new york-style cheesecake

This week is a special edition of a boy bakes in brooklyn: on the road. After the rather disappointing experience with chocolate chip cookies, I travelled upstate to my parents’ house in Millbrook for a weekend away from the city. Knowing that I’d be there for a baking day, I decided to make something that required some of the baking tools in my parents’ kitchen that I don’t have access to in my own – for example, a spring-form pan and a big food processor.

Cheesecake is a dessert that I remember we made quite a bit when I was younger, especially since it’s my brother’s favorite dessert. It always seemed so complicated, necessitating techniques that you only come up against while doing complicated baking, like separating egg whites from egg yolks, baking in a water bath, and lots of precision. Also, cheesecake required me to make a crust, something I really want to practice as I learn how to bake, so that I can eventually make my own pie crusts.

I chose the cheesecake recipe for this week from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. In preparation for starting this blog, this was a book that I consulted to brush up on a few baking techniques, review basic baking tools, and pick a few aspirational recipes, this cheesecake being one of them. Since I had to return the book to the library a few weeks ago, I pulled the recipe from her website (http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/new-york-style-cheesecake) where I found there was also a video of her putting together the cheesecake on her TV show, so I was excited to have an additional resource to look to for guidance while tackling this difficult baking project. Luckily, this particular cheesecake didn’t require egg separating, so I dodged that bullet. But it did suggest baking with a water bath, so I was eager to meet that challenge.

The crust was really easy to do, though it required the use of my Mom’s big food processor, something I don’t have in Brooklyn. I have a smaller one, but breaking up the wafer cookies in mine would have taken a few different batches. After the cookies were sufficiently pulverized, I mixed them with a couple tablespoons of sugar and some melted butter. Then I pressed the crumbs down into the bottom of the greased spring-form pan and a little bit onto the sides. Getting the crumbs pressed onto the sides was a little difficult, but with some elbow grease, it eventually worked out. I baked the crust for about ten minutes and set it aside to cool.

While it was cooling, I started in on the cake. The recipe called for three pounds of cream cheese to be beaten together until it was light and fluffy, then have flour and sugar slowly beaten in later. Unfortunately, I read the recipe incorrectly and started beating the cream cheese at first with all the sugar in the bowl, thinking it was like creaming butter. Oops. It really didn’t cause too much of an issue, but it was pretty difficult to get the cream cheese light and fluffy at first. It got there eventually – thank God for electric mixers.

I added the flour a little at a time, and then beat in the vanilla extract and sour cream. Once those were fully incorporated, I added in the eggs one at a time. Instead of worrying about breaking each egg separately into the cake mixture – all the while stressing over possible shell shards making their way into and trying to fish them out of the perfectly white batter – I put all of the eggs into a darker-colored bowl. This way, if any shell shards got away from me I’d see them as I was cracking open the eggs. Also, the bowl made it easy to pour the eggs into the cake mixture one by one.

After the eggs were all mixed into the batter, I poured the mixture into the now-cooled crust and covered the bottom and sides of the spring-form pan with a double-layer of aluminum foil. Then I placed the cake into a big roasting pan so that we could surround the cake with some boiling water. One of the hallmarks of a successful cheesecake is whether the top of your cake is free of cracks. Martha’s suggestion for preventing cracks from forming is to bake the cake in a hot water bath. Once the hot water was poured into the roasting pan, it took all three of us to get the flimsy pan into the oven. We managed with only minimal water spillage.

 

Once the cake went into the oven, it had to bake for forty-five minutes at 350, another thirty minutes at 325, and then sit in the warm oven with the door cracked for an hour. I pulled the cake out of this last step at around the fifty-minute mark so that we could use the oven to start preparing dinner. The recipe instructions told me to let the cake cool completely on a wire rack and then refrigerate the cake for six to twenty-four hours. Despite getting up and shopping early, by the time I refrigerated the cheesecake for six hours, we’d be having dessert at almost midnight. We made and ate dinner and I pulled the cake out after only four hours. Wherever Martha Stewart’s secret lair is, I’m sure that an alarm was going off, telling her that someone was deliberately disobeying her recipe instructions. But the cake looked perfect – see for yourself.

