the Bûche is a French tradition, and today versions are made in countries of franco-influence (and colonization) from Canada to Viet Nam. And by seasonally intrepid home bakers everywhere. Designed in myriad stumpy forms for Christmas, the log cake is typically génoise, sometimes chocolate, almost always has chocolate frosting yielding a simple bark effect. Traditionally filled with the same chocolate frosting, today’s Bûche coils around everything from chocolate mousse to chestnut brandy cream to nothing at all (Scrooge).

this rendition is a roll of vanilla génoise (glorious! as always) with filling of fig preserves, crushed toasted hazelnuts and a drizzled web of honey.

like any tree at yuletide, the dessert log begs to be decked. Meringue mushrooms are standard; ours took a bit of a Suessian bend. Inventive bakers worldwide decorate with fleets of wintery stuffs: marshmellow snow people; plastic santas, reindeer, elves, et al; filigreed white chocolate; glacé fruits; fake holly and sugared rosemary branches & cranberries. Julia Child dresses hers in a spun caramel veil. Mom questioned what that gold web represents. The magic of Christmas? She was unconvinced, and our broom handle remained free of sticky hanging caramel strands and log unveiled. The mushroom painting got a little involved as it turned out anyway.

powdered sugar often makes a snowing; we skipped in favor of the arty high-gloss of the frosting alone. This chocolate frosting is of butter and semisweet chocolate melted in hot instant espresso folded into the vanilla meringue left over from the mushrooms.

happy holidays. Eat well; be merry.

light does not bring time, however, and the non-cake (remember vegetables?) part of the evening’s spread needed serious attention, and work for the week (remember work?) had left less late nights than anticipated for concocting spreads and dips.

leisurely and lovingly made early in the morning, three sheets of génoise rested, waiting to serve, in the freezer. Two became four small rectangular layer cakes for the gathering, and one a larger one, layers sandwiched over lazy lady’s cranberry curd, for the ladies’ holiday luncheon at work.

the party cakes came in two flavors: lemon with vanilla frosting or fig filling with chocolate ganache. The youngest party guest had a fine time leading some of the others in decorating the four cakes.

my obsession with the cake itself is well established; with a spike of salt, it has evoked a quest for the golden filling to complement its sturdy, impetuous perfection. This meyer lemon curd nobly contends. A fine end for precious but unspoken for meyer lemons, greedily snatched from the Flatbush coop’s surprise offering which was meager— yet significant in showing up at all!

lemon curd is one of those lost simple kitchen concoctions that has become all mysterious and imagined to magically appear in jars from stores where food is born. Make such a thing from scratch, and to some, you too shine more magically, mysteriously.

for meyer lemon curd: whisk together 2 eggs and three egg yolks with 2 tablespoons of cream or milk. Grate in the zest of 3-4 meyer lemons. Juice the lemons for a generous half cup of juice.

turn the heat on low under a small sauce pan on the stovetop. Slice in 3 tablespoons of butter. Dump in ¼ cup of sugar (eureka lemons will want more sugar if you are working with those or Seville oranges, say). Stir in the eggs and lemon juice. Keep stirring and add 3 more tablespoons of butter. Cook, stirring, until the curd thickens enough to coat the spoon.  Pour the lemon curd into any glass container with a cover to store, or let it cool a bit then spread over the bottom layer of a cake.

lazy lady’s cranberry curd has no fussing with eggs—just butter, berries and turbinado sugar.

the chocolate ganache always has a lot going for it, the butter cream has been unbeatable on the génoise. The slim cake wants a topping juicier than thin chocolate. This butter cream made with fresh butter and vanilla seeds scraped from pods fat like plump raisins is luscious, a gift to both the cake and the tart fillings.

at this start of the winter season of lights in the cold, we all make a mirror together; here is part of this year’s mirror of collective creation:

mini-cakes themselves have become an obsession. One set sporting my virgin attempt at fondant. Photos are up on the facebook page; please like radical muffin to feast on bonus food porn. And i will try to catch up on the writing!

