Wordless Wednesday #117: Dessert Tasting, Richmond Station

saffron kulfi, smashed blackberries, pistachios

frozen yogurt, dulce de leche, chocolate wafer, smashed raspberries, maldon salt

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Chocolate Cake with Toasted Marshmallow Filling and Malted Chocolate Buttercream

If you follow me on Twitter, you've most likely heard me talk on and on about Cake Day since the weekend. You've also probably read my recap of that glorious day from earlier this week. And now you get to read one more! Because there is never such a thing as too much cake, right?

Photo by Jen Chan/@foodpr0n.

I think my favourite part of cooking or baking is always the planning stage. As much as I love to physically be in the kitchen, there’s something so invigorating and inspiring about researching recipes. You can get so many ideas, and one recipe can lead to new recipes, as you start adding your own inspirations and techniques to the process. It's such a creative process, and I often find myself overwhelmed with a long list of things I want to cook and bake in the end. Cake Day was no exception, as I found myself staring at a longlist of cakes I wanted to bake for the big day a few weeks ago.

I really hadn’t given chocolate cake much thought for Cake Day when I started my recipe research. I figured a few other folks would be claiming chocolate cakes, and that would allow me to play with some other flavours. I flirted with the idea of cakes with nuts—maybe almonds with citrus flavours or the classic combination of hazelnuts and chocolate. There were thoughts of cakes with fruits, like local strawberries or mangoes, to keep things fresh and light. I even contemplated Asian flavours—matcha and adzuki (red) beans, or black sesame. But the instant I saw this recipe from Sweetapolita for Chocolate Cake with Toasted Marshmallow Filling and Malted Chocolate Buttercream, I knew this was the one. Say whaa?! Toasted marshmallow? Chocolate? Malt? How could I resist such flavours?!

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Cake Day 2013

What do you get when you bring together thirteen food-loving, ambitious bakers into one kitchen? Lots of cake. Nineteen cakes, to be exact. We had Cookie Day, and we had Pie Day, so you know cake day was not too far behind. I was invited to last year’s edition but unfortunately was unable to attend, so when the date was set for the 2013 edition, I quickly booked it in my calendar and started researching cake recipes.

The concept for Cake Day is simple. Much like Cookie Day and Pie Day, everyone bakes a cake (or two, for us ambitious folks!) and shares it. While with previous days, most of us arrived with our cookies and pies already baked, much of the cake baking was happening that day. It was a long day, but no one seemed to mind being in such lovely company, the house constantly smelled of cake (can’t complain about that!), and the promise of lots of delicious cakes at the end.

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Wordless Wednesday #111: Supper Club, Vanessa

Olive-Oil Poached Halibut - parsley-fennel-vermouth broth, pickled asparagus,
braised leek, spicy walnut crumble

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Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake

I’m obsessed with rhubarb. Every spring, in the short eight- to ten-week window of the season, I load up on stalks of rhubarb at the market. There's something I love about those reddish pink stalks, and their refreshingly tart flavour.

I often like to roast the rhubarb with a bit of sugar and lemon juice to make a quick and easy compote, and serve it with my morning yogurt and granola. But when I came across this recipe from Saveur Magazine for a Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake, I couldn't resist with the fabulous local rhubarb at my disposal.


This cake is prepared à la tarte tatin method, in which the rhubarb is caramelized in a cast-iron pan before the batter is added and baked in the oven. At first, I was worried the cake wouldn’t turn out, as the batter was super thick and hard to spread around the pan. What I ended up with was a pretty sloppy looking cake with syrup seemingly running everywhere before it went into the oven. But I decided to let it do its thing, walked away for half an hour, and when I came back, the cake baked beautifully!

The crumb of the cake is rather dense, almost like a shortcake, with the sweet hint of vanilla. The caramelized rhubarb on top is melt-in-your-mouth tender, and the tartness counterbalances with the sweetness of the cake perfectly.


This cake is best served warm, with some vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. Any leftover cake should be kept at room temperature to keep it soft and moist; refrigerating it will harden and dry it out. (And it's the best excuse to have cake for breakfast!)

Get the recipe for Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake from Saveur Magazine here.