What happened when we cut into the cheesecake? Tune in tomorrow for the results of the taste test.

Thanks for reading!

- Jon

a tale of two cookies: the taste test

This week I experienced my first taste of failure. I was not thrilled with the way that either of these two cookies turned out because quite a few of the bottoms got burnt. The cookies made from scratch were so much better than the cookies made from store-bought dough, but I don’t think that came as a huge surprise.

Let’s start with the store-bought dough cookies, so we can talk about them now and never speak of them again. The few cookies from this group that didn’t burn were crispy and virtually taste-free. The chocolate chunks were evenly distributed and a decent size, but they didn’t taste much like chocolate. I really like my chocolate chip cookies to have a nice soft center to them, but these had almost the texture of crackers. Terrible, chocolate-studded crackers.

My homemade cookies tasted great for the most part. I was disappointed by how many I discovered to have burned, but overall, they really weren’t that bad. Cookies are definitely something I am going to work on again in a few weeks, I really want to improve on them. I got a suggestion from my friend Anna to use Silpat baking sheets when doing cookies, and when I brought this idea up to others, I found that many baking friends and acquaintances swear by them. I will definitely pick some up before I do cookies again. The homemade cookies did have that delicious soft center to them that I crave in a good chocolate chip cookie, the chocolate morsels were evenly distributed and melted to perfection in the few cookies that I sampled for myself. The cookies were flavorful, but I feel like they can be better. I also would like my homemade cookies to look a little bit more like the other ones did on top – they were just so professional looking. Maybe it’s something that comes with practice. I’ll have to see.

I shared the cookies with my coworkers, who seemed very happy for the treat on the last day of our fiscal year. The homemade cookies went really fast, while there is still a full Tupperware container of the other cookies sitting on my desk waiting to be thrown out come Monday. I was nervous about the snow that was supposed to hit over the weekend possibly closing the building and the cleaning crew not being able to empty out my trash over the weekend. One of the last things I want to find at my desk on a Monday morning is the lingering odor of burnt cookies – gross! The reactions to the cookies were pretty positive. Most people responded that the cookies were great, and I truly appreciate it. I’ve said it before, but I’m my own worst critic sometimes, so I’m definitely harder on myself than the other taste-testers I have. I was also surprised to find out that lots of people really like burnt baked goods, because some of my coworkers responded to my burnt-offering apology with the kind, “Doesn’t matter to me,” and even “No, I like the burnt ones!” This leads me to believe that people will take any free baked goods they get, or maybe that the folks in my office are so starved for homemade baked goods that the quality of the product doesn’t even matter. For the next couple taste-test columns, I’ll be employing other testers, so we’ll have to see.

With this project I came up against my first brush with a bad finished product, but I’m eager to push through. I will definitely be investing in some Silpat sheets and will be trying cookies again in the near future. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading.

- Jon

a tale of two cookies

It was the best of nights, it was the worst of nights, it was a night of wisdom, it was a night of foolishness, it was a night for baking cookies from premade store-bought dough, it was a night for baking cookies from scratch.

This week I wanted to prove to myself that I could take on a baking project completely from scratch. I also wanted to be able to measure my from-scratch cookies against ones that came from a mix, as kind of a mark of my progress so far. I settled on baking chocolate chip cookies, using the classic Nestle Tollhouse recipe from the back of the chocolate chip package and baking them alongside the premade cookie dough that comes in a tube. As you’ll read, the results were mixed.

The Nestle Tollhouse recipe calls for flour to be mixed with some salt and baking soda (remember how I bought baking powder by mistake?) and then set aside while two sticks of softened butter are creamed with both white and brown sugar. For the second week in a row, I forgot to leave my butter out to soften it, so I tried to do so at the last minute by letting it hang out on top of the stove while the oven preheated. Not so successful.