however—this is the brief season of quince, and quince insists upon a full sized cake. Most quince insist on a pavlova; these acquiesced to taking part in the great cake adventure.

the fruit, rock hard when raw and ripe, is apple-ish in shape, yellow as canary, and covered in a fine fuzz that every recipe recommends rubbing off even though you peel the skin off. The rubbing is meditative, a knowing of each fruit, and that has something to be said for it.

quarter and core the acerbic and hard orbs; halve or quarter the quarters. In a saucepan of appropriate size, bring to boil enough water to eventually cover the fruit slices. Sprinkle in a cup or so of sugar. Add a dash of salt if you are in the spirit of adding salt to everything. Maybe a squeeze of lemon. Add the fruit, cover and bring to a boil.

quince holds legend as the golden apple Paris awarded Helen and tempted Eve. A cake of quince from your kitchen is hopefully unlikely to end in war or expulsion from the Garden. The perfume of it will evoke this sort of divine allure. Quince are in the rose family, and smell like Arabian Nights.

lift the lid and inhale. Steam your face. Dream. As they poach they’ll blush pink. Cook until soft. Drain, set aside the fruit, and return the liquid to the pan and cook down until it is syrupy enough to suit your purposes.

in this cake, quince comes three ways: a layer each of smashed quince and quince curd in the filling and quince syrup in the pink butter cream.

the cake is génoise—the alluring vanilla speckled egg-voluptuous batter currently on call in the radical muffin kitchen. There were actually two quince cakes. The first a pile of quince slices in the center of a cake cooked in a single layer in a round cake pan for about 23 minutes. The custardy center worked with the fruit pile and the sides had a nice cake crust to frost with a thin ring of vanilla butter cream.

for this layer cake, each lawyer was baked in a heart shaped cake pan for about the same about of time creating a delightfully cakey cake.

the cake wants to be called “effortless.” The steps read long, yet in practice this comes together in a breath and a sigh. Relax. Follow the jelly roll recipe in the preceding post. Bake in a 350° oven in a baking sheet with sides lined with parchment paper (cut to fit), buttered and floured for 20 – 25 minutes. This wants to be golden brown and springy, drawing away from the sides, without having dried out or become dark brown. Watch it carefully.

once cooled, i wrapped it in foil and stashed it in the freezer. That suited the kitchen’s timing and helped the manageability later. You can do the same or go on to cutting, filling & frosting.

using a fairly large cookie cutter or a drinking glass, press out shapes in pairs from the cake. Stash the remains in the freeze for something reminiscent of trifle when one is wanted.

work a small jar of jam—preferably red—in a bowl until spreadable. Spread the jam in a thin layer over half of the shapes; sandwich with its pair. Frost with lovingly made-up, real vanilla butter cream. For flair, these are then iced with royal icing, going for a thin, crisp shell. Next time, fondant from scratch as behooves little cakes.

these sandwich halves are thicker than the traditional many layers of petite fours, more like a dainty layer cake. Or as Squib said, “What Little Debbie was if Little Debbie was a person making little cakes.”

more tantalizing images from a rosier side of the culinary imagination beckon: pretty pink cake twirling around fluffy white filling, decked out in shredded coconut or bûche de noël, feast-worthy chocolate cake, fit for downtown’s biggest department store window Christmas display or with no more decoration than fork tines through rich chocolate icing and a few meringue mushrooms. Maybe bûche in December. This initial experiment is more restrained.

beginning with a problem (specter of dry cake), turn to the wunderkinds of “America’s test kitchen,” the editors of Cooks’ Illustrated magazine. In the book Baking Illustrated, their jelly roll experiments focus on the trick of rolling the cake, which is sponge for manipulability and génoise, particularly, in their recipe. Now, the génoise, they tell us earlier, is a dry cake by nature; in fact, runs the risk of “squat, dry and flavorless.” Their fear for overall texture was soggy not dry. Génoise is standard for European layer cakes and petite fours contra more typically American butter or chiffon cakes. Could be the cake was dry so folks soaked it or folks wanted to soak it so they made a dry cake, but it takes a liking to a sprinkle of booze. Here we use St. Germain.

