butterscotch left over, so I decided to drizzle some on top of the cake. Let me tell you one thing: BEST DECISION EVER! Seriously. I still have a lot left over and I wish with all my heart I had some vanilla ice cream so I could smother it with this stuff.

Next month will be the last cake from this particular book, but I have a feeling I will be using this book way more in the future for whenever cake sparks my fancy. So please stay tuned in a couple weeks because I will make it my personal goal to have the last cake posted on time!

 

Butterscotch Cream Roll-Up
Slightly adapted from Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson

Ingredients
Butterscotch Sauce
5 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 ½ tsp. pure vanilla extract
½ tsp. salt

Cake
1 cup cake flour*
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
½ cup canola oil
4 egg yolks, room temperature
¼ cup water
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
6 egg whites, room temperature
¼ tsp. cream of tartar
* or ¾ cup + 2 tbsp. unbleached all-purpose flour and 2 tbsp. cornstarch, sifted multiple times

Filling
¾ cup heavy cream, cold
½ cup butterscotch sauce, chilled

Directions
Make butterscotch sauce first. Melt butter over medium heat in a large saucepan. Dump in the brown sugar and stir to combine. Stir frequently. Cook until the mixture begins to simmer and changes from a wet sand consistency to a liquid that looks like taffy. Drizzle about ¼ of the cream into the mixture and stir vigorously to combine. Whisk in the remaining cream. Turn the heat up to medium-high and allow sauce to boil. Whisk until the color darkens. Remove pan from the heat and allow sauce to cool for a few minutes. Add vanilla and salt. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until cold.

Preheat the oven to 325 F. Line a 12x16 inch jelly roll pan with parchment paper and grease with cooking spray.

To make cake: sift together the cake flour, baking powder, salt, and ¾ cup of the sugar in a large bowl. Whisk to combine. In a small bowl, whisk together oil, yolks, water, and vanilla. Add the liquid mixture to the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula until smooth.

In a clean glass bowl, whisk the egg whites until frothy. Add cream of tartar and continue to whip until the whites reach a soft peak. Gradually add in the remaining ¼ cup of sugar and whip until the whites hold firm, shiny peaks.

With a clean rubber spatula fold in 1/3 of the egg whites into the batter to lighten it up. Use as few strokes as possible. Add remaining whites, folding until incorporated. Pour batter into prepared pan and smooth the tops. Place cake on the center rack and bake for 16-20 minutes or until the top springs back up when lightly touched. Cool cake on a wire rack until it reaches room temperature.

Make the filling by placing a clean glass bowl and whisk or beaters in the freezer for 5 minutes. Add the cold cream and butterscotch sauce to the chilled bowl and whip until ingredients are blended. Increase the speed of your mixer until the cream holds soft peaks.

To assemble to the cake: turn the cake out of the pan, top facing up. Spread 2/3 of the cream filling over the top. Take the short end of the cake and roll it up. Spread the remaining filling over the top and sides of the cake. Keep the cake well-wrapped in the fridge.

For extra amazing flavor, drizzle the remaining butterscotch sauce all over your slices of cake, you won’t regret it!  

Butterscotch Krispie Cake with Butterscotch Frosting

 

If you read the blog regularly or maybe semi-regularly you may remember I participate in a wonderful group called Cake Slice Bakers. I have been baking with this group for almost three years and it has been so wonderful!

Today the group turns 5 years old. I think that is pretty significant and so do the other ladies in the group which is why some of use decided to bake cakes as a celebration (check out our birthday cakes on our new Facebook page!).

I didn’t make a traditional birthday for the celebration though. I saw this rice krispie cake Darla had made for Dobby’s birthday and I became obsessed with it.

SIDE NOTE: Yesterday was Harry's, Neville's, and JK Rowling's birthday, so Happy Birthday to them and the group!

I’m slowly starting to fall in love with butterscotch. Last year I made some biscoff butterscotch cookies (they didn’t make it to the blog due to all the cookies being gone before I could take cookies) and they changed my entire perspective on butterscotch.

