Mom's Chip & Date Cake and the bridge party

There's a story to this (actually 2 stories), so bear with me a minute.

My mother was a bridge master. The card game. It's sorta like being in the pros. And she had a group that came regularly to the house to play just for practice when they weren't in tournaments. Well, she had baked a cake, and left it out to cool while she went to get ready. I was all of 6 or 8 years old. And I wanted just one warm chocolate chip from the cooling cake. ............and one more............. and just one more.............

I'll bet you can guess the ending. Mom came out, and I had picked off every single chocolate chip from the top of the cake! Yup. I don't actually remember getting punished, but I'm sure I did.

Now Mom wasn't much a a fancy cook. She was actually the Queen of Convenience Foods. (She was a bridge master, after all. Oh - and a cop, but that's a different story). Most stuff came from a mix or a box, except for the occasional recipe from the red checkered cookbook or a magazine clipping. We're talking about 1960 or so. "Foodies" were unheard of.

Fast forward 50 years. I'm flipping through a recently acquired cookbook, Death By Chocolate, by Marcel Desaulniers. The book won the James Beard Award for Best Dessert Cookbook a few years back. In there is a recipe called "Mom's Chocolate Chip and Date Cake". He tells a long story about this being the recipe of the mother of a friend of his. And other than he throws in 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder, it's the same cake! So now MY mom's chip and date cake is in his book as HIS mom's chip and date cake!

Now my mom has been gone since 1968, so I can't ask her where she got it, but I'm quite sure that if he really researched it, he'd find that his special cake was from Redbook or Better Homes & Gardens back in the 1950's.

The moral: We all have a great award winning cookbook in us. We just have to cull through our mothers' old clippings!

Recipe after the jump - click on 'Read More'.

Sometimes you need to make orangeade

I had the rest of the oranges from the tree in the back yard, and was looking for something real special. Well, as all too often happens, good ideas go bad, and you have to make orangeade out of oranges!

I turned to Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking for an orange cake. The recipe sounded wonderful, with lots of fresh orange juice, fresh zest, and Cointreau. Typical of JC, the eggs are the only leavening in this cake. I don't have the 9-inch pans that it called for.  So instead of baking one 9-inch cake and splitting it, I baked it in 2  8-inch layers. That worked, but I had to watch the baking time - instead of 30-35 minutes, it was done in 20.

When I flipped them out of the pan, I tasted the crumb, and damn, it seemed tough. I was NOT happy. So I wrapped the cooled layers in plastic, and let them sit on the counter for 2 days while I stewed about it.

SousChef finally nagged me about finishing the cake or throwing it out. So I unwrapped, and found that the surface was now sticky, probably from the sugar content and the 2-day steam bath. (It was 80 degrees here yesterday). So I got out a pastry brush, and gently removed the entire surface layer of the cakes. Now I was worried about drying. So I diluted a tablespoon of Grand Marnier with a tablespoon of water, and brushed it on the surfaces of the cakes.

What to do now? I found a recipe for an orange-butter filling that sounded like an orange version of lemon curd. I cooked it (used a thermometer), beat it, cooled it in an ice bath, did everything but sing to it. Tried chilling it in the fridge. Soup. This is not a filling, it's thick orange soup. I've got a ton of good ingredients here that I really don't want to throw out - oranges, butter, eggs, sugar, more Cointreau.

I decided to try using the syrup as the base for a buttercream. I beat up a couple sticks of butter till soft & smooth, then started beating in about 2 cups of the orange stuff. It worked! It was the most delicious orange buttercream!

Now to put this thing together. I don't usually make just a cake & frosting. I like different flavor & texture elements in my desserts. Since I was working with all one flavor, orange, I was hoping for the textural interest between the sponge, the curd, and the buttercream. Now that wasn't going to happen.

So I thought "CHOCOLATE!" Orange and dark chocolate!  We're making a ganache! I heated 1/4 cup of cream and poured it over 2 ounces of dark chocolate. Did you hear what I said? 4 tablespoons of cream to 2 ounces of chocolate! That's not ganache - that's chocolate sauce! I even cooled that one in the fridge before I realized what I had done. I tried to fix it. Melted 2 more ounces of chocolate with a tablespoon of orange booze (by this time, I don't know if I used the Cointreau or the Grand Marnier - I think I had more than a few sips). I stirred the chocolate soup into the newly melted chocolate and VOILA! Ganache! But twice as much as I needed to coat the inside layer. No matter, I'll save it.

So I coated one genoise layer with chocolate, then a generous layer of buttercream. The next layer went on top, and I started frosting the whole thing. Well, it look pretty plain. But I still have more ganache. Hmmmmm...

Pulled out a decorating tip and built up a retaining wall around the top of the cake and added one to the bottom for balance. Then I poured the rest of the ganache all over the top of the cake. It looked lovely with that chocolate lake on top of the cake.

This morning, we cut the cake for breakfast. (Yeah, well. OK, we did. It was that or Grape Nuts). It wasn't tough. It wasn't dry. It was wonderfully orange and chocolate and delicious. It's a keeper.

So Much for Starting a Blog!

Two years ago, I had every intention of writing here a couple of times a week or more.  Apparently, my intentions exceeded my motivation.  This shouldn't come as a surprise.  Countless times in my life I started keeping a diary, a journal, a log.  Each time I wrote in it for a few days and then got distracted.  I was never good at recording events or rites of passage.  Photographs pile up in boxes, never to be identified or catalogued.

Likewise, I have clipped and saved recipes in boxes, drawers & folders.  I scribble ingredients on slips of paper, never to find them again.  More than 10 years ago (back in the days of DOS) I bought a recipe program for my old Compaq.  It took years to get about 100 recipes entered, but the software was so outdated that I couldn't do anything with it. So I thought I'd use this blog to compile decades of favorites.

Well.......................here we are 2 years later.  I have one recipe posted.  I don't know how far I'll get this time, but I'm going to give it another try.