be not daunted by the French terminology or impressive methodology! The cake is dreamy to make up and eat. Heat your oven to 350°. Cut parchment paper to fit an 18 by 12-inch baking sheet, rimmed. Grease with butter and dust with flour.

melt half a stick of butter in a small sauce pan, scrape in the seeds from a vanilla pod and set aside. In a larger saucepan, put about an inch and a half of water on to simmer.

sift one cup of flour and ½ teaspoon of salt onto a sheet of parchment paper.

beat together 6 eggs and one cup of sugar in a giant glass bowl. Half a dozen eggs made cracking right into the bowl seem downright reckless; cracking them into a small bowl made fishing out the inevitable bit of shell in the second to last egg less maddening. kitchen school marms of old would preach this practice to ensure that a bad egg didn’t spoil the lot as well.

set the bowl over the sauce pan, the bottom of the bowl above the surface of the simmering water. Beat the eggs with a whisk continuously until warm to the touch (Cooks say 110° on an instant read thermometer).

beat the eggs with an electric mixer or persistent wrist until “pale, cream-colored, voluminous, and form a thick ribbon of tiny billowy bubbles that falls from the whisk and rests on top of the batter for several seconds when the whisk is held about 4 inches above…” By electric hand held mixer, about 9 minutes.

remove about a cup of batter to a small bowl. Whisk in the melted butter at a slow drizzle.

sprinkle the flour into the big bowl of batter and beat in at the lowest speed. likewise beat in the bit of buttered batter.

immediately pour the batter onto the prepared pan; the illustrated cooks caution to hold the bowl close to the pan so as not to loose all that delicate volume. Spread to the corners with a spatula. Bake for about 25 minutes, until the cake is pulling away from the sides of the pan yet still springy.

while the cake bakes, generously dust a large kitchen towel with confectioners’ sugar. When the cake is ready, flip it right onto the towel. Roll it like a little sleeping bag.

work apricot jam in a bowl with a spoon until warm and spreadable. The Cooks call for ¾ a cup; I used the whole jar of Bonne Marman. Grated nutmeg into it and a little blood orange zest.

before the cake is entirely cool, unroll it. Brush with St. Germaine liquor (not a Cooks recommended move). Let that sink in. Spread with jam. Reroll cake over jelly then wrap the towel around the outside snugly to let it all settle into itself.

unwrap the dear thing when ready to serve. We frosted it with blood orange icing. It could have gone naked with whipped cream.

“look at my flowers. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembering. Please remember, love. And there are pansies, they’re for thoughts.” ~ ophelia,

this cake usually emerges on new year’s eve, when poetics honor the turning of the clock in the dead of winter, remembering, letting go, renewing, hope.  So delicious, this simple loaf has been in request since the snow fell on the green leaves of Brooklyn. Arising from my long lost nigella cookbook collection and resurrected by mouth from my favorite kitchen witch, in a sultry reading of the recipe from her copy.

ritually, i try to peel the apple skin away in one curling strip with a paring knife, then slice pieces of flesh off one apple into a small saucepan where two tablespoons of butter is melting. Break in two small sprigs off rosemary. These were grown in a big blue-green ceramic pot on our porch. Add 1 tablespoon of sugar— superfine for élan, turbinado for ennui. Zest one lemon over the pile up; slice it and squeeze in the juice from half. Cover and simmer until the apples begin falling apart, stirring every few minutes. Turn off the heat and let sit.

butter and line a loaf pan with parchment paper and butter it again.

meanwhile, in your best big bowl, beat together two sticks of butter (minus the 2 tablespoons for the applesauce) with ¾ cup of sugar , matching the kind you put in the apples, which you can also beat in once they’re not steaming hot.

beat in three eggs, one at a time. Add a shot of vanilla if you are feeling it. Beat in two cups of all purpose flour sifted together with two teaspoons of baking powder. A heaping teaspoon of sea salt if you used the coarser sugar. Pour the batter into the loaf pan. Place a long, fine sprig of rosemary down the center of the cake. Sprinkle the entire top and spring with superfine sugar.

