HCB: Many-Splendored Quick Bread

October 17, 2010 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Bread, Cookbooks, Desserts, HCB, Vegetable

See the title up there?

The key word is “quick”.

This bread is super quick, as in get everything ready and then, boom, before you know it it’s in the oven and driving you crazy with heavenly smells.

At least that is what happen when I decided to make it this past Friday.

Yep, you read it right, this past FRIDAY. As in, after a long day at work, I got to baking. Can you tell I had a hard week?

Because I totally did.

Very hard week, in total need of full therapeutic intervention.

So I got home and knew that if I did not turn on the oven and got busy, I was going to have a meltdown.

Baking, my anti-drug.

And this was the perfect prescription.

HCB: Caramelized Pineapple Pudding Cakes

October 04, 2010 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Cookbooks, Desserts, Fruit, HCB, Sweets

The first weekend of the months are the hardest for me when it comes to baking. My commitment to three baking groups makes it a bit hard, since I technically have 3 dessert to bake during the first weekend. So usually during this time one tends to fall of the to bake list. Since I had passed last weeks choice on HCB, I could not bring myself to pass on a second week. One of the other baking club is going to take a hit - the jury still out as to which.

I decided to start with HCB choice, because it was the hardest of the 3. The pudding portion had 3 pages of instructions, add 4 more if you decided to do the Brioche and you got, once more, 7 pages of instructions ahead of you. Which mean one thing - hold on to your whisk, its going to be a bumpy bake. After reading, I realized that after putting into account the waiting time between the steps, I was looking at well over 12+ hours of work for six baby cakes.

God, I thought the Apple Charlotte was hard.

HCB: Apple Caramel Charlotte

September 20, 2010 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Cake, Cookbooks, Desserts, Fruit, HCB, Sweets

Disclaimer: this post is long and there is a bit of a rant. Just as long as making this cake was and reading about it.

A few months ago, I was emailing with Jenn from Knitty Baker and we were discussing those cakes that were still left to do in our HCB list and this one in particular came about in conversation. We both were totally dreading it.

With 7 pages of instructions and 7 different steps, we knew it was going to take A LOT of resilience and baking savvy to do this one. Jenn was hoping that Marie would give us this one on a long weekend so we would have more time to plan for it. I was hoping that Marie would have a total Opps-y moment and would forget about this one.

We totally jinx ourselves. Because not even a week after this whole discussion took place - there is was in the baking list, and NOT on a long weekend.

This cake, even from the start was a total Prima Donna, and not in a good way. Did you know that the word “diva” means evil in some parts of the world?