Brooklyn Blackout Cake

I was in the mood for a fancy cake and decided on the Brooklyn blackout cake. This recipe from King Arthur Flour gives you the basic idea as well as the history. The cake combines a chocolate cake, chocolate pudding in between the layers, chocolate icing, and cake crumbs embedded in the icing around the sides. I decided to put together the cake based on recipes from several sources.

The cake is Rose Levy Berenbaum's devil's food cake. I chose this not only because it tastes great but also because the recipe gave me three layers, giving room for more pudding.

I made the pudding based on the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, including a healthy dose of cream along with the milk.

The icing came from Rose Levy Berenbaum's chocolate buttercream recipe. I hadn't made this before and it is surprisingly simple: milk chocolate, a little dark chocolate, and butter. No eggs, no corn syrup.

The crumbs come from the cake domes---they turned out to be plentiful.

A trimmed layer went down, then a layer of pudding.

The full assembly was iced.

Then the crumbs were applied by hand.

The result was spectacular and tasted great. Pudding, particularly a rich pudding, gives a distinctive taste and texture that is very different from an icing filling.

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Eating Around Georgia Tech: Ecco

Our Texas Instruments colleague Cathy Wicks was gracious enough to host several of us at Ecco tonight. This is one of those restaurants that has been on my list for a long time. Even though it is within easy walking distance of Georgia Tech, I hadn't made it there until tonight. The menu is a combination of Italian, Spanish, and French that make use of some local Georgia ingredients. The combination of those three countries is sometimes a little forced, although the georgia ingredients (fruit, cheese) were all great and perfectly appropriate. We started out with a meat and cheese board. This actually reverses the French tradition, where cheese usually follows the main course. Everything was excellent. The Georgia cheese was a big hit, as was the French cow/goat cheese. I thought the sauscisson was very subtle and very good. The waitress said that the roast pork pasta was their signature dish, so I had to try it. It had traditional broad pasta (fresh, of course)

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Pressure Cooker Candied Ginger

I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b

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