This is also one of the problems with trying to bake on a weeknight – not a lot of margin for error with timing. The butter had softened slightly, but not really enough, so when I started to beat the sugar and butter together, butter was flying everywhere. I’ve mentioned that I pride myself on keeping a clean kitchen, so tonight was a night that those OCD tendencies were put to the test a little bit.

Once I got the butter and sugar nice and creamy together, I added two eggs, one at a time and beat them into the butter. While cracking the second egg, a little piece of shell went into the butter mixture and I had to fish it out. I’m really praying that’s the only piece of shell that found its way into the mixture. I looked for any more pieces for a good few minutes before I was satisfied the rest of the batter was shell-free. If it’s one thing I really can’t stand is an unexpected unpleasant surprise in a baked good. It’s one of many traits I inherited from my maternal grandfather, Guido, along with a love of shoes and thick hair that responds to no amount of product or taming.

After the eggs were incorporated into the mixture, it was time to slowly beat in the flour, which was fun, as plumes of flour flew out of the bowl each time I turned on the beater. Even without butter going everywhere, my kitchen got pretty wrecked tonight.

Even before the mixer got started, the kitchen was getting a little wrecked.

After the dough was set, I mixed in the chocolate chips and the nuts. I don’t tend to love nuts in my cookies, but I’m also not strongly opposed to them, so I decided to follow the advice of the Tollhouse experts and leave the nuts in. I chose walnuts and decided to chop them very finely to avoid having them competing with the chocolate chips for attention in each of the cookies.

Now it was time to crack open the tube of dough and start spooning out cookie dough. I made up one baking sheet with the premade dough and one with my dough, set it in the oven for ten minutes and started cleaning up. I checked the cookies at nine minutes and thought they didn’t quite look done yet. As I continued cleaning, I remembered they would continue to cool for a couple minutes still on the baking sheet, so they might finish baking on the actual sheet. I worried that leaving them in the oven would result in them possibly baking for too long. As I fretted over whether or not to pull the cookies a minute early, the buzzer went off. I pulled the cookies out right away and realized that they were totally fine. As I tested one cookie on each side for doneness, I saw that both were nearly completely uncooked and mushy in the center of each cookie. I left them  both on their sheets for two minutes, and when I had come back, they were all done and ready to go. The cookies that came from the premade dough looked like they had just come out of a box of Freihofer’s., but my homemade batch were all much bigger and thicker. I couldn’t wait until they cooled so I could try one of each. (Anyone who actually knows me knows that this last statement is a complete lie and that the second the cookies were cool enough to touch with my hands, they were cool enough to sample. But you’ll have to wait for Saturday for the results of the taste test!)

After the baking sheets were free, I put together a second sheet of cookies for both premade and homemade doughs and popped those into the oven. What I was noticing as the cookies cooled and I stored them away was that most of the premade-dough cookies were coming out crispy and burnt, while my homemade ones were not burnt on the bottom. The same thing held true for the second batch of cookies as well. I have to say that I’m a little embarrassed that it was easier for me to bake my homemade cookies than it was to bake cookies from a tube.

Tonight was truly a tale of two cookies: pretty premade dough cookies that burnt to a crisp and more rustic homemade ones that turned out looking pretty fluffy and chewy. We had a messy kitchen and some nasty burnt cookies, but a recipe that went off pretty much without a hitch.

Thanks for reading! As always, feel free to take it to the comments.

- Jon

funfetti cupcakes: the taste test

First off, let me apologize for taking so long to post! The days after Joe’s birthday I came down with a really terrible cold that sidelined me through all of last weekend. During all of last week, I would go directly from work to bed, or just not make it out of bed at all. A box of tissues, a z-pack, and far too many episodes of Friends on DVD, and I was ready to jump back into life this Monday morning. Now that it’s Wednesday and I have procrastinated enough on writing this next entry.

