It's only 10 am and I've already had a major cooking disaster.

[Skidmore]

We are going to the annual village picnic this afternoon and this year we're in the section of the alphabet responsible for bringing desserts. I spent about 40 minutes putting together all the ingredients and mixing a blackberry cake. Looked beautiful coming out of the oven. Let it rest in the pans 10 minutes before removing the layers, and they came out fine. Waited a bit more to peel the wax paper off the bottom of the layers and that went fine. What didn't go fine was flipping the layers over on the racks so they could continue cooling. One almost split exactly in half and the other lost a chunk on the side top. I'm hoping to salvage them by assembling them later. The layers together with blackberry jam between them and cream cheese frosting over all. I just feel sick. I don't really have time to make something else or to go 20 miles in town to hunt down a bakery that has something decent on a Sunday morning in Iowa.

I swear I'll never make another layer cake. I have no freaking luck with them.

[Warpy]

1. They'd have cooled just fine without the flipping around

That was your problem, you did too much.

The less you handle them, the more chance you'll have of not having to glue pieces back together.

Shit happens, though. Nobody complains if their slice of cake has a little bit of frosting or filling in an odd place.

[Skidmore]

4. Maybe, but my experience has been that if I don't flip them back

over to the side that was on the bottom of the pan, they then stick to the rack anyway.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

2. I'm sorry,

but it's really not that bad & I bet it tastes great.

Do what I do when that happens; glue it together with more frosting & then let someone else cut it. If/When it falls apart, blame them. lol.

It'll be fine. :hug:

[Skidmore]

3. Okay, it's better.

I put the one with the bit on the top missing on the bottom, top down and put blackberry jam on it. I put the other layer on top--the one that had almost split into two pieces across and it picked up just fine. Cooling seemed to help it a bit and it held together. I frosted the whole cake with the cream cheese frosting, and filled the little depression in the top caused by the missing piece on the bottom with fresh blackberries from my berry patch. I stuck the whole thing in the fridge till we leave. It actually looks pretty good. I got to taste the little piece that fell off and it tastes pretty good too.

I feel better now. Thanks for listening.

[babylonsister]

5. Who cares what it looks like, it sounds scrumptious!

Save me a piece? ;-)

[Skidmore]

6. I'll get the recipe up soon.

The batter has blackberry jam and buttermilk in and is a lovely shade of lavender. It is a very tender and moist cake.

[TygrBright]

7. Dang, sounds YUMMY!!

Do post a recipe!

anticipatorially,
Bright

[Skidmore]

8. Here goes...Blackberry Jam cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

2.5 cups all-purpose flour
1.5 teaspoons baking powder
1.5 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
.5 teaspoon baking soda
.25 teasoon salt
.5 cup low-fat buttermilk or soured milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1.5 cups sugar
.5 cup butter or margarine, at room temperature
2 large egg whites
1 large egg
1.5 cups seedless blackberry, red raspberry, or strawberry jam

1. Preheat oven to 350 F Lightly grease and flour 2 9-inch cake pans; line bottoms with wax papwer. In a small bowl, stir together the 2.5 cups flour, the baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, and salt. In a cup, combine the buttermilk and vanilla. Set both aside.

2. In a large bown, with an electric mixer on medium, cream the sugar an dbutter until light yellow nad fluffy, scraping side of bowl often. Add the egg whites and beat well. Ad egg and beat well. Bet in .75 cup of the blacberry jam. Using a wooden spoon, stir in one-third of the flour mixtur, then half the the buttermilk mixture. Repeat, then stir in remaining flour mixture.

3. Spread the batter evenly into th prepared pans. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until toothpicks inerted in the centers come out clean. Place the pans upright on wire racks for 10 minutes. Using a narrow metal spatula, loosen sides of cake layers from the pans, then invert the cakes onto the racks. Peel off the wax paper and let cakes cool completely.

Frost with cream cheese frosting.


Cream cheese frosting

In a large bowl, with an electric mixer on Medium beat 4 oz. Neufchatel cream cheese, 4 teaspoons low-fat milk and 2 teaspoons vanilla till fluffly. Gradually add 1 box (16 oz) confectdioners sugar, sifted 4.5 cups), beating until frosting is smooth. Makes aobut 2 cups or enought of rost the sides and tops of 2 8 or 9 inch round cakes or one 13"x9"x2" cake.

