a treat from work

apricot upside down cake
I spirited this tiny tart home from work last night. When there is a whole sheet pan of them lined up, it looks like a field of flowers. The person who runs the hot station at work is in charge of making the cakes, and I have heard some complaints about how tedious it is to cut all the apricots and arrange them in the pan. It looks so beautiful, though, I would think it would be some consolation for all the trouble. We serve it with praline anglaise sauce, candied almonds and toasted almond ice cream.


strawberry gelato
So I finally made a recipe from The Ciao Bella Book of Gelato and Sorbetto. Each of their recipes calls for you to make a plain base or chocolate base from two master recipes, then make add-ins to create different flavors. This recipe called for the plain base plus a homemade strawberry jam. I loved the recipe for the plain base. It had very little cream and only four egg yolks in it, and came together beautifully. The finished gelato was a little icy once frozen, but the taste I took just as it finished churning was smooth and extremely flavorful.


magnificent moist golden cake
So I have a cake order at the end of July! I was going to go with a delicious butter cake recipe we used for our wedding cake project in school, but I wanted to try a few other options first. This recipe is from Shirley Corriher's book Bakewise. She says in the book that she developed this recipe because she wanted to create a versatile cake that was both moist and easy to slice. It looked beautiful right out of the oven and did indeed prove easy to slice. But when Chris and I tasted it, we both agreed that it was too greasy and too sweet. I was really disappointed, especially since it was such a fussy recipe to put together. It called for milk and buttermilk, oil and butter and cream whipped into soft peaks.