As we all recall, there was quite a bit of drama concerning the frosting, and thankfully some of you have offered support and suggestions via the comments or email, all of which I wholeheartedly appreciate. I do want to say that my frosting kicked ass. It was delicious and creamy, and not overly sweet. It’s possible that when I got home from Joe’s party in the wee hours of Sunday morning, I may have snuck a little from the bowl of leftover frosting. I will neither confirm nor deny that it happened.

Two quick caveats before we get into how the cupcakes got to the party and how they went over in the taste test. One, I forgot to take a picture of the finished product! So stupid, and I apologize, but they looked alright. I’m not an artiste with frosting yet, but I’m sure I’ll get there someday. Not bad for a first time out solo. Caveat number two, I forgot to grab my camera to take pictures at Joe’s birthday party so you all could see some pictures of us sampling the cupcakes alongside our fancy cocktails at the bar. As I was rushing out the door to catch the bus with a box full of cupcakes, slipping my camera into my coat didn’t quite happen. It turned out to be for the best.

Getting the cupcakes to the party on public transportation was no easy feat. You all have seen the picture of the bundled-up cupcakes in their box covered in aluminum foil. They were pretty secure, but it’s not like the box was wall-to-wall cupcakes – there was some room for them to slide around. Also, many of you may not have taken city buses around Brooklyn, but it’s not always a smooth ride. However, I wasn’t about to shell out $15 to take a car service for twenty-something blocks, and it was too far and too cold to walk all the way to the bar with the box of cupcakes, so the bus was my sole option. I have never in my life had a smoother ride on any form of public transportation anywhere. My bus driver guided that bus so smoothly down through Greenpoint and into Williamsburg that I swear we could have been floating on air. I was shocked that all of the cupcakes arrived whole and without the frosting getting everywhere. I’ve lived in Greenpoint for over three years now and I’ve never felt like even remotely praising anything or anyone associated with the MTA until that night. Bravo, B43 bus-driver-lady.

When I got to the bar, everyone was stoked to see the cupcakes. Joe was beside himself with joy so we put the cupcakes down in our reserved area. A few minutes later, our server stopped by and took them away. Apparently, the bar had a big notice up on their website that you can’t bring in outside food to a party there. It’s their rule and I understood, but we were all really bummed. Our server put the cupcakes up on a shelf in the kitchen where they sat uneaten by anyone in our party. Then, my friend David, who was standing next to the kitchen, looked over and caught one of the chefs sneaking one of my cupcakes. At this point, our server had been missing for about ten minutes, we all needed drinks, and David was fired up that he wasn’t allowed to eat a cupcake but the kitchen staff was. Luckily our server didn’t show up for another twenty minutes or so, because David was about to lose his cool when he witnessed the cupcake-snatching. By the time our server showed up to take our next drink order, David had calmed down and let well enough alone. And sure, I was upset, but I thought that causing a scene about a stolen cupcake would possibly lead to the rest of them all “accidentally” falling off the shelf in the kitchen. I think also the stress over the frosting had tired me out – I didn’t have any more fight left in me.

By the time we were ready to leave the bar the size of our party had greatly dwindled. We decided to trudge the few blocks over to Joe’s apartment and sample the cupcakes there. Seven of us sat up in Joe’s living room at two in the morning eating cupcakes paired with wine, whiskey or water.

I tried one cupcake of each size. The frosting was fantastic and totally seemed worth the trouble. The larger cupcakes were perfect. The cake was moist, buttery, while also being light and fluffy, but the cupcakes didn’t fall apart and crumble in my hand. The smaller cupcakes were fine, if not a little too firm. I think had I taken them out maybe a minute or two sooner, they would have been perfect. Lesson learned. Overall, I was very satisfied with the result of this project and feel comfortable not using mixes to do cakes anymore.

