Scary, for #LetsLunch

I've made a few Halloween cakes in years past, mostly for Fall Festival cakewalks and class parties, and I managed to find a few pictures of my favorites. The pumpkin beauty, below, was from pre-blogging days or I would have had a two-part series on making it. It involved three batches of my signature pound cake, plus three batches of buttercream. There were three smaller pumpkin cakes, too. I baked them in tube pans and Bundt pans, cemented them together to resemble a sphere, and decorated with orange buttercream and green fondant. My husband, daughter and I spent an evening in the kitchen, baking and decorating. 

The one I wish I had a picture of, but didn't think to do that (again, pre-blogging days) was a chocolate Bundt cake with chocolate glaze topped with a chocolate spiderweb. It was elegant and spooky and had a come-hither chocolate-y-ness about it. I may need to remake that one and take a picture of it. The cake was baked using my go-to chocolate pound cake recipe.

Pumpkin cakes. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

The following year, I decided to ease up on the buttercream and pound cake and came up with a Graveyard cake made with Pepperidge Farm Milano "tombstones" and Peeps ghosts. Here's my very homemade-looking cake:

Graveyard cake. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

I was reminded of this very homemade cake recently when I received this picture from the fine folks at Driscoll's berries - a fruit-enhanced graveyard cake. The ghosts are strawberries dipped in white chocolate, how clever is that? Here's the recipe for this ghoulishly good cake.

Graveyard cake. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books.

Before you go, please click over to my #SeriousSandwich giveaway post to win a copy of Chef Emeril Lagasse's new cookbook, "Emeril's Kicked-Up Sandwiches." Drawing is Friday evening, so the clock is ticking...

#LetsLunch is a monthly Twitter party with a global group of food bloggers. Here's a partial list of October's participants:

Lisa’s Pretzel fingers at Monday Morning Cooking Club
Lucy’s fabulously spooky Halloween cakes at A Cook and Her Books
Annabelle’s Halloween Spice Cookies at A Glass of Fancy
Linda’s Pumpkin Spiced Flan at Spicebox Travels
Rashda’s Spooktacular Stuffed Pumpkin at Hot Curries & Cold Beer

Text and images copyright 2012, Lucy Mercer.

Halloween Cakes Past

Glass pumpkins from Atlanta Botanical Garden. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books



I've made a few Halloween cakes in years past, mostly for Fall Festival cakewalks and class parties, and I managed to find a few pictures of some of my favorites. These are a few years old and the quality isn't great, but they do give a good idea of how I made the cakes.

The one I wish I had a picture of, but didn't think to do that (pre-blogging days) was a chocolate Bundt cake with chocolate glaze topped with a chocolate spiderweb. It was elegant and spooky and had a come-hither chocolate-y-ness about it. I may need to remake that one and take a picture of it. The cake was baked using my go-to chocolate pound cake recipe.

Now here's a cake, or cakes that I'm pretty sure I will never make again. Three recipes of pound cake baked in all sizes of Bundt pans, cemented together with buttercream and decorated with orange buttercream and green fondant. It was a family project and it was incredible - the largest of these cakes was unbelievably heavy.

Pumpkin pound cake. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

Pumpkin cakes. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

And finally, the ever-popular graveyard cake made with Pepperidge Farm Milano "tombstones" and Peeps ghosts. Here's my very homemade-looking cake:

Graveyard cake. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

I was reminded of this very homemade cake recently when I received this picture from the fne folks at Driscoll's berries - a fruit-enhanced graveyard cake. The ghosts are strawberries dipped in white chocolate, how clever is that? To learn how to make this ghoulishly good cake, check out this story. http://www.examiner.com/american-food-in-atlanta/spooky-graveyard-cake-for-halloween-parties

Graveyard cake. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books.

Bake a pound cake for friends, family & teachers

Cream cheese pound cake by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

 True confession: I was the kind of kid who went off to college and baked. That's right, the only graduate of the University of Georgia who spent her Friday and Saturday nights creaming butter and sugar together and preheating the oven. I'm still not too sure why I didn't channel this enthusiasm for the never-ending possibilities of the butter-sugar-flour matrix into a food-related career, but the truth is, I spent my extra hours at college baking cakes. I tried all manner of pound cakes and baked them in loaves so that I could distribute them to friends and co-workers. I tried lemon-glazed pound cakes, sour cream pound cakes, and eventually found this recipe for a cream cheese pound cake that has been my best baking friend for two decades. It makes a lovely Bundt cake, but really shines as a loaf cake, with the typical San Andreas Fault line running through the middle. The crust is crispy and shattery, the interior is buttery and tender. 

