Daring Bakers’ Challenge: Sans Rival!

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake!  And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.

In case you’re confused, yes, this was last month’s challenge.  I am super late posting this!  Procrastination, the usual culprit, wasn’t to blame this time.  Although too late to count, I finally decided to make the Sans Rival last week in between bowing string parts for Beethoven 3 (it’s totally fine and normal if you don’t know what this entails).  With the ingredients on hand and friends to feed it to that evening, why not?

(umm, especially when this is the only thing I’ve been able to make since Thanksgiving…)

Pumpkin Stout Gingerbread Bundt with Brown Butter Icing

Ahh, fall.  Your days are shorter, the air is cooler, and leaves crunch beneath our feet.

Wait…what’s that other sound?

Bundt pans trembling with fear!  Or is it with glee?

That’s right, we’re hurtling towards National Bundt Day (November 15!), made popular and most earnestly celebrated by Mary the Food Librarian.   Last year was my first time paying tribute to the curvaceous confection, and thus the Zebra Bundt Cake was born.  This year’s offering is much more visually tame, but the flavors certainly make up for that.  

Pink Grapefruit Yogurt Bundt

I finally caught Bundt Fever back in November when I made a zebra bundt cake for Mary the Food Librarian‘s I Like Big Bundts Roundup celebrating National Bundt Day.  (Did I use the b word enough in that sentence?)  Standard bundt cakes are usually too big for my needs, so when I spotted a half-sized pan several months ago at a nearby shop, pangs of want were planted deep within my soul.  This is me pretending to be melodramatic.

A couple weeks ago, the Groupon of the day was for that shop, and I didn’t think twice about it.  Don’t you love how they help you save money on money that you probably wouldn’t have spent otherwise?  That little bundt pan (there was only one left! fate!) was mine. 

Fresh Strawberry Cake…and Sesame Street!

I always thought grown-ups were weird whenever they’d talk about how fast kids grow up.  It felt like it took foreverrrr!   Nothing could be better than being a Big Kid, right?  They could ride all the rides at theme parks, stay up later, watch the PG movies, and go to sleepovers.  The good life.

Now I wish they had Big Wheels for grown-ups, along with nap time followed by milk and cookies.

Wait…except I still don’t like naps.  (most of the time…)

Cake POOPS!

Let’s just get this out: poop, Poop, POOOOP.  Everyone poops!

Have I grossed anyone out yet?  I hope so.

I have been babysitting a lot lately, and after changing MANY a poopy diaper a couple weeks ago, I was struck with a brilliant (IMO) idea.  It seems like everyone and their mom has been obsessed with cake pops for quite some time now, thanks to the oh-so clever and talented Bakerella.  So what happens when you drop an extra O in there?  Cake Poops are born!  Totally inappropriate, I know, but they just so happen to make perfect treats for April Fool’s Day!

These are made just like cake pops, except the cake is squished around the tops of the sticks instead of being formed into balls first.  My cake/frosting mixture seemed a little too squishy (maybe because I ate some of the cake?), so I added some rice crispies to make it a little more stable.  Bonus poop texture!

The recipe that started it all…

It’s my baby niece’s fault.

You see, they found out she was allergic to dairy and soy about a year ago.   My sister therefore had to change her own diet since she was nursing.  This was around her 35th birthday last year (today!), so I felt like I needed to somehow make a dessert that my sister could eat.  I don’t remember what I searched for that actually led me to it, but the recipe that intrigued me the most was Joy the Baker‘s Vegan Chocolate Avocado Cake.

Joy’s blog was actually my first true introduction to the world of food blogging.  Up until then, I would just blindly look up recipes on AllRecipes.com or look through cookbooks (I still do both, of course).  It was all over from there. I started bookmarking any blog that seemed interesting, and still check them all almost every day.  I must have immediately felt like blogging was something I’d like to do, as evidenced by all the photos that I took while making and serving this cake.  Since then, I’ve almost always made a point to photograph at least the finished products.

As you can see by the photos above, the wet ingredients of this cake make an interesting…soup.  Once you add the dry ingredients though, it definitely looks like chocolate cake batter.  This was my first time making a vegan dessert, so I learned about the vinegar/baking soda trick to make the batter rise!

Black Forest Frankencake

My dad got me into baking when I was a kid.  He’s not a professional baker, but is good at following directions to a T, which seems to be a good trait in baking. Together we made things like oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, frozen chocolate custard, triple chocolate cheesecake, and Black Forest cake.  Hmm…looking back, I’m definitely noticing a trend!

I’ve always baked desserts for holidays, but this past year started baking things for family birthdays rather than giving gifts.  It’s much more fun to give something that you’ve made yourself!