To make up for being out of commission on Saturday, I planned to bake during this week. For my next project, I went out shopping for the ingredients only to make the rookie mistake of getting baking powder instead of baking soda. By the time I realized it tonight, it was too late to go out to the store and get the right ingredient. Instead I will be baking tomorrow night and posting about my experience the same night, and then again this weekend I will get back on schedule. To add a little more excitement, a boy bakes in brooklyn is hitting the road. I will be out of town this weekend, but I will be baking while upstate at my parents’ house. While the snow falls here in Brooklyn, be on the lookout for a flurry of postings on a boy bakes in brooklyn! Ha!

No? Not funny? Maybe my next project could be a blog about learning comedy.

- Jon

funfetti birthday cupcakes

This week, my baking project was another throwback to childhood: the funfetti cupcake. My friend Joe’s 32nd birthday was yesterday, so for his birthday party, I decided I would bake a batch of cupcakes for everyone to enjoy while we were out at the bar. I perused the aisle at my local grocery store earlier in the week to see what the cake selection looked like and spotted the funfetti mix – classic yellow cake that’s freckled with rainbow-colored sprinkles in the mix. For those unfamiliar with this particular phenomenon – and seriously, shame on you – it makes your cake look as though it’s dotted with little rainbow fireworks inside. It’s very cute – perfect for the next birthday cake you want to bake for the under-10 set. Or in my case, the early-30s set.

Joe is a good friend that I met almost 3 years ago and one of the few people I know who truly revels in celebrating his birthday. I wanted to do something really special, so I cleared the funfetti cupcake idea with him (he was thrilled, called the selection “perfect”) and agreed with his suggestion that a simple vanilla frosting would be the best compliment to the rainbow-tinged cupcakes. Since my goal is to eventually get away from using store-made products, I set out to find an appropriate frosting recipe that I could make by myself. I settled on the “Silky Vanilla Butter Frosting” from my Good Housekeeping Cookbook.

Now, dear reader, I recognize that you are possibly shaking your head and thinking to yourself, “But Jon, wouldn’t it be easier to make homemade cupcakes and use store-bought frosting, instead of the other way around? You’d still get away from using mixes for everything while not stressing yourself out to the max at the same time!” While I agree, I don’t exactly know how one would do a homemade funfetti mix, and was more than willing to let the fine folks at Duncan Hines figure that out for me.

I started baking by following the instructions on the back of the cake mix and using my brand new hand-mixer! My note to self in last week’s blog posting inspired some charity on the part of my Mom, who offered to fund my electric-mixing dreams. Thanks, Mom!

When I pulled out the cupcake/muffin pans that I had bought a few years back, I realized that I had two mini-muffin pans and one regular-sized pan though I had originally thought it was the other way around. Suddenly, I realized I’d possibly have to do the cupcakes in two batches instead of just one, which could have posed some problems, but I figured I’d confront that problem if I came to it.

And come to it I did, but in all honesty, the cupcakes posed very few problems to me at all. The mix called for 18 or so minutes to bake the regular-sized cupcakes, so I figured I’d check on my minis around the 15-minute mark. Some of them got a little overdone, but for the most part they were fine. Next time, I’m checking on them at 12 minutes instead.

After the first batch of cupcakes went into the oven, I started working on the frosting. The ingredients were as follows:

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1&1/3 cups milk
2 sticks softened butter
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

The recipe instructed me to mix the sugar and flour together and then whisk the milk into them slowly. Afterwards, the mixture would be brought to a boil, and then cooked for two minutes. It sounded a little similar to making a roux, something I’ve done a few times before, even though I still find a roux to be a little intimidating. It’s not a technique that came with my degree from the Cooking School of Mom, and certainly not something I do often.

I steeled myself to attack the frosting-making with sheer nerve – flying blind like this and trying something new in the kitchen can be really scary. After I measured out the flour and sugar and combined them, I tried measuring out the milk, only to have a good quarter of a cup of milk get away from me and splatter all over the floor. I pride myself on the fact that I don’t often have a lot of messes in the kitchen. I keep a fairly clean workspace and very rarely get prep ingredients on the floor. As I stared down at the puddle of milk spreading across my kitchen, I started to lose my cool. But that old adage, “Don’t cry over spilled milk” saved my mood. I slowly whisked in the milk as instructed and left the floor as it was for the moment.

