It's Christmas in September!!

Continuing on with our unplanned international week.  This past weekend one of us went visiting parents.  The mother go her shipment of holiday goods early and the order was accidentally duplicated. Nothing had to be returned however. So with extra Stollens to spare one was given to go and brought to cake hour today.

Another box from Dimpflmayer!

Keeps for a long time - no stale date needed!

Fresh out of the box - traditional shape!

All sliced and ready to go!

We have seen this many times before.  Stollen is the traditional German Christmas cake. This version is the Marzipan Stollen meaning it has a marzipan filling inside.  It is made by Dimpflmayer in Canada and as it says on the package it keeps for a long time!  The marzipan version is our favorite as it is always good and moist and the marzipan adds a nice flavor touch.  It did not take that long for this to disappear!

Typical raisins, candied fruit, slivered almonds and some marziapn!

Yesterday, China - Today, French treats via Japan.

We had another international treat today!  This one actually came from Japan and was not produced by an American subsidiary of a Japanese company! One of our colleagues from the Japan was having a visit from his mother from Japan.  Included with her luggage was a box of treats that made it to cake hour.

This was our package for today- right from Japan!

Notice the very Japanese sounding name!

As usual - several layers of packaging!

But finally you get to the box with the company logo!

As one expects from a product made for Japanese consumers, the box was very well and decoratively wrapped. Notice the name, however!  Henri Charpentier!!  Not exactly a Japanese sounding name, is it?  Apparently Henri was born in Ashiya, Japan.   The byline on the package says, in French, "He was born in Ashiya blessed between mountains and ocean and filled with a cultural spirit.  It is a pleasure to offer happiness with these delicious sweets!"  Very nice!!

This logo has a message!

The types of sweets we expect to find are called Madeleines and Financiers.  These are both known French confections.  Financier is a small French pound cake that resembles a gold bar - hence, possibly, the name. It uses brown butter so is darker than a pound cake. A Madeleine is also a pound cake but is made in a distinctive shell shaped mold.  The traits of both of these are well reflected in what we had today.

More wrapping for the two treats!

In addition to attractive wrapping, Japanese products usually have several layers of packaging. This was no exception but once we got to the box and opened it there were several individually wrapped offerings of the two types of mini-cakes.  Being wrapped individually kept them moist.  They were also very good tasting buttery and not overly sweet.  And again they went down very well with tea or coffee!  It was a nice bi-cultural offering today getting some French treats by way of Japan.

One of each!

Top is the Madeleine and bottom is the Financier! For future reference!

It's time for the August Moon Festival!!

Cake hour is still going strong...just getting to blog about it gets a little behind. Today was the festival of the August Moon.  That is what is called in Western Culture.  It is a holiday of the far East including China, Taiwan, Vietnam etc.  There is referred to as the mid-autumn festival.  You might think they would call it the end of Summer festival because that is when it takes place not in the middle of autumn.  But, whatever!  It is sometimes called the mooncake festival because it is when traditional mooncakes are served up. For the uninitiated these are pastry shells filled with sweetened bean or other fruit paste.  It is like eating a pie crust with some thick pie filling.

Nicely packaged!

Chinese Specialty made in the good old USA!

And lots of packaging!!

Nice looking set of moon cakes!

 The ones we had today were from a Taiwanese company with a subsidiary in California.  Authentic Chinafornese as it were.  They came in a nicely decorated box that was typically over packaged.  Did they really need a hard plastic box inside the main box?  These were relatively small in comparison to others we have tried. One thing we liked about them was that the Chinese characters created within the pastry part on top apparently identified what the filling was.  This was a very clever and decorative way to let you know. If you were unsure of what was inside and if you liked it, you did not have to stick a probe in the bottom in the hopes of finding out what you are getting like some people do with filled chocolates. The fillings included black bean, date and pineapple - or we think one of them was pineapple.

Chinese characters in pastry are a neat touch!

Could be date, black bean or pineapple.

These tasted good. They are never very sweet but can sometimes be a little on the dry side. That was not the case with these.  Typically they go well with coffee or tea and these certainly did.  We were glad to be able to have another cultural event and celebrate with our Chinese colleagues.  Happy August Moon!

And this is typical filling. All in all they are like fig newtons!

First time for Babka!

It's time for another student cake!  Today's baker has a Jewish/Israeli heritage. Indeed after her internship she is headed to Israel for the month of August. Not bad!  To fulfill her obligation she decided to prepare something that reflected on her heritage and came up with a Babka! She found a recipe online and undertook to prepare this classic Jewish/Eastern European treat.

This is something grandmother would have made!

It's Babka in a pan!

 

Streusel on the top adds texture!

In some respects this is a cross between a cake and bread.  It is a yeast dough that is twisted into a shape and includes either chocolate or cinnamon as a filling.  You could say it is a cake version of a cinnamon or chocolate roll. Our baker today opted for the chocolate version. Since the dough is twisted and then baked the filling forms shapes throughout that are seen when it is cut.  This makes for a nice visual effect.  The top is covered with streusel which is made from butter, sugar and flour.  Streusel is very commonly strewn across the tops of coffee cakes and the like so it was appropriate here.

Good and solid and tough to cut at first!

The twisting of filled dough makes for some stripes inside!

Today's baker made two solid bricks of Babka.  They were baked to a golden brown. I don't know if it was the batter or the added streusel but the outside was very hard at first and made for some interesting cutting. Once you got through the edge it was perfectly fine.  It certainly tasted good, went great with coffee and seemed to go over well with all.  There was a whole one left over so we let today's student take some home to share with the family.  Given that she wanted to share something special and the quality of the homemade product this gets our four star rating.

