Amateurs with Knives

Discouraged and irritated, I took a couple of weeks off of the current On Trial series, where we are painfully working our way through Taste of Home’s latest publication. The cover article proudly boasts “Best Ever Desserts” and we are putting them to the test.

After one failure of a cheesecake and one decent, although not “best ever” cake, we’re back in the kitchen to find out if ToH magazine can redeem themselves with their Tiramisu Brownies.

Tiramisu is a dessert of Italian origin. It is essentially comprised of soft, spongy ladyfinger cookies (preferably Italian savoiardi) dipped in strong coffee and liquor. These are layered with a mascarpone, egg, sugar and cream mixture, and topped with cocoa powder. The original dessert did not contain any alcohol, as it was often served to children. A delicate cake with an intense flavor, tiramisu is served in different incantations across the globe.

Photo courtesy Sebastian Kügler and Wikipedia

Still, I had some expectations going into this.

The savoiardi cookies that comprise a tiramisu are a spongy bite of deliciousness marinated in a strong coffee mixture. The cookies aren’t heavy at all, which left me a little concerned about a brownie version — a brownie is usually meant to be picked up and, in order to do so, this would have to have some sort of substance to it. Still, I was hopeful.

I’m not going to list the recipe to this - you’ll thank me later. If anyone out there wants it, the magazine is available at grocery stores everywhere and will probably be up on the ToH website in the near future.

Semisweet chocolate is melted and mixed with butter. So far, we seem to be on the right track here. If you use a decent-quality chocolate, you will get better results. I always love the glossy texture of chocolate and butter.

So far, so good. Beat in sugar and a lot of eggs. Add flour and… a quarter cup of instant coffee granules.

Ugh. You’ve got to be kidding me. An entire quarter cup!? Too late, this thing is now a train wreck that I can’t turn myself away from! I added it to the bowl.

That mess gets set aside, and you start on the filling. It’s mascarpone cheese, sugar and vanilla. Pretty basic.

Now we just put it all together. Half of the chocolate mixture goes into the bottom of a greased 13×9 baking dish. As you can see from the photo, I used parchment paper. That’s just how I roll. The mascarpone cheese mixture is poured on top.

The remaining batter is spread over the top. I found this annoying because the dough is not pourable, so I had to carefully smooth this out as best as I could without mashing it into the mascarpone. If you are making this recipe (I don’t know why you would be but just in case you are) I would suggest putting thin strips down and trying very carefully to smooth this out. Space the chocolate evenly, so as it bakes it can spread and connect to the other blobs of chocolate.

After baking, you get a big pan of brownies. Here is a slightly blurry photo of one that I managed to capture right before leaving for work.

The brownie portion itself is just a brownie. There’s no depth of flavor, no “vavoom” of the chocolate. I really think that if I had just left out the instant coffee, I would have had something decent. The mascarpone filling is good, but is sort of left hanging by the brownie not being able to deliver.

The Verdict: Fail

The recipe tried to give us a light brownie to mimic the original tiramisu dessert, and that was its failure. If we had gone with a brownie that consisted of rich texture, deep chocolate flavor and good dosage of a decent quality (and brewed) Italian roast, it would have been more successful.

Taste of Home, you need to get your act together.

Next up, we’ll be trying out the Taste of Home mini apple pies and, if this doesn’t rock my sock off, we’re calling it quits and giving the ToH Best Ever Desserts an abysmal Sandra Lee rating.

During February and March, we’re going to be taking a baking tour through Taste of Home’s “Best Ever Desserts” and putting them to the test: Do they stand up to their claim of best ever? Last week we tested their cover recipe, a Layered Mocha Cheesecake, and found it lacking. In fact, I wouldn’t even recommend someone make this for a casual dessert. There are better and more satisfying cheesecakes out there.

This week, we’re taking a look at their Toasted Butter Pecan Cake. I only took one picture of this while making it, because it’s essentially created with the usual cake ingredients:

2 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk

The white cake is spiced up by melting 1 1/4 cups of butter in a pan and toasting 2 cups of chopped pecans in it. You can pick up bags of chopped pecans at your local grocery store’s baking aisle, although they can still be a little large, regardless of saying “chopped” on them. If you prefer them smaller, take a small meat mallet to them while they’re still in the bag or, if you’ve already removed them from their package, put them in a sealable bag and give it a light whacking.