Once the milk/flour/sugar recipe was fully combined, I turned on the heat. I felt a little led astray by the writers of the cookbook, because when they say “stirring constantly” what they really mean is “don’t stop stirring to do a single other thing for the entire time it takes to boil and cook this mixture.” After I turned the heat on under the saucepan, I quickly cleaned up the floor and washed my hands. When I returned to the stove, I found the gooey concoction was beginning to stick to the bottom of my saucepan. This was frustrating because the last thing I wanted to do was burn the homemade frosting, run out and buy the store-bought stuff, and then hang my head in shame. So I focused all my energy into keeping the mixture moving.

A few air bubbles started to pop through the top surface of the mixture, which had become incredibly gluey, so I lowered the heat as much as I could and kept stirring. My arm felt like it was about to fall off. The next time someone makes a new year’s resolution to exercise more, but isn’t really the gym type, recommend making homemade frosting to them. After the frosting mixture heated for a few minutes, it needed to cool completely before being mixed in with the butter and vanilla extract (I’m assuming so that it doesn’t just melt the butter, but instead helps the butter retain its soft fluffyness). I put the frosting into a small bowl and placed it to the side, happy to no longer have to work with the “Silky Vanilla Butter Frosting,” or as I had now renamed it, “Condensed Evil.”

I pulled out the first batch of cupcakes and set them out to cool down, knowing that one cannot frost warm cupcakes. I even set up an impromptu baking rack for the regular-sized cupcakes by placing the wire tray from my toaster oven across on of the burners on my range. I felt very proud of myself for this moment of minor ingenuity.

I then had to fill up my one regular-sized cupcake tray for round two of baking and threw that batch into the oven, happy to have a break from having to watch or stir something. Good thing I don’t keep alcohol in my apartment, or the second half of this baking project might have been completed while tipsy. Seriously, frosting is stressful!

After the frosting mixture and the cupcakes had both cooled down, I set out to finish the frosting. I whipped up the butter to make it light and fluffy and added the milk/sugar/flour mixture in a few stages to the butter. When it was all thoroughly combined and the vanilla extract was mixed in as well, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the texture of the frosting. It looked lumpy and was just too limp to hold on to the top of the cupcakes, especially the minis. Though the recipe doesn’t say you can do it, I decided I’d cover the frosting with some plastic wrap and toss it in the fridge for about 10 minutes, figuring that would help firm it up. It worked perfectly. The frosting that came out of the fridge was the exact texture and consistency I was looking for. It spread well onto the cupcakes and looked great. I did my best with frosting the cupcakes, wishing that I had a piping bag so I could make them look even more professional. Maybe some day.

Last complaint about the frosting: there was way too much left over. What am I going to do with all of this? I hate wasting stuff when I’m cooking!

Once the cupcakes were thoroughly frosted and ready to go, I boxed them up and covered them with some tinfoil to protect them on the bus ride over to the bar. The weather forecast said there could be snow, and the last thing I wanted was for these cupcakes to be ruined after I stressed myself so much over them. As the bus slowly made its way through Greenpoint, I thought about my friend Ashley, who is such a devoted baker and Martha Stewart aficionado that she has a special carrier just for cupcakes that’s part of Martha’s collection of home goods from Macy’s. It’s a spectacular piece of kitchen ingenuity, but it’s just not how we run things in Brooklyn – cardboard ditto-box lid and tinfoil is how we roll.

