Monday, April 26, 2010

Lemon Raspberry Cake With Lemon Whipped Pudding Frosting

Where did the time go? Cannot believe that I have not post for almost a month. I had a good birthday party celebrated by my friends and family earlier in April. For once, I did not have to make the cake! LOL. Just kidding, I actually enjoy make different kinds of cakes. In addition, spring allergy hits me in full speed this month that I almost sneeze and have itchy eyes every day. But it is still nice to see flowers and green leaves everywhere. I also have been very busy on teaching CPR/AED pro as a volunteer instructor for Red Cross.

Now let's come back to cake. :) Yesterday, I made this 3-layer lemon cake with raspberry jam fillings cake for my niece's birthday. The frosting was made of instant pudding, milk and cool whipped. It was very light, delicious, and not too sweet. More like the European or Asian pastry. The only problem was that the decoration writing bled out all over the cake. I was worried if the usual cake frosting would work as writing on the pudding frosting and my worry became true. Oh, well, at least, everybody loved the taste of the cake.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Easter Desserts

The weather was beautiful in the past two days. It was even the record high in temperatures 2 days ago. It is surely nice to enjoy the 80 degree (25'C) sunny days in early April. Of course, it goes right back to 40 degrees (5'C) and rains whole day long.

The short warm weather does boost all the plants and flowers to grow. All trees have leaves and there are Daffodils, Hyacinthe, even Tulips blooming everywhere. The crocus have almost done with blooming. This also means that the allergy season has come back as well. It is no fun to sneeze and have itchy eyes all day long.

Got invited to Easter dinner tomorrow so I decided to try make 2 new kinds of desserts for it. Both are gluten free version so nobody is going to have problems to eat either.

The first one is the "coconut pecan oatmeal cake". The cake part contains both gluten-free flour mix and oatmeal with cinnamon and nutmeg. It has a nice spiced cake taste and very moisture. The topping is made of brown sugar, pecans, shredded coconut, milk, and butter. The topping is applied after the cake is done then the whole thing is put into broiler to caramelized the topping.

The second one is the "apple rum cake". This one is more like a loaf cake. It has chopped apples, raisins and rum in the cake mixture. It actually does not taste that much of rum in the bread since most of it has been absorbed in the raisins. And the chopped apples give it a better texture and fruity taste. However, personally, I prefer the coconut pecan oatmeal cake more since it has that feeling of "comfort food" for the holiday. Hope that everybody has a nice Easter day week and don't eat too much chocolate eggs or jelly beans!