This “cake” has such a beautiful deep butterscotch flavor due to butterscotch chips strewn throughout and butterscotch sauce (like the kind from Smucker’s). But I also have to give credit to the brown butter frosting that get slathered between the krispie treat layers.

I haven’t worked with browning butter very much. I can count how many times I’ve browned butter on one hand. I don’t think I browned the butter enough for this frosting out of fear for burning it, but it still gave a wonderful caramely flavor.

My favorite part about biting into these was definitely the partially melted butterscotch chips. I think I have officially because a butterscotch lover!

Butterscotch Krispie Treat Cake with Butterscotch Frosting
Adapted from Bakingdom
Makes one 9x13 inch pan

Ingredients
Treats
6 cups rice krispie cereal
½ cup butterscotch chips
4 tbsp. unsalted butter, cubed
10 oz. mini marshmallows
¼ cup butterscotch sauce

Frosting
1 stick unsalted butter, browned and solid
2 cups powdered sugar
Pinch of salt
2 tbsp. butterscotch sauce

Directions
Line a 9x13 inch pan with tin foil. Grease foil with cooking spray.

Combine the cereal and butterscotch chips in a large bowl.  Combine marshmallows and butter in a large saucepan set over medium heat. Stir the marshmallows and butter until both are completely melted into each other. Once the marshmallows have melted pour in the butterscotch and stir until combined. The mixture may bubble a little. Pour the cereal into the melted marshmallow mixture and stir until the cereal is completely coated in melted marshmallows.

Press the hot mixture evenly into the prepared pan. Allow to cool completely.

While you wait for the rice krispie treat to cool, make the frosting. Beat the browned butter in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment for 30 seconds. Gradually add the powdered sugar. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as necessary. The mixture may look very dry and crumbly. Beat in the salt and the butterscotch sauce. If the frosting is still too dry add a little bit of milk or cream.

To assemble the “cake”: cut the rice krispie treat in half hamburger ways (if you are not an elementary school teacher this means you cut the cake so you have two 9x6 inch rectangles). Place one of the layers on a serving plate. Spread about 2/3 of the frosting on top of the bottom layer. Stack the remaining layer on top of the frosting. Use the remaining frosting to decorate the top of the cake.

Butterscotch Chocolate Chip Cookie Bark

Oh boy. Last week was so hectic that… well it just wasn’t good. School has been in session for about a week and a half now and I’m still getting adjusted to my new school rhythm. Let me tell you, it has been hard, harder than previous years for some reason, and whoever said that your senior year in high school is a breeze, obviously flunked out because I am working my tail off here. The last week basically had me emotionally and physically drained, however, my weekend wasn’t as terrible as the week was. I even managed to find a little time for baking.

I knew I wanted to make something that was comforting because comfort food is geared to do just that: comfort. I know that there are tons of comfort foods out there, but to me, nothing says comfort like a warm chocolate chip cookie. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have to look very hard for this recipe. In fact, I obtained the recipe from a blog I have recently started following. Tara is the author of The Butter Dish. She is funny, witty, all of those good things, and it’s not just a food blog. Tara also writes about her day and little knick-knacks she finds, like the very adorable and coveted Mug Buddies - my gosh, they are so cute, I want one.

Anyways, one day Tara posted a recipe for Chocolate Almond Cookie Bark. When given a choice between a soft and chewy chocolate chip cookie and a thin a crisp one, I will always and forever pick the soft and chewy. However, this cookie bark looked so delicious that I just had to try it. I did make a few adaptations to the recipe, like added butterscotch chips just because I needed to use up the little I had left.

I was actually pretty excited to make this bark because it is essentially one giant cookie, and who doesn’t love those giant cookie pies they have at the mall, am I right or am I right? However, this is a strange cookie because it requires no leavening agents or any eggs to bind it all together! Craziness. The cookie baked until it was a perfectly golden brown and it filled the house with the most amazing cookie aroma ever, seriously. My sister came home about an hour after the cookie had baked and she could still smell the wonderful cookie fragrance. (They should totally make a perfume that smells like chocolate chip cookies.) I had to resist eating the cookie for a little while because otherwise I would spoil my dinner, but it was totally worth the wait.