pop in the oven and bake for a little over three quarters of an hour, until a golden crust forms and the center is set. Remove from the oven to a cooling rack to rest in the pan for a few minutes. Flip, turn again onto a serving plate. This is one of those cakes that can quietly join you for breakfast, dress up for dinner, and accompany tea through the week if you can keep it. Make two.

most importantly, icing quickly made – because there’s make-up to be done – and divisible into  colors enough to satisfy. purple seemed appropriate for the thinning of the veil feast (see also, mushrooms). Then green for a witch’s striped socks sensibility. black sprinkles and green and orange teeny balls of sugar.

thus – although i usually go in for meringue-ish toppings for cupcakes and royal icing flourishes like candied white sugar plaster – straight up confectioners’ sugar and liquid alone were ideal for treats for the costumed hordes. Sift three cups of powdered sugar into a giant glass bowl. By hand or electric hand mixer, whip in a shot of lemon juice, a shot of vanilla extract and about a quarter cup of whole milk. Adjust with sugar or milk to thicken or thin; thicker to pipe and thinner to spread. We had a pastry bag of thick purple icing for piping details and a big bowl of thinned out dragon green for coating the tops of the cakes by dipping them in headfirst.

now, the  writing of the cakes is officially out of order of the making of the cakes: a pumpkin bundt and chocolate birthday cake preceded these twisted fairy cakes. anticipate…

perfectly ripe farm fresh pears in hand and breakfast in mind, the Am Wholefoods’ Country-Fresh Pear Cake recipe answered the call. Just a few luxurious touches like a slab more butter and a crushed almond crust, made it just a twinge more…femme.

draw 2 eggs out of the fridge to warm. Preheat the oven to 350˚ then line and butter a 9 inch round pan. finely chop about a cup of almonds, roasted work fine, to dust the sides and loosely cover the bottom of the pan.

peel, core and chop 4 pears. the recipe calls for 2 pounds; i had 2 large and 2 small pears and that was plenty of pear.

melt 3 tablespoons of butter (one more than our wholesome friends recommend) in a liquid measuring cup then measure in a generous ½ cup of honey and ¼ cup of cream.

beat together—wholeheartedly— the eggs, butter, honey and cream. Add a dash of salt. Sprinkle in ¾ cup whole wheat flour and ¾ cup of cornmeal, through your fingers like you’re making polenta, and fold into the batter. The cornmeal taste and texture compliments the pears yet makes for a denser cake; you can make it as prescribed with all whole wheat flour or lighten it up by using yogurt and adding a teaspoon of baking soda. Fold in the pears.

pour into the pan. Spread to the edges and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. And bake for about 45 minutes. Enjoy warm with vanilla or ginger ice cream if you feel that way about it. Or eat with coffee in the morning.

squib & the preacher eater pickler both requested peanut butter chocolate cakes when the great cake adventure embarked. Sunny Meadows coming to dinner for the first visit to the new place called for a cake manifestation of the household tastes. Voilà—a quadruple chocolate loaf cake with peanut butter chips resplendent with gold glitter and bronze dust.

beginning with Nigella’s recipe for quadruple loaf cake, i added peanut butter chips and soaked with the Hershey’s syrup left from the marbled Bundt. Having not made the chocolate syrup from scratch, there’s nothing to compare, yet i think in this instance my preference here might still be the taste of nostalgia from the standard can.

heat the oven to 325˚ with a baking sheet set on the middle rack. Cut parchment paper to line the bottom of a loaf pan; line and grease the pan well with butter.

haul out your food processor if you got one.

if not you can still beat this together with a hand mixer or wooden spoon and a strong shoulder by creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs then the dry ingredients with the boiling water.

let 2 eggs and 1 ½ sticks of butter come to room temperature. sift together 1 2/3 cups all purpose flour, ½ cup cocoa, and a ½ teaspoon of baking soda. Measure out 1/3 cup of sour cream or yogurt, 1 ½ cups mixed frozen peanut butter chips and semisweet chocolate chunks, ½ cup of boiling water, and 1 1/3 cup of sugar; i used half brown sugar half white.

