HCB: Cradle Cake

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I have been waiting for this cake for a bit now.  Somehow every time I would open Rose’s Heavenly Cakes book, it seem to fall on this page.  And every time I would hope that Marie would put it in rotation.

This week the waiting was over.  This week this was the cake on the spotlight.

At first glance, the cake does not look like much and I actually thought it was a plain pound cake with a crusty shell.  Which to be honest, I’m a total sucker for.  I have written before how heavy, pound cakes, are actually my favorite types of cakes.  Maybe because they remind me of they types of cakes my “nonna” and I would bake when I was young, or the fact that that buttery flavor just screams comfort food at it’s best.

So this simple cake was screaming my name.

Boy, was I wrong.  This cake actually is a variation of the original recipe that won the Pillsbury bake-off in 1950.  Upon closer reading of the whole thing, I realized that the crusty outer of the cake is made up of a dacquoise made with pecan and chocolate which hugs the simple butter cake – thus the “cradle” in the name.

HELLO CAKE!  You just jumped to captivating status in my world.

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HCB: Génoise Tres Café

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See that pretty picture above of the pretty cake.

It looks all innocent like.

But, don’t let it fool you.

Because that pretty, innocent cake did not play nice with me.

You would figure that after almost a year of baking with the HCB group, I would have certain steps engrave in my brain.  And that list of steps should read like this:

  • READ THE WHOLE RECIPE, not once, not twice, not three times, but four times
  • READ IT AGAIN, just in case.
  • Stop being confident and cocky.
  • No trash talk back to the cake 

Instead it reads like this: 

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Popovers

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The year that I meet Tom, we travelled to Bar Harbor, Maine for the first time to meet his extended family.  The WHOLE family, as in there were over twenty people plus expected, we had a agenda of activities sent to us before the trip.  

Sadly the occasion was not a joyous one.  See, a week after I meet Tom, his father past away. It was not a surprise passing, his father had been sick for a while and it was his time to go, everyone had made peace and they were simply getting together to celebrate his life and to scater his ashes on top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park as per his request.  I wrote about this trip here and here.

The trip for me was a chance to travel within the US.  I have to come clean, having lived in the US for more than twenty years and I’m clueless about the country in general.  I’m a snob traveler and most of my trips involved the use of a passport, so I don’t know my adopted country that well - there I said it *hung head low*

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