That’s it for tonight! Hope you enjoyed this week’s post. Be on the lookout for my post about how the cupcakes turned out once we got to the party. The drama did not end in the kitchen this week!

grandma's crumb cake: the taste test

This recipe worked really well for the most part and I was very satisfied with the results. On Monday, I brought some of the crumb cake with me to my office. The response from my coworkers was very positive and everyone told me it was really delicious. I was a fan of the crumb cake as well, but I'm also my own worst critic, so I had two small complaints.

My first complaint was that I found the cake to be a little too fluffy for my own preferences. When I tried a piece Saturday night after the crumb cake cooled it was falling apart in my hands. However, by Monday afternoon when I had my second piece, the cake was now a little denser. By that time, it had been in its Tupperwear container for two days and I think some of the butter from the crumbs had seeped down into the cake. Maybe the key to this crumb cake is to make it ahead of time. If it’s to be served to guests at brunch, go ahead and bake it the night before so it has some time to settle afterwards. Also, I felt the crumbs had too much of a strong taste of cinnamon. Perhaps the powdered sugar I had accidentally overlooked would have cut that flavor, or perhaps next time, I’ll just cut back a tad on the cinnamon.

Besides those two minor criticisms, the cake was delicious and having it reminded me of Sunday morning visits to my grandparents' house. I think Grandma would be very proud.

grandma's crumb cake

My first project is a favorite treat of mine from childhood that is associated with my maternal grandmother, Angie Degennaro. Grandma is 92 years old, which means she was born in this wonderful borough of Brooklyn in 1918. She lived in Bensonhurst until the mid-1950s when she and my grandfather moved their two daughters out to Lindenhurst on Long Island.

Her crumb cake recipe comes from a spiral-bound cookbook called “Our Family Recipes,” a collection of family specialties and favorites that was compiled by my cousin, Patty Ruvolo, back in 1991. Grandma gave me a copy of the recipe book after my grandfather, Guido, passed away and she cleared all their possessions out of the house in Lindenhurst so she could move in with my Aunt Pam in West Babylon. The cookbook looks like it was put together using the old program The Print Shop and printed at home on a dot-matrix printer. Each recipe comes with the name of the person who submitted it to the cookbook, and quite a few stains from where a splash of something got away from my grandmother in the kitchen. There are lots of Degennaros, Ruvolos, Critellis and others in the pages of this book, which also contains the very coveted recipes for my Mom’s linzer tarts and my great-aunt Olga’s cream puff shells – both recipes I will be attempting later in the year.

This crumb cake recipe was not actually submitted by Grandma, but my cousin Virginia “Ginger” Degennaro. I picked it as my first project for it’s sentimental value and the fact that it utilizes store-bought yellow cake mix. Since this one is not a closely-kept family secret, nor is it the property of a published author, I figured I would post this one in full, something I might not be able to do each week.

1 box yellow cake mix

            - prepare as directed and bake in 13 x 9 pan.

Mix     2c flour

            2/3c sugar

            2t cinnamon

            2 sticks melted butter

            1t vanilla

When cake is 2/3 done or golden on top. Crumble mixture on top. Finish baking. Sprinkle powered sugar on top.

The tossing aside of traditional recipe-writing in a step-by-step fashion combined with the spelling mistake of “powered” sugar made it absolutely necessary that I post Ginger’s recipe verbatim here.

I started with the yellow cake, and following the instructions on the back of the box, I combined the cake mix with eggs, vegetable oil and water. I got this:

Then the recipe called for me to beat the mixture together for 30 seconds using the electric beater that I don’t have. Luckily, I have like 5 whisks, so steeling myself against the coming pain of a sore wrist, I grabbed my nearest whisk and started working that cake mix together like no one’s business. Ten seconds later, my wrist hurt so much that I wanted to cry, but my mixture was lumpy and very unappealing-looking, so I soldiered on and eventually got the mixture as lump-free as possible. Note to self: get an electric mixer.

