HCB: Barcelona Brownie Bars

May 21, 2011 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Cookbooks, HCB

Marie, our fearless founder of the Heavenly Cake Bakers has completed her goal of finishing every cake (minus the wedding cakes) in Rose Levy Beranbaum - Rose’s Heavenly Cake Book. In 2 years she baked a total of 90 cakes and through it all manage and inspired over 40 bakers around the world baking along with her every week. I’m not going to lie and tell you that she will be greatly missed. I have gotten so used to every week looking forward to her Last Cake, Next Cake post where she recapped every single bakers trials and hurrah moments – it was the highlight of my mid week.

HCB: Golden Lemon Almond Cake

May 02, 2011 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Cake, Desserts, HCB, Sweets

See the pretty cake?

You can send many thanks to my main chica Jenn at Knitty Baker. Go on, visit her and leave a message and tell her how great she is because that beautiful picture up above, I owe it to her.

I’ll wait.

The backstory… every time we would have a HBC cake in the line up that resembled a dense cake that called to use a bunt pan; I would suddenly be hit with pan envy. Every week as I visited all of the HBC blogs, I would covet everyone’s fancy baking pans while whining like a 3-year old lamenting that I needed to get with the program and buy a fancy pan.

My plain old bunt cake pan was not cutting it anymore among all the fancy bakers.

Jenn was listening. I mean what are “chicas” for right?

HCB: Southern (Manhattan) Coconut Cake with Silk Meringue Buttercream

April 19, 2011 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Cookbooks, Desserts, HCB

I’m going to make this post short and sweet, because guys I’m exhausted.

I mean like really, really worn-out.

My new job, which I love, is really taking a lot out of me, not only mentally but physically as well. I come home every day of the week and all I want to do is jump in the bed and put the world on hold until the next day when I have to do it all over again.

And I know that I been absent the last couple of rotations from the group, but this weekend this cake was not going to be passed by.

First coconut cake – HELLO is the Holy Grail at my house. Besides my Tres Leches, this is the second “signature cake” that my family is always asking for. I was intrigue in Rose’s take on it, so it was going to be made period. I started late on Saturday night after a full day of running errands all over town. The game plan was to make the cake and then on Sunday finish off with the crème anglaise and the buttercream.

As some of you