Almond Streusel Cake

Bundt cakes. I don’t know why they appeal so much to me. Maybe because the first cake I learned to make with Grandma Lucy was a bundt cake… and also because they are so easy to do! This Streusel Bundt Cake is no exception. In baking and pastry making, streusel is a crumb topping of butter, flour, and sugar that is baked on top of muffins, breads, pies, and cakes. In this version we add some spices and almonds to add a little bit more flavor and crunch.

This cake is delicious, but I recommend that you bake it and serve it within a day of making it. When I prepared it, I just added half of the streusel to the bundt pan (Step 7), but you really have to add two-thirds of it. That way you don’t end up with too much streusel at the top like I did. The original recipe calls for pecans, but I replaced them for almonds and the result is equally as tasty!

Kitty

Ultimate Streusel Cake

Original recipe by Martha Stewart
Yield: Makes one 10-inch Bundt cake

Ingredients
Streusel Filling:
1 1/2 cups packed light-brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
Pinch of ground cloves
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
4 ounces unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sliced almonds

Cake
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
5 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups sour cream

Icing
2 1/2 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
1/4 cup milk

Directions:

First, make the filling. Combine brown sugar, cinnamon, and cloves in a medium bowl. Stir in granulated sugar, flour, and salt. Using your hands or a pastry cutter, cut in butter until combined and mixture is crumbly; stir in almonds. Transfer to the refrigerator until ready to use.
Pre-heat oven to 350ºF. Butter and flour generously a 10-inch bundt pan (or other tube pan with a 3-quart capacity) and set aside.
Now, make the cake. Sift together all-purpose flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into a bowl; set aside.
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes.
Add eggs, one at a time, beating until well combined. Beat in vanilla.
Add reserved flour mixture and sour cream in alternating batches, starting and ending with the flour; beat just until combined.
Spoon half the batter into prepared pan. Make a well in the center, and crumble two-thirds of the streusel mixture into well.
Spoon in remaining batter, smoothing top; top with remaining streusel.
Bake until golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean, about 1 hour. Transfer to wire rack and let cool 45 minutes; invert cake onto a wire rack set over a rimmed baking sheet.
In a medium bowl, whisk together confectioners’ sugar and milk until combined; set icing aside, cover with plastic wrap, until ready to use. Drizzle over inverted cake; serve.

Cinnamon Roll Pancakes

Don’t you think this is a pretty interesting recipe? I found it on Pinterest, …of course. So far, Pinterest hasn’t let me down. I know a lot of people have found recipes or projects that turn out to be a giant FAIL. I guess you just need to know where to look and what to pin. But, that’s what The Foodies’ Kitchen is for. We test recipes for you, so if you find them here, you know they will work. (If you follow our instructions and use the ingredients we list!)

My tip for this recipe is that you need to have two spatulas to flip them over and don’t be stingy with the butter. When you flip your pancake over after adding the spiral of cinnamon and sugar… it makes a caramelized little swirl of goo that sticks to your spatula, so you want a clean one to flip over your next pancake. (Or wash the spatula as you go along, but that doesn’t work for me)
And, you need that butter on that pan!

Flavor wise, this is SWEET. They are good, you can taste the cinnamon and the caramelized sugar gives it a nice touch, but having more than one is too much for me, so I just made one for each of my family and kept the rest of the batch regular good old pancakes.

Note: For this recipe, I used our own The Foodies’ Kitchen pancake recipe, which yields 6 pancakes. However, I cut the ingredients in half for the cinnamon filling and icing, because I knew I didn’t want to make the whole batch with the cinnamon spiral.

Helga

Cinnamon Roll Pancakes

Recipe adapted from Crunchy Rock
Yield: 6 Pancakes

Ingredients:

Pancakes:
1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
¾ cup milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 tablespoon sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cinnamon Filling:
1/2 stick unsalted butter, very, very, soft
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon

Icing:
1 cup powdered sugar
1 oz. cream cheese (optional)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons milk

Procedure:

Mix the dry ingredients together and stir with a whisk. In a separate bowl, whisk the milk, eggs, vanilla and butter together. Add the wet to the dry and stir just until incorporated. Do not over mix.
For the cinnamon filling: Mix all ingredients with a hand mixer and with a rubber spatula, scrape into a pastry bag or a heavy freezer bag that has the end snipped off. (About a 1/4 inch of the corner cut off.)
Now, for these pancakes you’re going to want to use a nonstick skillet. It’s really necessary or the brown sugar will stick and burn.
Pour the pancake batter into the skillet and spiral the cinnamon mixture onto the pancake. Allow to cook until the pancake is almost completely set on one side. ( Use medium heat, and cook for 2 minutes) Flip and cook for another minute.
Tip: Don’t pour the spiral too close to the edge of the pancake, or it will run over and stick to the pan.
After each batch of pancakes, wipe out the skillet with a dry paper towel and remove any extra brown sugar mixture.
After the pancakes are done, place on your serving plate and drizzle with icing, if using.
To make the icing: Mix all the ingredients and add enough milk until it is a pourable consistency. You can pour this into another zip lock bag or just drizzle it over the pancakes with a spoon.