dump the butter and sugar into the processor then pulse a few times. Add in everything else except the water and chips. Pulse and pour the boiling water through the chimney of the processor lid until all is battery. Fold in chips. Pour into the pan.

bake for about 45 minutes, until just not quite set through. Put it on a cooling rack and poke some holes in it. A chopstick works well for this. Drizzle chocolate syrup of your choice (perhaps spiked) into the holes without being too neat about it.

let the cake cool. Meanwhile, over at the stovetop, bring ½ a cup of cream to boil in a small saucepan. Turn of the heat and whisk in 6 oz bittersweet chocolate until melted and smooth.

when the cake is cool, turn it out of the pan. A bit of parchment paper over your hand keeps chocolate syrup off you—we love parchment paper sandwich bags for all kinds of things, including this little task. When the ganaché is firm enough to be piped, spoon it into a pastry bag or craftily turned piece of parchment paper fitted with a star tip. Pipe the chocolate in stripes over horizontally over the loaf. Sprinkle with glitter and shimmer dust.

this futile venture into boxes sent me right back to real butter. Enter lardy cake. no Pillsbury bake-off winner here; no showboating. Lovingly offered up by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra in her tour of old world breads and sweets Warm Bread and Honey Cake, lardy cake is a British stalwart dating back to the second half of the 19^th century.

a harvest cake of freshly rendered pig lard, original recipes earned the name. up-dated versions rely on butter, and real slabs of fresh butter here are a real celebratory ingredient in city hearths, evocative of generous bounty, novel in its old-fashioned rich goodness.

Pagrach-Chandra is a staunch defender of lardy cake. writing from a hostile health-conscious environment in the modern UK, she cites critics’ warnings of “health hazard” and “artery clogger” then scoffs: I suspect that many of its detractors would not hesitate to pour cream sauce over a huge steak on a regular basis, yet they begrudge the bit of butter that goes into an excellent cake. Perhaps they simply do not like cakes.

radical muffins only live once, and butter is delicious. Lardy cake is an utterly worthy breakfast or coffee treat, a cinnamon roll all in one cake round that you slice to eat. Not only a great cake—in the vein of not too sweet coffee cakes—but also a good introduction to bread make. So take this on if working with bread is among your desired kitchen skills but its seemed too daunting to start.

in a large bowl, stir in a packet of dried yeast into half of ¾ cup warmed milk. Let the yeast come to life. Melt 3/8 a stick of butter, stir in a tablespoon of sugar, and set it aside to cool.

stir 2 ½ cups flour along with the rest of the milk and the butter. knead knead knead until the dough is smooth and elastic. leave to rise an hour or so, until doubled in size.

butter and line the bottom of a 9-ich spring form pan.

punch down the dough and knead in ¼ teaspoon of salt. pat the dough into a circle and sandwich between two long pieces of parchment paper or lay out on a well-floured surface. Roll out until about ¼ inch thick.

cream together 7/8 of a stick of butter, unsalted and softened, and 1/3 cup of dark brown sugar. work in ½ teaspoon cinnamon and ¼ teaspoon nutmeg.

spread the sugar-butter on 2/3 of the rectangle of dough, leaving a margin at all the edges. Sprinkle the buttered areas with 1/3 – ½ cup currants or raisins and lightly press them into the filling with the palm of your hand. Fold the dough over the filling like a burrito, taking care to seal the edges. Let rest for 5 minutes.

turn the dough for a fresh angle. Roll out the pastry burrito to form a slightly smaller rectangle. Fold again and let rest. Repeat 2 or 3 more times, depending on how much the filling begins to ooze. Less maybe more here; this cake may have benefited from one less turn or a sit in the fridge to firm up the butter.

on the final turn, roll the cake into a circle and pat into place in the pan. Leave for a final rise, letting the dough double in size.

preheat your oven to 350˚ and bake your lardy cake for 25-30 minutes. Pull it out and leave to rest 15 in the pan then turn it out to cool. Enjoy now or later. Quietly rejoice.