While that was happening, I went to work on preparing the rest of the cake batter. It’s pretty standard: Mix your ingredients thoroughly in a bowl.

When I was done with that, I realized I had ignored the pecans for too long and burned some of them. When they’re done toasting, remove them from the pan and spread them out on a cookie sheet lined with foil.

As you can see, I have a few burned bits in there. Before putting this into your cake batter, be sure to remove them, then mix them into your batter. Spread the batter evenly among three greased 9-inch baking pans and bake. I used two round pans and baked the cakes for a bit longer - hey, it all tastes the same.

The frosting is a delicious cream cheese frosting, but again, nothing an amateur baker hasn’t seen before. I would definitely recommend this over any store bought frosting, as I am not a fan of that canned crap. The frosting is pretty, uh… I don’t want to say “generic,” but it is not specific to the taste of the pecan cake, and can be used on many, many other cakes and cupcakes. It is also so simple (don’t be thrown off by the list of ingredients) that any novice can make it. In fact, I put my husband to work on this while I was doing other things. So easy even a Neanderthalspouse can do it.

Frosting:
2 packages (8 ounces each) cream cheese, softened
1 cup butter, softened
1 packages (2 pounds) confectioners’ sugar
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 to 3 Tbsp. milk

Basically, you take these ingredients, put them all in a huge bowl, and combine. Simple as that. If you are someone who is looking to build a nice repertoire of frostings you can use on different cakes and cupcakes, I would snag this. That may sound funny but I have a lot of excellent cake and cupcake recipes, but it’s harder to find decent frostings. Even I have entertained ideas of purchasing canned frosting. Don’t do it! There are better tasting frostings out there, and this is one of them. It tastes fun and light, and is truly the star of the the Toasted Pecan Cake. It does make a lot, even for this cake, so if you’re going with cupcakes, you may want to consider cutting the recipe in half.

The Verdict: Not Guilty of being a Best Ever Dessert

This is a nice cake, moist with a great texture, and is something that I would make again to finish off a casual springtime BBQ. Unfortunately, the wow factor just isn’t there — it’s a wonderful white cake with some pecans in it. Additionally, the frosting is nice but it is the crowning glory of the cake, upstaging the dessert, rather than acting as its spectacular sidekick. In my opinion, as a best ever dessert, the frosting should be over-the-top and tailored only to this cake, but it isn’t. I could use this frosting on fifty other cakes, and a “best ever” shouldn’t do that. I would recommend this to you as it is definitely worth making again once or twice for a casual occasion, but I do not think it is a best ever.

Note: I couldn’t capture a picture of my cake because I was late for an event and had to run. By the time I had a chance to take a picture of the cake, it was mostly eaten. The picture you see above is from the Taste of Home Magazine, and looks pretty much like the cake I made, except mine was only two layers.

A few years ago, I was given a subscription to Taste of Home Magazine as a Christmas gift. I had never heard of it before. At the time, the subscriptions I had were from Bon Appetit, Gourmet and Chocolatier, so you could imagine what I thought of this little country bumpkin magazine with recipes by amateur chefs. However, as most of my cooking repertoire was baking, I thought I should give it a whirl so I could at least try to find some dinner recipes. As I cooked through the magazines, I found as many misses as hits, but it eventually won me over.

Just the other day I had a brief discussion about this magazine with Citizen Chef, who apologetically remarked that Taste of Home is a bit “low brow” as far as cooking is concerned. At first I took great offense. Then I remembered he is a huge Rachel Ray fan, and the best recipe I’ve had of hers is a chicken breast plopped into a pot with a quarter cup of store bought hot sauce, slapped in between two buns with some blue cheese salad dressing and a slice of lettuce, and I started to feel a lot better. In fact, I am laughing as I write this, knowing that Citizen Chef will read this paragraph and know of my ultimate victory based on the paragraph above. As a consolation prize, I offer this ridiculous photo of Rachel Ray:

You’re welcome. Don’t say I never did anything for you.