This recipe will yield two loaves or one Bundt cake. I've made four batches of this cake in the past week, to distribute to teachers, friends and family at Christmas.

Cream Cheese Pound Cake

3 sticks (1 1/2 cups) unsalted butter, softened

3 cups granulated sugar

6 eggs

1 (8 oz.) pkg. cream cheese (neufchatel acceptable), room temperature and divided into three equal pieces

pinch salt

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 325. Use baking spray to coat inside of Bundt pan or tube pan or 2 loaf pans.

2. In mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar for several minutes. When fully incorporated and no longer grainy, add eggs and cream cheese alternately. This means two eggs, fully mixed in, piece of cream cheese, fully mixed in, followed by eggs and cream cheese two more times. When batter is creamy and smooth, add, on low speed, flour and pinch salt. Stir in vanilla extract.

3. Pour batter into prepared pans and smooth the top with a spatula. Cake bakes in 325 degree oven for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.The cake is ready when a narrow bamboo skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Let cake cool on rack for at least an hour before giving in to the luscious vanilla and butter smell and slicing generous portions for your starving family.

Look for more ideas for gifts from the kitchen like orange pecan coconut balls , roasted almonds and my never-the-same-way-twice snack mix on A Cook and Her Books. Looking for Christmas cookies? Try Scottish Shortbread and Macadamia Tassies.

Text and images copyright 2011, Lucy Mercer.

Mayonnaise: the Stuff of Life

I recently read that Harp seal mommies nurse their pups for just 12 days before leaving them in the cold North Atlantic waters to search for food. The seal mother’s milk is thick enough to sustain the pup, in fact the book described it as “creamy and thick like mayonnaise.” Another reminder, this time from the animal kingdom, that mayonnaise is the stuff of life.

I come from mayonnaise people. I was raised on mayonnaise. We weren’t loyalists in my parents' house, all brands had a tryout - Kraft, Blue Plate, Hellmann’s and the staple of the South, Duke’s. There was an unfortunate, dark time of a healthy eating kick that meant strange mayo pretend-to-be’s were stocked. A lesson learned the hard way: mayonnaise needs real fat to taste good.

Mayonnaise is a constant thread through the kitchens I have known - my grandmother put mayonnaise in a celadon ceramic crock beside a plate of sliced garden tomatoes. My husband is from Macon, Georgia, and he remembers his grandma serving pound cake slices slathered in mayonnaise and fried. Mayonnaise is culinary glue - it holds together any number of salads - egg, pimento cheese, chicken, tuna, cole slaw, potato. As the basis of a sauce, it can dress up everything from fish to pasta.

Here is a menu celebrating the accessorizing power of mayonnaise and the Dorado that my husband caught last week. It’s a little South of France meets Heart of Dixie, and a tribute to the universality of mayonnaise, a sauce which, if Wikipedia is to be believed, came to France by way of Spain. I used the mayonnaise from a jar, but the recipes are easily adapted to homemade mayo. Follow Francis Lam’s detailed instructions or my streamlined cheat sheet:

Pan-Fried Dorado Sliders with Spicy Tartar Sauce

Fish Stew with Red Pepper Aioli

Fried Pound Cake

Pan Fried Dorado Sliders with Spicy Tartar Sauce

For the sliders, I dredged chunks of Dorado in seasoned flour and cornmeal and fried them until done. I served them on mini buns with shredded cabbage and this spicy tartar sauce.

1 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro
10 pickled jalapeño rounds, minced
Three teaspoons dill pickle relish
Juice of 1/2 lime
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Salt and pepper to taste

1. In a bowl, mix all ingredients together. Make ahead for better flavor. Store in refrigerator.

Fish Stew with Red Pepper Aioli

Fish stew
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 carrot, peeled and finely chopped
2 leeks, chopped, use the whites and part of the greens
1 cup white wine
2 cups shrimp stock or clam juice or water
4 cloves garlic
Salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

1/2 pound fish fillets, chopped into bite-size pieces

1. In a stockpot, saute carrot and leeks in olive oil until soft. Add white wine and cook until reduced by half. Add stock or clam juice or water, and garlic and cook for 10 minutes.

2. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add fish and cook for about 5 minutes, or until cooked through. Serve with red pepper aioli.

Red pepper aioli
1 cup mayonnaise
1 roasted, peeled and seeded red bell pepper
5 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Salt and pepper to taste

1. In a food processor, with blade running, drop in garlic cloves. Add bell pepper and process until pasty. Add remaining ingredients and process. Make a day ahead for better flavor. Store in refrigerator.

Fried Pound Cake

This is my husband's childhood treat, a slice of pound cake, buttered on both sides with mayonnaise and cooked on a griddle. It's sweet and salty at the same time. I would say add sweetened berries and whipped cream, but it's pretty indulgent on its own.

© 2010, Lucy Mercer.

Fish Stew and Red Pepper Aioli adapted from the New California Cook by Diane Rossen Worthington.

Spicy Tartar Sauce adapted from Fine Cooking Magazine.
Fried Pound Cake adapted from a fine country cook.

Little Black Dress of Cakes

Pound Cake by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

I'm sure I'm not the first writer to make this baking analogy, but then, I'm probably not the first baker to make this cake. Every cook needs a few great recipes that they can commit to memory and pull out whenever the occasion warrants. A little black dress, one might say, just the right thing for any occasion, casual or dressy, winter, spring, summer or fall. Coco Chanel knew that when she designed the LBD, and good cooks should follow her lead.

Cooking LBD's should most certainly include a roast chicken, a special potato something and a perfect vinaigrette for a simple salad. And for dessert, something picked up from the local patisserie? I think not. Especially since the local patisserie, like the boulangerie, is a chain grocery store with a bakery known for making specialty cakes from mixes. My dessert LBD is pound cake, that church potluck staple, dense and buttery and just crying out for strawberries and real whipped cream.

My first chef, my mom, didn't really like kids hanging out in the kitchen, but she would let me make cakes and pound cakes were one of the first I tried. I have made sour cream pound cakes, which are wonderful, including a chocolate pound cake that is to live for. For a time, I was enamored with a recipe that required separating the eggs, beating the whites and folding them into the butter-rich batter. The texture and flavor were wonderful, but I consider separating eggs as enjoyable as emptying the dishwasher. Time to try more recipes.

In a cake decorating class, I was horrified when I was given a pound cake recipe that included Crisco shortening. Crisco? In a pound cake? That's for biscuits, never pound cake. All butter, and only butter, that's the way to go.

I found the perfect pound cake recipe in a community cookbook on my mom's shelf. It was called "Evelyn's Pound Cake." I call it a cream cheese pound cake. This recipe has been around awhile, and my version is not much different than the original. It is always reliable and will win you friends. Start making this cake regularly, take it to work, share it with your family, give thick slices to neighbors. Bake petite loaves and give them at Christmas with a small jar of homemade lemon curd. And before long, like Coco Chanel, you will soon be known for inimitable style and unparalleled taste.

Cream Cheese Pound Cake
3 sticks (1 1/2 cups) unsalted butter, softened
3 cups granulated sugar
6 eggs
1 (8 oz.) pkg. cream cheese (neufchatel acceptable), room temperature and divided into three equal pieces
pinch salt
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 325. Use baking spray to coat inside of Bundt pan or tube pan or 2 loaf pans.

2. In mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar for several minutes. When fully incorporated and no longer grainy, add eggs and cream cheese alternately. This means two eggs, fully mixed in, piece of cream cheese, fully mixed in, followed by eggs and cream cheese two more times. When batter is creamy and smooth, add, on low speed, flour and pinch salt. Stir in vanilla extract.

3. Pour batter into prepared pans and smooth the top with a spatula. Cake bakes in 325 degree oven for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. In my kitchen, I bake the cake in a Bundt pan and set the oven at 325 on convection and it takes nearly two hours to bake. The cake is ready when a narrow bamboo skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Let cake cool on rack for at least an hour before giving in to the luscious vanilla and butter smell and slicing generous portions for your starving family.