Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Caramel Cake (from Maya via Martha)

I love Martha Stewart recipes. I know people sometimes have trouble with them, and I think I've just gotten lucky with my picks so far, but they always seem to turn out well (with the exception of the time a coconut cake overflowed in my oven and caused a small fire, but I'm pretty sure that was my fault for assuming that I could use an 8 inch cake pan instead of a 9 inch - turns out you should pour out some of the batter if you are going to do this. The cake was still delicious though, once I got the fire put out and managed to get it baked).

I've been eyeing this recipe for caramel cake, and with a coworker's birthday this week, I finally have an excuse to try it out. It's from Maya Angelou's cookbook, and the recipe is up on Martha's site.

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I always butter and flour the cake pans before starting anything else

The recipe looks a little intimidating, because it has multiple parts. You first have to make the caramel syrup, which is just melted sugar added to water. I noticed that many of the reviewers commented on the thinness of the syrup, so I took one person's suggestion and melted the sugar on its own and then added just 1 cup of water. Well, my caramel syrup was still pretty much the consistency of water, but it tasted good. I think next time I'll use a more standard recipe for caramel, and add cream instead of water.

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Adding the caramel "syrup" to the batter

The cake batter tasted delicious, and so did the nibbles of cake that I scraped out of the pan. I was less impressed with the frosting, which is really just a basic buttercream (powdered sugar + butter + cream). I didn't have cream, so I used 1% milk. I'm sure my frosting would have been richer with the cream, but it would probably still be a little boring. Disclaimer: I'm not a huge fan of plain buttercream. If you are, you will probably love this frosting.

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You're supposed to drizzle the caramel over the top of the cake, but my watery caramel just dripped all over it, so I ended up spreading it out instead, which was not as visually appealing.

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Overall I think this was a success, so I'll chalk one more up to Martha. I don't know what was up with the caramel consistency, but I ran with it and it turned out okay anyways. I just have one complaint - why does a woman who owns a media empire still have a website that drives me nuts? It's slow, the links are broken, the search feature kind of sucks. Seriously, Martha, sack up and get it fixed so that I can enjoy gawking over your domestic mastery without annoying interruptions.

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