I grabbed one of my glass 13 x 9 baking pans and promptly poured the contents of the bowl into the baking pan. As I was scraping the last few drizzles out of the bowl, I realized I had forgotten to grease the bottom of the baking dish – shoot! Now I was faced with the choice of dumping the batter back into the bowl, cleaning out the baking dish, and either drying the baking dish by hand and then greasing it, or leaving it to dry in my drying rack while greasing my other baking dish and pouring the batter into that one. I decided to leave the batter where it was and worry about all the unnecessary cleanup for after I had some crumb cake. I figured it’s a glass baking dish, the cleanup won’t be as awful as if I’d used a metal one. Note to self: don’t get flustered trying to take pictures for your blog posts when baking so that you miss crucial steps that will save you trouble later.

I should clarify that yes, I do have two 13 x 9 glass baking pans and no electric mixer. Hey, someday I might need to make two pans of lasagna at once, right?

Moving along, the cake went into the oven and I started on making the crumbs. This required melting two whole sticks of butter, which I decided to do on my stove because I feel like butter splatters way too much whenever I’ve melted it in the microwave and results in lots of extra cleanup. So I put the two whole sticks on the lowest setting and let them melt away while I measured out and combined the other crumb ingredients in a separate bowl.

mmmm... feel that heart attack building now

After I poured the butter into the other crumb ingredients, I was met with the conundrum of what utensil to use to mix the ingredients together, and settled on a fork. I think it worked pretty well.

By this time, the cake was still a good 10 minutes away from being crumb-ready, so I set the crumbs aside and did a little bit of cleanup. One of my mom’s cardinal rules of the kitchen was that we always clean up as we go along, a lesson that has served me quite well in the many years since I first learned it. When my timer went off, I noticed that the butter had separated a little bit from the rest of the crumb ingredients, so I gave them another quick mix before I pulled the cake out. The cake was not quite set and just starting to get golden on top, so my timing was on and I started crumbing the top of the cake. This process took longer than I thought it would, but eventually I got the whole cake covered and placed it back into the oven to finish off. When the timer went off again to signal the end of the baking, I took a look at the cake and it appeared as though the crumbs were still a little too moist, so I left the cake in for a few additional minutes.

After I pulled it out of the oven for good, I let the crumb cake rest for about 10 minutes before carving it up into big squares. I couldn’t resist a piece, so I had it as dessert. And since the powdered sugar was not listed with the other ingredients for the recipe, I neglected to pick it up at the grocery store. So the cake is without powdered sugar, but it's probably a blessing since trying to sprinkle it on top of the cake would have made a huge mess I'm sure.

So, that’s how it all went down on Saturday. I am bringing in some of the crumb cake to work for my coworkers and will post in a few days what their and my reactions were.

Thanks for reading!

- Jon

first! an introduction

Welcome to my blog, a boy bakes in brooklyn. I’ve started this blog to document my attempt to become more comfortable and competent while baking. I consider myself pretty skilled when it comes to cooking, but baking has always felt like a completely different process altogether. It includes lots of additional hardware and gadgets that the limited space in my one-bedroom apartment and the budget from the salary at my low-level corporate job just don’t allow. Baking requires exact measurements and sometimes, exact processes, like whipping egg whites to a proper consistency or folding said egg whites into another mixture. The idea that the smallest misstep while baking can completely destroy an entire project is daunting and also one of the reasons I’ve stayed away in the past.

But no more.

There are too many people in my life who bake well, and I am determined to become a member of that group. My plan is to spend each Saturday this year baking. I’ll blog about my experience on Sundays and report back later in the week with results from my taste-testers. I plan on starting with some very simple recipes using pre-mixes or other shortcuts, but my intention is to eventually move away from these. I know that as someone who is as comfortable in the kitchen as I am, and as someone who lives in Brooklyn – self-proclaimed home of the DIY food movement – should turn his nose up at using store-bought mixes, but these early projects are more about building confidence, practicing, and evaluating what is missing from my kitchen that will enable me to bake.

That said, I’m glad you’re reading this and are along with me on this journey. Please feel free to offer encouragement or suggestions in the comments of each post.

- Jon