Peanut Butter Cheesecake

Day in and day out, we're faced with so many choices and decisions. What makes one thing better than the other? What's right? What's wrong? Don't you just wish that you didn't need to make a decision, and you could have it all?

That is what happened to me one day, and it resulted in this Peanut Butter Cheesecake. I was left in a dilemma of whether to bake something with peanut butter or bake a cheesecake before I thought, "Hey, let's just put the two together and beautiful things will happen."

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Cinnamon French Toast Cupcakes with Maple Buttercream

Cupcakes for breakfast? Say it ain’t so!

But these cupcakes can shamelessly (or so we’ll keep telling ourselves) be eaten up for breakfast. And why not? These Cinnamon French Toast Cupcakes are almost like their real-life counterpart. Heck, throw some crumbled fried bacon bits on top and you’ve practically got a full brunch meal right here!

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Raspberry Lemon Cupcakes

It was my friend's birthday this past week, and she's a huge fan of cupcakes, so naturally, I had to bake her a batch. While chocolate cupcakes kept creeping up in my mind as I was deciding what kind of cupcakes to make her, I opted for something lighter and fruitier to celebrate what is left of the summer.

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Wordless Wednesday #48: Congratulations Mr. & Mrs. White!

Not completely wordless this week. For those who follow my tweets, you may know that I was at the wedding of my good friend this past weekend. It was a beautiful day, and I'd just like to say congratulations to my friends! I'm so happy for them! Don't they make a beautiful couple below?

It wasn't my intention to take pictures of the dinner, sitting at the head table and all, but they turned to me and asked if I was going to take pictures and put them up. So here they are... Quite good for a wedding, I must admit. That chocolate mousse dessert was divine, although I couldn't finish it because I was so full by that point! And I never did make my way to the midnight buffet table. Congratulations again to the happy couple!)

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Curried Wild and Brown Rice Cakes

Being Chinese, my family eats a lot of rice. Most meals, there will always be steamed white rice. The only time rice doesn't show up at the table is if we're doing pasta or potatoes.

I don't eat the stuff quite as often now—perhaps because I'm so darn tired of seeing it. My parents find it funny that whenever they visit, my rice bucket always seems untouched since the last time they were here. Which is probably true. But when I do make rice, I cook a mix of brown and multigrain rice with just a bit of white mixed in there. If I'm going to each rice, it might as well be the type that's good for me.

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Sour Cream Coffee Cake

What was originally going to be an impressive lemon tart morphed into a fairly pedestrian-looking coffee cake.

Okay, so my laziness was purely to blame. But I was always taught to never go to anyone's home empty-handed, and I certainly couldn't show up to my aunt and uncle's with nothing to offer them, so I turned to a tried-and-true recipe that I knew would be really easy to make.

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Luck O' the Irish Cupcakes

Chocolate. Guinness. Bailey's Irish cream. When you marry them all together, you get the ultimate dessert.

Chocolate Guinness cupcakes filled with an super luscious and silky Irish cream chocolate ganache, and topped with an Irish cream buttercream.

To die for.

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Learning to Love the Red Velvet Cupcake

The red velvet cake is one of those iconic food items in American culinary culture. Popular, instantly recognizable, and yet its history is shrouded in much mystery. After reading several resources on said cake, there was really no one definitive answer as to how it came about. Regardless of how the red velvet came to existence, the combination of red food colouring, cocoa and buttermilk was certainly a winning combination, and red velvet remains to be a very popular flavour in North America.



Despite its popularity, I must confess that before yesterday, I was a Red Velvet virgin. Yes, I've never had a red velvet cake or cupcake of any sort. While it is the red colouring that makes this cake so distinct, perhaps it was that fact that always turned me off of it. It was like there was a tiny little voice inside of me telling that something was wrong with it that they had to mask it with so much food colouring to win the eyes over rather than the tastebuds.

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A Tale of Two Desserts

Close your eyes and imagine this.

A layer of chocolate génoise. A layer of chestnut cream. A layer of chocolate almond crunch. Another layer of chestnut cream. Repeat.

The result: a Chocolate Chestnut Crunch Cake.

