I am so excited to share with you my recent cake baking adventures! As you may know, I made my first wedding cake ever last year for Jeff’s younger brother. It was a long and difficult process and at the time I was sure I’d never want to do another one again. But, I learned so many things last time about how I could have done it better if I had it to do all over, so naturally I began to wish I had another chance to put this new-found knowledge to use.

The engagement of Jeff’s youngest brother; Bryan, to his lovely fiance; Caitlin, gave me just that chance. I offered to do their cake for them and was both excited and nervous when they accepted. Caitlin decided on a sophisticated and classic design that I was sure was in the realm of my abilities, but there was one component to it that I had absolutely no experience with… jam.

Sure, I could have just bought jam, but I saw an opportunity to learn a new skill and create something really custom and unique. And so, this cake baking journey begins with $18 worth of strawberries and some seriously good strawberry vanilla jam.

I started the Monday before the wedding (which was on a Saturday.) It took about a half hour or so to chop up the 4 quarts of strawberries I needed for the recipe. I used about 3/4 of the giant flat of berries I purchased, leaving me with a huge gallon bag of them that’s now sitting in my freezer ready to become smoothies.

I had to learn all about jam-making for this project, and one thing I learned was that a jam needs pectin (a complex sugar naturally occurring in plants that acts as a gelling agent) in order to set up correctly. Strawberries are very low in pectin naturally, so you need to add some to get the right consistency. You can buy pectin in powder form, but for the life of me I couldn’t find the stuff anywhere, so I went with another technique to introduce pectin to the jam: citrus zest.

Citrus fruits; especially their rinds, pith, stems, and seeds, are all high in natural pectin. I wasn’t sure how much of it I needed, so I just used what I had and hoped it worked. Thankfully, the zest of 3 lemons combined with their juice ended up being plenty to get this jam gelled.

The next step was to let the berries macerate in the juice and sugar until they became soft and released much of their own juices. I let them sit for about 2 hours while I ran an errand, but I think even one hour would have been plenty. I could not resist to eat a few of the sticky sweet strawberries right out of this bowl. They were incredible!

After that, it’s pretty easy to turn them into jam. I put them in a large pot and let them boil away for close to an hour, making sure to skim off any foam that formed on the top to keep it from boiling over.

At the very end, I mashed them up a bit with a potato masher to make it a bit smoother (better for putting in a cake so there are no chunks to make the cake layers uneven,) and then added a few tablespoons of vanilla for a sweeter, more rounded flavor. The vanilla took the tart edge off the jam, making it a “strawberries and cream” type flavor.

And here’s how you can tell when it’s done…

I put a small plate in the freezer before I started boiling the jam. You can put a small dollop of jam on the cold plate, count to ten, then tilt the plate to see if the jam is still runny, or if it moves more slowly across the plate. This jam looked ready!

And there it is in my biggest plastic container. I don’t know exactly how much this made, but I know that I only used half of it on the cake. Now I know for next time not to make so much d@mn jam!

Here’s the recipe for the quantity I made. You can easily half or even quarter this for your own use though. It really is excellent, I’ve been putting it on toast and yogurt all week!

Strawberry Vanilla Jam

Ingredients

• 4 quarts strawberries (chopped small)
• 3 cups white sugar
• 8 tbsp. fresh-squeezed lemon juice
• zest of 3 lemons
• 3 tbsp. vanilla extract

Cooking Directions

1. Stir together chopped strawberries, sugar, lemon juice, and zest in a large bowl and leave covered for at least one hour.
2. Transfer to a heavy-bottomed pot and boil for 40 minutes to an hour, stirring frequently with a spatula and skimming foam from the top continuously to prevent over-boiling.
3. Mash jam with a potato masher to desired consistency and add vanilla, mix thoroughly.
4. Test jam on a cold plate for doneness. If it still runs quickly after 10 seconds on the cold plate, reduce it further by boiling for 10 or so minutes longer. If it runs slowly or not at all, it's done.
5. Jam should stay safe in the refrigerator in a sealed container for at least a week. Freeze or can any remaining.

Next up, making 6 lbs. of buttercream and layering it with the jam between fluffy vanilla cake!

Yes, I used all 6 lbs. of frosting!