Bastille Day Brownies

We are heading into the second week of the student cake competition. It also happened to coincide with Bastille Day.  This is a big holiday in France, in case you didn't know, commemorating the storming of the Bastille prison during the French Revolution.  It is interesting that this name is used in the English Language.  The French holiday is actually referred to in French as La Fête nationale or The National Celebration.  It celebrates the referenced Bastille storming but also the day the French were unified which is also on February 14, 1790.  Maybe since it celebrates two events they decided to not reference the Bastille in the naming of the holiday.  Did you know that as part of the celebration The oldest and largest regular military parade in Europe is held on the morning of 14 July, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris in front of the President of the Republic, French officials and foreign guests?  Now you do!

So far today our student volunteer baker opted for some basic brownies but left them on a sheet uncut and then frosted them with three colors of frosting to give us the French tricolor flag!!  Très créatif!  

I'm not French but someone told me it was Bastille Day!

Tricolor Brownies!

It should be viewed this way to accurately represent the flag!

It was fun to tie in his baked goods with the French national day.  The Brownies were a friend's recipe and were very dense and chocolatey - much more fudge than cake like.  The frosting on the top was a commercial frosting that our friend had colored with normal food coloring. It tasted exactly as we would expect. The brownies were good and probably would have been so without the frosting. But then it would not have been a tribute to Bastille Day.  

The squares went fast!

More fudge than cake in this batch!

We give today's entry a 3.5 star rating giving the day's treat credit for being homemade and for being French fun!

The cake had cancer and could probably cause it too!

A very colorful entry today for our student cake month!  The top of the cake alone had a lot of color and had something to say!  One of the things we study in the lab is hepatocellular caricinoma or HCC which you see on the cake. One of the models we use is a subcutaneous tumor model in rodents.  The animal image is that of a mouse and the little red floret on the upper back of the mouse represents the tumors that form.  So we have a colorful paean, as it were, to the work that we do.  This definitely gets marks for creativity.

Celebrating research with a colorful cake!

Our work with HCC or liver cancer gets a different publication!

So does our study model!  That's a mouse, y'all!

That's not a flower. IT'S A TUMOR!

The cake was another pan cake and the question was what flavor would it be...chocolate, yellow white...or electric blue and yellow!  Say what?  That's what it turned out to be. For the first time we have a marble cake not out of the traditional chocolate and yellow cake but rather yellow and some electric blue batter. This apparently was mix of yellow and actually aqua blue cake mixes.  Taking note of the cancer theme on the cake, there was some sarcasm about whether the food coloring in the cake could actually cause cancer.  Lighten up people!  It's not like your eating a ton of it. Though we did try to get out 1000 calorie a day colleague to eat several pieces.  Maybe he will be a test case!

What flavor do you suppose?

Are we at risk from this blue coloring? Call the FDA!

The flavor for each remained vanilla. This cake got your attention and was certainly unique. It tasted fine however the vanilla frosting in various colors was definitely a commercial frosting. Although the recipe was not original, the artistic factor gives this cake a boost and a four star rating. Not to mention that the baker had to combine those bags of batter to get the swirl effect! What a physical challenge that must have been!

Imagine the effort mixing those colors!

Today we also had bread number two - also cinnamon raisin!  The goal was to make it less moist and doughy to try to get a better bread consistency.  It was definitely drier but still not quite there. Further experiments are necessary.

Look familiar? It's daily bread number 2!

Definitely more bread than cake like but there is a ways to go!

A good mocha cake and it's NOT Duncan Hines

Our third student cake also went with the chocolate theme.  This was a chocolate cake that included coffee in both the cake batter and the frosting. So we guess that makes it a mocha cake. It turns out it was a collaborative effort. Our competitor for the day took advantage of a friend's better experience with baking and came up with this creation. 

All by herself Skeptical!

Her partner in cake!

The proud bakers!

A little asymmetry for effect?

It was a good size chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. The two people involved swear that the entire thing was made from scratch and not from a mix.  There was a little skepticism because the cake part was very dark as you tend to see after using Duncan Hines cake mixes.  However it was explained that was because both cocoa powder and coffee were used and also that the batter included heavy cream and vinegar as a replacement for buttermilk.  We were still a little skeptical.

There's coffee in that frosting

Dense and dark!

If we didn't know better....

.......could it be this? See the resmblance?

The frosting was a standard butter cream that also included some coffee.   As the cake got warmer the frosting softened up nicely and went better with the cake.  It was a two layer cake with the same frosting in between. The presentation was standard for a cake like this and it was essentially cylindrical that looked good and solid. On one part the top layer overhung the bottom layer supposedly for artistic reasons. We were skeptical.  One of the chefs indicated they were going to decorate it with M&Ms but then thought that would be too much.  It would NOT have been too much.

A few M&Ms would have been a nice finish!

Apparently the M&Ms didn't matter much!

The cake itself was rich and moist, to the relief of the bakers. The chocolate/mocha taste was great and as mentioned the cake paired very well with the frosting.  Assuming this was from scratch and not Duncan Hines, we give a four star rating for a great tasting recipe.

We are also guinea pigs for and experiment in bread making. Don't ask why because we don't know!  Today's sample was a cinnamon raisin bread made in a bread machine. We are supposed to help determine the best texture and dough ingredients.  This one was cinnamon raisin. It was good although a little too doughy so the recipe will be changed tomorrow!  Can't wait!

Give us our daily bread!

Cinnamon raising in case you were wondering!

On balance good but a little doughy!