The most dominant flavor, I thought, was the butterscotch chips I added in. Whenever butterscotch is added into anything, that is the only thing I taste for some reason. But…I did taste the almond extract that went into the creamed butter and sugar mixture. It was subtle, but I think it made the cookie bark that much better. The bark itself was crisp, but it wasn’t thin, which, in my opinion, is the turn off point when consuming something as sacred as the chocolate chip cookie. This cookie totally saved my stressful week.

Butterscotch Chocolate Chip Cookie Bar
adapted from The Butter Dish

Ingredients
1 stick unsalted butter, soft
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup brown sugar
3/8 tsp vanilla extract
3/8 tsp almond extract
1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
¼ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
½ cup butterscotch chips
About ¼ cup extra semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

1. Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees. Line a 9x9 inch square baking pan with parchment paper. Only do this step if you are paranoid, like me, that everything will stick to the pan and never come off. The original directions call for an ungreased pan.
2. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugars until light and fluffy looking. Add in in the two extracts and beat for another couple minutes. Slowly add in the flour in about two to three stages. Take the bowl off of the mixer and add in the chocolate and butterscotch chips.
3. Plop the dough onto the prepared pan. If you are using parchment paper, this part will be a little tricky because the parchment will want to slide around and the cookie dough will not want to spread. Forming the cookie dough into the pan is not impossible, though; it will just take a little bit of elbow grease, persistence, and a lot of cookie dough placement.
4. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the top has just turned a lovely golden brown color. Take the cookie bar out of the oven. Cool on a cooling rack, while still in the pan. Once the cookie bark has cooled almost completely, place the extra chocolate chips into a microwave safe bowl and heat for about 30 seconds and stir. If the chocolate still needs a little melting, heat again in 5 second increments until the chips have melted into a smooth consistency. Take a spoon and dip it into the melted chocolate and then, in a randomized fashion, drizzle and fling the melted chocolate onto the cookie bark.
5. Take the cookie out of the pan, using the parchment paper as handles, and place on a flat surface. Cut into desired shapes and sizes. Now eat, be merry, have a glass of milk.

Nothing to do for Once

I would like to apologize for the smallish hiatus I took. I’ve been so wrapped up in school stuff that I hardly don’t have time to bake! I would have made something last weekend, but I was at the Masters with my dad. It was actually pretty cool. I was pulling for McIlory and he was doing so great, but then nerves got the better of him on round 4. I felt so bad for him :(.


Now, back to school stuff. Today was the first day in a loooooong time where I didn’t have a single thing to do for homework or to study for some test. I was telling my friend today that I have absolutely no clue what to do with myself when I don’t have any homework because it’s such a big part of my high school life. Well the other day I saw on Joy the Baker’s blog that she had brown butter cookies and I’ve heard that brown butter can taste really good when it’s put into baked goods and I told myself I would make them this weekend. (If I had time that is.) So because I had nothing to do today, I made those cookies, but made a couple adaptations. I still have butterscotch chips left over from when I made the blondies way back when and I didn’t feel like going to the store to buy chocolate chunks and coconut, so I used the butterscotch chips, plus I also halved the recipe since I didn’t want to be baking for an hour!

The cookie ended up having a crusty exterior and a slightly soft interior. It’s a good cookie, but nothing to rave about. Joy's of course look like perfection, haha. Oh well, I'm glad I just had some time to actually bake something. Plus I had fun working with something I've never worked with before.

I like it better when dough isn't, well, dry. I got kind of frustrated when scooping the batter onto the sheet.

They do look pretty though, don't they?

Mmm, butterscotch chips!