June 21, 2012 Alayna Discussion 20 comments

Let me start by saying that I am not on a diet and I do not normally purchase “diet products.” I bought this think Thin bar solely because I flipped out that it was chocolate covered strawberry flavored. Sounded delicious to me, so I ignored the capitalized “Thin” and the various other blurbs about how now you can have your dessert and eat it too and other marketing bullet points that alluded to real pleasure suppression as the avenue to weight loss.

:::Steps off soap box:::

If I’d have seen this ingredient list before I tossed it in my shopping basket I would have probably put it back on the shelf. Very little real food in there. There are 0 grams of sugar and 15 grams of protein and the bar clocks in a 200 calories. Those are pretty good stats…as long as it tastes good. (I think you know where this is going.)

Appearance: A nice size. Covered in a chocolate coating that appears a bit waxy and fake but nothing too alarming.

Texture: Soft, pasty, and homogenous. Reminds me a bit of marzipan with the smooth but subtle grittiness.

Taste: Oh. My. GAD. GROSS!! This is the single worst bar I’ve ever tasted so far in my life. It’s like a giant squishy metallic-tasting vitamin paste covered in colored beeswax. But what about the strawberry flavor, you ask? Nearly non-existant. It tastes a bit like if they took that thick gluey strawberry glaze you get on top of diner cheesecakes, mixed it with cherry cough syrup, diluted and aerosolized it, and then misted it around the room that the bars were made in. Faint but distinctly gross.

Overall, the one word I would have to use to describe this bar is OFFENSIVE. Not just offensive in flavor, but I am genuinely offended that anyone would have the gall to market this a satisfying and healthy dessert replacement. At 200 calories, you could probably eat 2 or even 3 real chocolate covered strawberries and be putting healthier things in your body than this fake crap. It saddens me to imagine that some poor woman might choke down this awful concoction in lieu of a real dessert because she thinks this is all she can have.

This bar was pretty cheap and I still feel like I got ripped off.

July 1, 2011 Alayna Discussion 6 comments

Thank you all for all the well wishes after yesterday’s post about my neck issues. I am really feeling a lot better now, almost back to normal.

I thought I’d lighten things up today with a recipe I made over Memorial Day weekend that totally wowed the crowd.

Prepare yourself for…….chocolate mascarpone stuffed strawberries!

Cuz if chocolate, cheese, and sweet strawberries can’t make a girl feel better when she’s hurting, what can really?

Jeff and I went to a barbecue on Memorial Day with a ton of people. I was really hurting that night, but it felt so good to see these get gobbled up in mere minutes. It always makes me so happy when people like my food.

I found some enormous strawberries at Publix and knew they’d be great for making a light dessert. In fact, I’ve made this exact dessert before with green tea flavored mascarpone and it was a big hit, so I kinda had an idea that this might go over well. 😉

To make, I just cored the strawberries with a paring knife then got to work on my filling.

I used 16 oz. of room-temperature mascarpone cheese, and whipped it up with about 1/4 cup cocoa powder, two generous squirts of agave nectar, and maybe a half a cup or more of unsweetened almond milk to thin it out some.

A scooped the sweet cheese filling into a ziplock bag and cut the tip to use like a piping bag. I actually have a set of piping bags with fancy tips, but I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to get it out.

They turned out beautifully though…

This recipe made about 20 giant stuffed strawberries.  It would make nearly twice that for regular sized strawberries, so if you’re not making these for an army you might choose to cut the recipe in half.

Chocolate mascarpone stuffed strawberries

The not-too-sweet chocolatey mascarpone filling in these luscious strawberries really lets the fruit take center stage in this easy summer dessert.

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Yield: 20+ large strawberries

Ingredients

• 20 extra large strawberries
• 16 oz. unsweetened mascarpone cheese
• 4 tbsp. agave nectar
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• up to a 1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk

Cooking Directions

1. Wash and allow strawberries to dry before cutting off the tops and coring them with a small knife.
2. Whip together all other ingredients and transfer to a piping bag.
3. Pipe cheese mixture into strawberries and refrigerate until time to enjoy.

The filling was not too sweet, allowing the flavor of the ripe strawberries to really shine. This is one recipe I’ll make again and again, as it’s super simple but always impresses.

Next time, stuffed strawberries with chocolate chips!

June 7, 2011 Alayna Discussion, Recipes 9 comments