In the last year, the Taste of Home editorial staff has changed, and the magazine has taken on a new format. Rather than miscellaneous pages with random recipes everywhere, the magazine is organized and focused, with themes a reader can actually follow. It appeared to me that they were stepping up their game to target the slightly more food savvy “Food Network” fanbase. It was a commendable change.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, I received this:

Best Ever?

To say that I love baking wouldn’t be strong enough. I have purchased expensive books just for that one must have delicious dessert recipe that I could not live without, spent a great deal of money on pricey ingredients and spent long, long hours on a single dessert. Twenty-four hours on a cake? No problem.

If you claim best ever desserts, you’d better be prepared to rock my socks off. The cover looked great, but after flipping through the recipes I had serious doubts.

This month we’re putting Taste of Home’s “Best Ever Desserts” on trial, starting with the cover recipe: Layered Mocha Cheesecake.

Let’s take a look at the ingredients. You can get a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be like based on the list.

Crust
1 1/2 cups cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookie crumbs
1/4 cup butter, melted

They lost me on the first ingredient. This is supposed to be a decadent, best ever mocha cheesecake and the crust is crushed Oreos? This is a red flag if I’ve ever seen one.

But I had to keep going in case they proved me wrong. After tossing a bunch of Oreos into my food processor, I mixed them up with the melted butter and pressed them into the bottom of a springform pan. It does not get pre-baked as most other crusts do. Just set it aside and make the rest of the recipe.

Sure, it looks delicious, but don’t be fooled. It tastes like nothing more than oreos and butter. I know what you’re saying: “Oreos are delicious!” And they are. While we may love the delicious taste of Oreos, they have no business being in a “best ever” anything, much less something that supposedly tastes like a mocha. They get dipped into a glass of milk and then go in my mouth, and that’s it.

Moving on. The filling is simple, and that’s fine. I’m okay with simple as long as the result is delicious. In this case, the author of the recipe has you make one basic cheesecake filling, then divide it evenly into two bowls. From there you alter each bowl to create your layers.

Filling:
2 Tbsp. plus 1 1/2 tsp. instant coffee granules
1 Tbsp. water
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
4 packages (8 ounces each) cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 all purpose flour
4 eggs, slightly beaten
2 teaspoons vanilla extract 2 cups (12 oz.) semisweet chocolate chips, melted and cooled

Once again, they lost me at the first ingredient and I’ll explain why using a mathematical formula:

I don’t care how expensive that espresso powder was, but it does not translate into a delicious mocha. No. Stop arguing with me. It doesn’t turn into something you would want to top with whipped cream and inhale. In fact, I can assure you that it tastes as far from a mocha as anything could taste. So if this is true and it does not taste like a delicious mocha, what makes anyone think that putting it into your recipe is going to turn it into a decadent mocha cheesecake?

It isn’t.

Ingredients 4 - 8 get dumped into a bowl and mixed up until it is creamy. Simple enough.

Separate it into two evenly distributed batches. Bowl #1 gets some melted chocolate. This goes fine with the Oreo crust. Then there’s Bowl #2 that receives a funky concoction of the boiling water, cinnamon, and espresso powder - something I would never have imagined in a million years would go with an Oreo crust.

Bowl #1 is poured on top of the crust, followed by bowl #2. Bake at 325 degrees for 45 - 50 minutes and refrigerate overnight.

The verdict: Not even close to being a Best Ever Dessert.

The whole thing was a mess, and the texture was more like a thick mousse than a cheesecake. The “mocha” was only in the top layer and, aside from the problem of it not tasting anything like a mocha, the concoction did NOT go with the Oreo crust. It tasted more like a curious chocolate dessert than a mocha anything, and most people who tried it failed to even recognize it as a cheesecake. Eating this is akin to the disappointment you receive when someone says “Britney Spears” and you’re hoping for the “Baby One More Time” girl, but you’re instead getting the pimply, post K-Fed, shaved head girl in need of some panties. I am ashamed to say it, but there are better cheesecake recipes in the (older publications are better) Better Homes and Gardens red-and-white checked cookbook.

Next week we’ll put ToH’s “Toasted Pecan Cake” on trial so stay tuned!