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Fun with Cake Pops

Thanks to Bakerella, cake pops have been quite a popular phenomenon amongst bakers in the last little while. They're cute. They're fun. And they're a lovely alternative to the cupcake. I decided to give them go and made a batch of cake pops a few days ago to add to treat bags I was putting together.



I'm a very strong believer in scratch cooking, but I decided to cheat and make life easier by picking up a box of cake mix (at least it was organic!) and canned frosting. The cake pops themselves are extremely easy to make. What I found time consuming was coating them to ensure a beautiful, perfect outer shell. Due to the temperature difference (cold cake, warm chocolate), the coating cracked as it cooled and dried, which meant I had to do two layers to get a nice, white coating.

While it took twice the time, it make the pops look great in the end, especially with some rainbow sprinkles on top. Encasing them in chocolate, plus the frosting added to the cake, make them super moist even after a few days.



Cake Pops
Adapted from Recipe Rhapsody
Makes about 50 pops

1 (14.25 oz) box cake mix, any flavor
1 (16 oz) tub frosting, any flavor (you will not need all of it)
or 1/2-3/4 cup homemade frosting
1 (24 oz) package candy melts (white or chocolate)
Sprinkles
Lollipop sticks

Bake the cake according to the directions on the box in a 9" x 13" pan. Allow to cool completely.

Cut the cake into smaller pieces and place in a food processor (you will probably have to do this in two batches). Pulse until you get fine crumbs. Place crumbs in a large mixing bowl.

Add 3/4 cup of the frosting to the bowl of cake crumbs. Using your hands, mix the frosting into the crumbs. Add more frosting as necessary until the cake is rollable and holds together.

Roll a small amount of cake into a ball, much like a truffle, into a 20g ball, about 1 inch in diameter. Place on a baking sheet. When all the cake has been rolled, placed them into the fridge for at least 1 hour.

Melt candy melts in a double boiler. Remove cake balls from the fridge. Dip the end of a popsicle stick into the melted chocolate and insert into the flattened side of the cake ball, no more than halfway through. Repeat with remaining cake balls. Place the cake balls into the fridge for about 15 minutes to chill them again.

Remove cake balls from fridge and dip into the melted chocolate, twirling and lightly tapping the popsicle stick to remove the excess chocolate. Insert the cake pop into the styrofoam to allow the chocolate to dry. Repeat with remaining cake pops.

After the first layer of chocolate coating has dried, repeat with a second layer of chocolate coating. Add sprinkles to the cake pops before the chocolate sets. Allow cake pops to set completely before wrapping in small cellophane bags.

Wordless Wednesday #25: Lollipop Lollipop Oh Lolli Lolli Lolli

A Peanut Buttery Surprise

There were two birthdays going on this week (a co-worker's and a friend's) and that was good enough of a reason for me to whip up a batch of cupcakes to celebrate the occasion. I love making cupcakes filled with a little something extra in the middle—a nice little surprise with every bite. So, inspired by the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup (which ironically I absolutely can't stand), I made Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes with a sweet surprise inside...

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Betcha' Can't Have Just One Slice

It's no surprise that I have a major sweet tooth, and if I come across something I really like, well...let's just say it's hard for me to stop wanting more.

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Sugar High: #CupcakeCampTO 2.0

I’m pretty sure about 200 people in the city of Toronto are still feeling the effects of all the sugar that was consumed yesterday at the second ever CupcakeCamp Toronto.



Thirty-eight bakers. About 50 different flavours. More than 180 eaters. 2000 cupcakes. You know sugar madness was about to ensue.

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Thanks for the Delicious Memories 2009!

It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone. Time sure does fly when one is having fun and eating a lot of good food, doesn’t it? 2009 saw me checking out a couple of restaurants around the city, revisiting childhood traditions of fruit picking, and making more use of my teeny, tiny closet of a kitchen.

So what will I remember most from 2009? One particular meal stands out, but first the honourable mentions. The year kicked off with a sugary bang when Toronto held it’s first ever Cupcake Camp. Professional and amateur bakers got together, baked a whack load of cupcakes, and raised money for charity at the same time. What was thought to have been a small event turned out to be a huge success, drawing out more than 300 people to the event. Not that’s memorable!

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