[housewolf]

10. Wow, this sounds SOOOO great!

I'll have to try it with some of that wonderful Marion Blackberry jam I had recently.

Sorry you had problems with the cake. I keep a spare cake rack around to use in case I need to flip a cake back onto its bottom to cool, but it sounds like you were well-able to fix up the cake. I'll bet it was a big hit at the gathering!

Thanks for posting the recipe.

[GardeningGal]

12. Looks good! I don't suppose this is a high altitude recipe is it?

I checked your profile and came up empty, but I'm guessing since there are only a few of us states that need to worry about high altitude that the odds are against this being a high altitude recipe.

[Skidmore]

13. I'm from Iowa.. Not a high altitude recipe at all.

[politicat]

15. Here's the changes for a high altitude recipe:

Add 1 T per cup of flour of liquid (buttermilk, milk, water, oil or fruit based fat substitute)
Subtract 2 T sugar per cup used (sugar is effectively sweeter at high altitudes for long and complex reasons that Cook's Illustrated's Baking Illustrated explains far better than I do.)
Subtract 1 T flour for every cup of flour used. Do this after you've put the flour in the bowl; don't try to do the math.

Bake with a hawk's eye - heck, grab a stool, turn the oven light on, and watch it. Read a book but don't get engrossed. Turn the timer to 5 minutes before it should be done and be prepared to go up to 15 minutes over. However, when the timer goes off 5 minutes before the cake is done, turn off the oven (especially if it's electric.) Let it finish up with the cooling residual heat.

Work with thick cakes to start - bundts and tubes - until you get comfortable with the recipes. Hold off on delicate layers and thin sheet cakes until you really know the proportions and have your oven singing like a choir boy to your every command.

[Skidmore]

16. Thanks for those instructions.

I knew recipes were different for high altitudes but not how or why. That was helpful.

[grasswire]

9. glad it came out okay

If it had not worked, you could have broken up the cake pieces and made a sort of trifle with it, sprinkling a bit of liqueur and layering with whip cream and some pudding or something, and sticking a little sign on that says "adults only" -- I'm always comforted by knowing that if a dish fails you can usually re-tool it and call it something else.

Jam cake is a great recipe to learn. Congrats!

[wildeyed]

11. Tell them it got squished in the car.

No one will care anyway, sounds delicious!

I had a baking tragedy the other day too involving a peach and blueberry tart. The filling exploded out of the crust. It looked pitiful, but after I put it on top of the vanilla ice cream, no one seemed to mind.

[Skidmore]

14. Guys, I'm back. Hey, the cake was a hit. Only brought 3 slices

home. Have many requests for the recipe. I'll have to do a mailing now.

[eleny]

17. Congrats!

It really does sound like one of the yummiest cakes.

[jeanarrett]

18. Your blackberry cake recipe was exactly the

one I used last night, except I used 4 leftover, very brown bananas instead of blackberry jam and added a cup of chopped walnuts. I did not copy your recipe and substitute--I used an old newspaper recipe of my Mom's from the 1960's for banana cake that I found in one of her old cookbooks that she had pasted into the front cover. I also frosted with cream cheese icing. It was excellent. And it had the exact same ingredients right down to the measurements, except for the blackberry jam. Very moist and yummy!

[Skidmore]

19. I'm going to try this substitution the next time we have

overripe bananas. Banana anything goes quickly in our house. I'll bet it would be good with currants as a substitute too, only use mace. At any rate, the next time I make it, I want to reduce the cinnamon a little and up the other spice a bit.

Another lady brought this excellent nut cake to hte dinner and I asked her about the recipe. She had taken a yellow cake mix and added a box of vanilla pudding mix (cooking kind, not instant), increased the eggs by one, increase the oil by a couple of tablespoons, and decreased the water by a couple of tablespoons and added wanuts, frosted it with buttercream frosting, and sprinkled it with chopped walnuts. It was very buttery and hearty too.