10:32 AM
2 Comments
- Breakfast, cinnamon roll, icing, Pancakes, sugar
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Reine de Saba (Chocolate and Almond Cake)

Reine de Saba, better known as Julia Child’s favorite Chocolate and Almond Cake, is a recipe that we couldn’t help to share with you. Seems that this last week I’ve been reminded of Julia constantly. It all started on Monday I think after looking through some books to buy and Amazon started recommending My Life in France over and over again. So I gave in and now I am reading it!

Julia first fell in love with french food when she was on her way to Paris with her husband Paul Child, at the Restaurant La Couronne in Rouen. It’s amazing how one meal can change your life! She started buying food at the local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu. After that, she started teaching french cuisine along with Simone Beck and Louisette Berthole, calling their informal school L’école des Trois Gourmandes (The School of the Three Food Lovers) with whom she wrote the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Today, February 11th marks the 50th Anniversary of Julia Child’s famous TV show The French Chef, her television cooking show. This show was produced and broadcast by WGBH, the public television station in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1963 to 1973. It was one of the first cooking shows on television. The French Chef introduced French cooking to the United States. All of the recipes used on The French Chef had originally appeared in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and for the show, Julia chose a set of more domestic recipes so they could be within the reach of a home cook without staff. Sometimes there were occasional accidents that became a popular trademark of Child’s on air presence: used as “teachable moments” to encourage viewers to relax about the task’s demands. One thing was certain, this show made us know the Julia we all love: her fondness for wine; her ornate speech; her staunch defense of the use of butter (with margarine invariably referred to as “that other spread”) and cream; her standard issue “impeccably clean towel”; and her closing line at the end of every show: “Bon appétit!”. In 1966, the show won an Emmy for Achievements In Educational Television.

She has been often our inspiration and because her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking it’s not only a collection of recipes but a technique and guidance masterpiece, we love it! It throughly explains what steps you need to take to prepare a recipe, along your tools needed and detailed explanations for some of the most challenging processes. If you want to get a new cookbook and don’t have this one yet, definitely consider it! A classic for your kitchen.

Bon Appétit!

Kitty

Reine de Saba
(Chocolate and Almond Cake)

Yield: One 8-inch cake
Recipe by Julia Child, from iPad App Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Selected Recipes

For the Cake:
4 ounces or squares semi-sweet Chocolate
2 tablespoons of Rum
4 ounces softened butter
⅔ cup granulated sugar
3 egg yolks
3 egg whites
¼ teaspoon of cream of tartar
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
⅔ cup pulverized almonds or 1 cup of almonds to pulverize
¼ tsp almond extract

For the Glaçae au Chocolat (Chocolate-Butter Icing):
2 ounces semi-sweet baking chocolate
2 tablespoons of Rum
5 to 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ cup cake flour (scooped and leveled) turned into a sifter

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 350°F (175°C). Butter and flour the cake pan.
Set the chocolate and rum in a small pan with a tight cover, and place (off heat) in a larger pan of almost simmering water; let melt while you proceed with the recipe. Measure out the rest of the ingredients.
Pulverize your almonds in your food processor, about a cup. Add a tablespoon of sugar to avoid the almond oils to lump up.
Cream the butter and sugar together for several minutes until they form a pale yellow, fluffy mixture.
Beat in the egg yolks until well blended.
In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites, cream of tartar and salt until soft peaks are formed; sprinkle on the sugar and beat until stiff peaks are formed.
With a rubber spatula, blend the melted chocolate into the butter and sugar mixture, then stir in almonds, and almond extract.
Immediately stir one-fourth of the beaten egg whites to lighten the batter.
Delicately fold in a third of the remaining whites and when partially blended, sift on one-third of the flour and continue folding. Alternate rapidly with more egg whites and more flour until all egg whites and flour are incorporated.
Turn the batter into the cake pan, pushing the batter up to its rim with a rubber spatula. Bake in middle level of preheated oven for about 25 minutes.
Cake is done when it has puffed, and 2½ to 3 inches around the circumference are set so that a needle plunged into that area comes out clean; the center should move slightly if the pan is shaken, and a needle comes out oily.
Allow cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Run knife around the edge of the pan, and reverse cake on the rack.
Allow it to cool for an hour or two; it must be thoroughly cold if it is to be iced.
For the Icing, place the chocolate and rum in the small pan, cover, and set in the larger pan of almost simmering water.
Remove pans from heat and let chocolate melt for 5 minutes or so, until perfectly smooth.
Lift chocolate pan out of the hot water, and beat in the butter a tablespoon at a time with the help of a rubber spatula. If the mixture starts to cool off too fast, place the chocolate pan again in hot water and beat in the butter until it fully incorporates.
Then beat over the ice and water until chocolate mixture has cooled to spreading consistency. This will take about 3 minutes.
At once spread it over your cake with spatula or knife, and press a design of almonds over the icing.