Caramel Quake

It’s funny to start a blog about baking with a baking mistake, but in a way that is perfect, since a big part of what I hope to accomplish with this project is to let people know that anyone with a desire to bake a cake can bake a cake, and nearly anything you make will be delicious. This piece also seems like the perfect one to start with because you can’t bake without living a life, and you can’t live a life without making mistakes. This blog will therefore not only be dedicated to baking and to baking disasters, but it will be interwoven with all the parts of life which may or may not be analogous to baking.

Recently I spent a week in North Carolina with my 90-year old mother, and while we were making plans for our visit (a big part of the visit itself is the planning), she asked me to make her a caramel cake. You can read more about my relationship to caramel cake in this article in Salon magazine (from 1998!), and also in the blog entry on Caramel Cake, but this cake was and is a defining feature of my life. I have been making caramel cakes fast and furious this summer, to great success and acclaim. (Somewhere I read that a baker said “God can deal with my lack of modesty when it comes to baking,” which I embrace.) The cake I made for my mother was alas not a success. It was, in fact, a Quake as opposed to a Cake:

I can make all sorts of excuses for this cake (she has an electric oven and I’m used to gas; she didn’t have round cake pans probably because I left them at my brother’s house last time I visited; the weather was unseemly hot, even for North Carolina in August; I had to mix the cake by hand; she didn’t have a proper cake platter so the plate I used was too small), but the truth is I made a dud and I have done that before and will do it again. 

I made this cake for a friend’s birthday when I was in Tahoe a few years ago; clearly the only response to that trainwreck was to drink.

My friend whose birthday it was seemed not to care at all that the cake was literally falling apart.

Both of those cakes were, by the way, delicious, and we ate every crumb of them.

I have written a cookbook called Happy Cake, which is what my older granddaughter calls cake, an amalgamation of Happy Birthday and Cake, and which has been rejected or ignored by various publishers (I don’t know which is worse, but I’m going to say ignored), and I have decided to create a blog and post the various chapters of the book, because what I really care about it getting the recipes and the details out there. Honestly I would email you directly with any recipe of mine that you asked for, so the actual publishing of a book is less about any proprietary feelings I have about recipes, and more about pride in creating something tangible. However, since tangible baked goods are made to disappear, the quicker the better, I am not sure why I feel that a hard copy cookbook is better than a digital representation of recipes and anecdotes. I will say that the danger in my emailing you a recipe, as opposed to writing it all out thoughtfully with directions and explanations, lies in my not remembering all the specific things that I do when I bake that really do contribute to success. So I took the time over the last year to try and write down all of those very specific things, and then I began sharing out the recipes with non-bakers or seldom-baker friends of mine, asking for detailed feedback. I invite anyone reading these posts and trying the recipes to send me feedback and thoughts about the details I include.

In response to the original Slice of Life column in Salon that I reference above, I received a really good but easier version of the caramel icing I have been working on for years, and so maybe something like that will happen in response to this blog. Meanwhile, here is the post on caramel cake (as opposed to quake).