Brown Butter Butterscotch Cookies
adapted from Joy the Baker
makes about 30 cookies

Ingredients
1 stick unsalted butter, melted and browned
½ cup sugar
~½ cup brown sugar
½ tbsp vanilla extract
1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
~½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
1 egg
½ cup butterscotch chips

Directions

1. In a medium skillet set to medium heat, place butter in and wait for it to melt and brown. It will bubble and fizz for a little while, which is good. Once the bubbling has subsided wait for the butter to turn a brown color and as soon as it does remove from heat and place into a small dish and allow it to cool for a few minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking dish with parchment paper.
3. In the bowl of an exectric mixter fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the sugars and the butter on medium speed for about 2 minutes (it will be grainy, don't worry). Next, beat in the egg for another 2 minutes (the mixture will be very smooth afterwards). Add in the vanilla.
4. In a medium bowl, wisk together the flour, salt and baking soda. Once combined, slowly add into the sugar and butter mixture until just combined. The dough will be very dry. Fold in the butterscotch chips.
5. Bake for 10-12 minutes, just make sure the edges are slightly brown and the centers are squishy. Once done baking, cool on the pan for about 5 minutes and then transfer onto a wire rack.

Nutrition Facts

servince size: 2 cookies

Calories 177.9 Total Fat 8.3 g Saturated Fat 1.7 g Polyunsaturated Fat 0.1 g Monounsaturated Fat 0.1 g Cholesterol 28.3 mg Sodium 95.0 mg Potassium 18.6 mg Total Carbohydrate 25.0 g Dietary Fiber 0.3 g Sugars 18.0 g Protein 7.4 g

Blondie Moment

So I was originally supposed to make brown sugar fudge yesterday, but I don’t own a candy thermometer. So I was going to buy one but I couldn’t find a decent one, so I decided to put the brown sugar fudge on hold. Instead, I made this butterscotch blondie. I didn’t want to make cookies or a cake or anything like that, I wanted to try something new, which is why I made this little beauty.

To my recollection, I have never had a blondie, but I guessed it was like a cousin to the brownie, just not chocolaty. Well, to make a short story even shorter, these blondies were pretty darn fantastic. I have never used butterscotch chips before, but I’ve always wanted to and because I couldn’t find butter fudge (whatever that is) I decided to sub in butterscotch chips. I think they may overpower the blondie just a little bit, but not much. It’s a nice combination.

I was surprised at the outcome of the batter though. I was expecting some sort of fluid like batter, but it turned into more of a cookie dough batter. I don’t know if that’s how many blondies are or if it’s just this particular recipe. Either way, the batter tasted good and it baked well too.

I was really tempted to just make this into a cookie,s icne the batter was so thick, but I stuck to the blondie aspect of it.

Here it is, all nice and golden brown.

My dad also got a new camera, and so I've been trying to take pictures with it instead of my sister's camera.

Butterfudge Blondies
adapted from 1001 Cupcakes, Cookies & Other Tempting Treats
makes 12 squares

Ingredients
9 tbsp butter, softened (8tbsp)
1 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs, slightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
4.5 oz butterfudge, chopped (1/2 cup butterscotch chips)
1/2 cup macadamia nuts, chopped (omited)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degree . Grease and line an 8-inch square bakin pan.
2. Place butter and sugar into a large bowl and cream together until fluffy. Gradually add in the eggs and vanilla extract.
3. In a medium sized bowl, sift the flour and baking powder together and gradually add into the butter mixture. Beat well until fully mixed. Add the butterfudge (butterscotch) and the nuts and mix until well incorporated.
4. Pour the batter into the grased pan and with a spatula, smooth over the surface.
5. Place the pan into the oven and bake for 40-45 minutes (with convection it took only 30 minutes) or until risen and golden brown on top. Let col in the pan for 5-10 minutes, then slice cake into serving sized peices.

This can be left out at room temperture, but it tends to get a little stiff, so to soften it up a bit, place blodnie square onto a plate and microwave it for about 10 seconds.

Nutrition Facts
serving size: 1 square

Calories 244.5 Total Fat 10.8 g Saturated Fat 2.3 g Polyunsaturated Fat 0.2 g Monounsaturated Fat 0.3 g Cholesterol 50.8 mg Sodium 64.3 mg Potassium 35.6 mg Total Carbohydrate 35.0 g Dietary Fiber 0.0 g Sugars 22.0 g Protein 2.8 g