Swedish Sokerkaka (Sugar Cake)

This dense, spiced cake has become a staple in our home. It's so simple to make and uses ingredients you probably already have in your pantry:  flour, sugar, baking powder, dried spices, salt, eggs & cream. There's no butter to soften and no special order in which to combine ingredients -- you simply measure them, put them all in the same bowl and mix them together. I use a stand mixer, so from start to finish it takes me no more than 5 minutes to make the batter, pour it into a bund form pan and pop it in the oven.

The spice that the recipe calls for is one found in a lot of Swedish baked treats: cardamon. While I like cardamon, I tend to associate it more with savory foods -- our favorite Indian restaurant puts whole pods in its sauces and rice, and when I first tasted this cake I immediately thought *Chicken Vindaloo*. The second time I made it, I substitued cinnamon for the cardamon, which made for a delicious, lightly-spiced cake. The third time around, I used pumpkin pie spice (my husband's favorite).

Recipes for this cake abound on the internet. I used one from Beatrice Ojakangas' The Great Scandinavian Baking Book.

Angel Food Cake

I had a craving for angel food cake and had been wanting to try out the recipe for a lemon-flavored version from the Barefoot Contessa Family Style cookbook. Plus, I'm always looking for recipes that let me use my kugelhopf pan and help me amortize the cost of my stand mixer...

This cake hit the spot, but I'm afraid I won't be posting any pictures of it outside of the tin. It was a bit of a struggle to get it out -- I had to cut and pull out a slice before I could gently "tug" the rest of it out without the top half sticking to the pan. To give you an idea, once out it looked like one of those airplane neck pillows, without a cover and toasted.

Ann Romney's Welsh Skillet Cakes, tweaked

For those interested in US politics, campaigning is beginning in earnest, at least on the conservative end of the spectrum. During election cycles, it has become customary for potential presidential candidate's spouses or the candidates themselves to provide recipes from their personal collections.

I'm not sure when this custom started but am thinking that it had something to do with Hillary Clinton's comment in 1992 that she could've "stayed home and baked cookies" in response to a question she received with respect to her career as a lawyer. If I recall correctly, many a housewife were offended, so she apologized for the statement and, as an added bonus, provided a chocolate chip cookie recipe... Regardless of where the tradition began, I'm glad it's here as I'm always looking for new things to bake.

In the lead-up to the 2008 election, I saw that a few presidential hopefuls' wives had provided recipes, including Ann Romney's for "Welsh skillet cakes". Being far more original than the standard chocolate chip cookie, my interest was peaked and I decided to make a batch of these current-studded, dense cakes.

Flash forward to 2011...a few weeks ago I heard that Mitt Romney declared his candidacy and immediately thought back to these cakes. This time around, in order to make the cakes a bit healthier, I decided to tweak the recipe a little and substituted wheat flour for white, cassonade for white sugar and raisins and dried apricots for the not-always-in-season red currants.

These cakes are really delicious. They remind me a bit of my favorite cake doughnuts, much more so than the glazed doughnut muffins that I made last summer and subsequently scorched in the microwave. I think it's the nutmeg that's to thank for this. Here is my adapted version of Ann's recipe:

Ann Romney's Welsh Skillet Cakes (modified from the original recipe)

Yield: 35-40 cakes

1 egg
1 1/4 cups dried fruit (raisins, apricots, etc.)
1/2 cup milk
3 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup cassonade
2 teaspoons nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspooon salt
1 cup butter

1. Beat egg with milk in a small bowl; add the dried fruit.

2. Sift all of the dry ingredients together. Work the butter into the dry ingredients using a pastry cutter until the mixture is mealy.

3. Pour milk, egg and dried fruits over the mixture all at once and mix well. Wrap the dough in wax paper or plastic wrap and chill for at least one hour.

4. After chilling the dough, roll it a little less than half an inch thick. Cut out cakes using a round cookie cutter.

5. Cook on a pancake griddle greased with oil on both sides (the original recipe calls for a 325°F griddle). Flip the cookies when you see that the top of the dough has become shiny. Flip and cook on the second side for slightly less time.

6. Roll in granulated sugar (tried this with the first few cakes, but stopped  because I had trouble getting the sugar to stick). Let cool before eating.

Caramel-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake

Finally, a cake. It was time for a cake. This summer I went through my copy of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours and flagged all of the recipes that I wanted to try. This cake was at the top of the list and, as yesterday was a bank holiday in France, my husband kindly took over baby-watching duties, freeing up the day to do whatever I so pleased.

After working for several months on my granny square blanket (see here, here and here...it's almost done, I promise) and at times feeling like no real progress was being made after hours of crocheting, it was great to be able to make something from start to finish in a single afternoon.

I've had a few near-disasters in the kitchen when caramelizing sugar, so I was pleasantly surprised when the topping turned out exactly as it was supposed to -- and I had no burns to boot. It becomes extremely sticky once set and pulling off the parchment paper (my improvisation since I don't own the springform pan that the recipe calls for) was a bit tricky, but all in all this cake was a cinch to make and even easier to eat.

As a bonus, per Dorie's suggestion in her book, I was able to turn the leftover topping into a jar of caramel sauce. Now I just have to decide what to put it on...

Classic Banana Bundt Cake

In our house, when the bananas get too ripe to eat, we cut them up, freeze them and use them to make smoothies. But recently I’ve been struck by a few decidedly unhealthier cravings, including banana bread. So when we had four bananas just a few days away from smelling chemical, I used them to make Dorie Greenspan’s classic banana bundt cake.

Not only did this cake curb my craving, but making it also provided me with the perfect opportunity to use a cookbook I received from my mother last Christmas (Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours) and a kugelhopf bundform pan I bought during a visit to Frankfurt the December before that (for reasons even I don’t understand, I’m a bit obsessed with kugelhopf molds – just ask my husband or select family members who’ve had the pleasure of accompanying me on one of my wild goose chases for them). We ate the cake plain, but I bet it would be great with coconut ice cream.