Zosia's Reviews
15 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 15Sort by: Title 
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Rose's Heavenly Cakes
By Rose Levy Beranbaum
Wiley - 2009
A very moist, oil-based banana cake with a white chocolate, cream cheese frosting.
What I liked about the cake:
- lovely, tender crumb
- both cake and frosting remain soft at refrigerator temperature
- it has my preferred cake:frosting ratio (ie lots of cake, very little frosting)
What I didn’t care for:
- the banana flavour takes a back seat to the lemon rind in the cake, and the almond extract in the frosting
- based on Andrew’s review, I made sure to use a cake strip but the cake still domed
- the recipe calls for a lot of heavy machinery that I’m not sure is necessary - the food processor twice!! (once for the bananas and again for the frosting) and the stand mixer for the cake
The texture of this cake is beautiful, and the flavour has the potential to be fabulous with 1 small adjustment so I would definitely make it again but perhaps pair it with a milk chocolate frosting instead.
useful (1)
Chocolate Butter Cupcakes : page 296
Moist, chocolate-y and not too dense, just what I like a chocolate cupcake to be.
The recipe is for a cocoa-based butter cake that uses the author’s favoured 2-stage mixing method. The batter takes only minutes to mix once the cocoa-boiling water mixture has cooled, and just a short time to bake so these treats can be ready in less than an hour.
These are good enough to eat plain but I had some leftover toppings from previous projects that I wanted to use up so this batch was frosted with peanut butter buttercream and chocolate ganache.
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Chocolate Ingots : page 313
This recipe for financiers au chocolat is the first from this book to disappoint. The little cakes are very rich, very buttery and very involved to make but sadly lacking in chocolate flavour.
The instructions start with the directions to preheat your oven for 20 minutes before you bake, not giving any indication that during those 20 minutes you will be scrambling to toast, cool and grind almonds into almond flour, make beurre noisette and caramelize cacao nibs! My oven preheated for almost an hour before I was ready to bake!
I don’t have a financier pan so I baked them in a mini muffin tin, a size I thought was better suited to the rich cake. The texture was quite nice with a thin crispy crust and moist but dense interior, and though I didn’t care for the caramelized cacao nibs on their own, they added a nice crunch and cut the sweetness of the cake.
As much as I didn’t like them, others loved them so you’ll just have to try them yourself!
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This is a great carrot cake - it's very moist and light, mildly spicy and doesn’t have any of the add-ins that so many people take exception to ie coconut, pineapple, chopped nuts, raisins (raisins are optional in the recipe). It’s also oil-based and uses a lot of carrots (1 lb shredded!).
The most time consuming part of the recipe is prepping the carrots; once that’s done, the batter comes together in a just a few minutes. I’ve made this cake often for large gatherings and baked it in different sizes of pans including a 9”x13” and as cupcakes and it always turns out very moist and delicious; I used 1.5x the recipe to bake the 3 layers in the photo.
I don’t personally like white chocolate with carrot cake so I use the frosting variation with powdered sugar. It’s a little on the soft side but it’s not as sweet as some and retains a little of the “tang” of the cream cheese.
A great basic recipe!
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Double-Chocolate-Whammy Groom's Cake : page 419
The name says it all! This is an uber chocolate-y, moist, dense cake that I made for my husband for our recent wedding anniversary to make up for the groom’s cake he didn’t have at our wedding!
It starts with making the fudgy pudgy brownies, standard 1-pot/bowl brownies that include unsweetened and white chocolate, cocoa powder, eggs, flour, pecans and lots of butter! These are extremely moist so I relied on the internal temperature to tell me when they were done.
After chilling, the brownie is finely cubed and added to the Chocolate Domingo cake batter. This cake recipe is also in The Cake Bible; it’s a moist, milk chocolate-flavoured cake made with cocoa powder, sour cream and lots of butter!
The recipe calls for the cake to be baked in a bundt-type pan but I took a chance and baked this in the Wilton guitar cake pan. It baked perfectly level but unevenly....the neck of the guitar was done before the rest of the cake. Rose suggests you spritz the cake with bourbon; instead, I coated it with a thin layer of the Chocolate Cream Glaze (a thin ganache) from The Cake Bible to seal in the moisture.
I’ve made equally delicious chocolate cakes that took up far less time and ingredients so I would rate it a 3. However, the recipient and guests loved it so I’m compromising with 4 stars.
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Dulce de Leche Whipped Cream : page 337
Delicious caramel-flavoured whipped cream….it’s as easy as adding a few spoons of dulce de leche (store-bought or homemade) to cold cream before whipping. A natural accompaniment to chocolate or coffee-flavoured desserts, it would also complement vanilla and many fruit desserts.
A great alternative to vanilla-flavoured cream.
I served this with The Chocolate Pavarotti cake from Rose Levy Beranbaum's website for Father's Day.
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Financier-Style Vanilla Bean Pound Cakes : page 322
Sweet, intensely vanilla in flavour with a tight, moist crumb and golden crust, this really is what all vanilla pound cakes aspire to be.
You can see by the photo that I didn't make financiers; I don't own a financier pan but I do own a new bundt pan that was calling out to be used and I wanted to make a cake that tasted as beautiful as I knew it would look. I also had a plethora of egg whites on hand that, unfortunately, had a smidge of egg yolk in them - I love the appendix that lists the recipes that use either egg yolks or whites alone and provides the quantity required....saves having to go through the entire book to find this information.
The batter mixes up quickly using Rose's 2-stage method (dry ingredients beaten with softened butter and some liquid/egg with the balance of liquid/egg beaten in later). I tripled the recipe for the bundt cake and it baked, perfectly level, in 40 min. on a rack placed in the lower third of my oven.
Don't let the specialized pan requirement discourage you from trying this recipe; apart from the bundt cake, I have baked this recipe successfully in a loaf pan and a mini muffin pan.
useful (3)
Golden Dream Wedding Cake : page 397
I didn’t make a wedding cake, but I did make a cake for my mother. This is a delicious, moist, almond cake flavoured with lemon (oil, zest and syrup) and frosted with a silky, lemony, white chocolate-vanilla bean buttercream.
The recipe is easy to scale down: I just made 2/3 of the batter and syrup intended for the 6” and 9” tiers and 1 batch of the frosting to make a 9” layer cake. As with all of Rose Levy Berenbaum’s recipes, if you are meticulous in weighing the ingredients and following directions, you will be rewarded with a perfect cake. It’s best to bake the cakes at least the day before as it allows time for the lemon syrup, which is applied to the warm layers, to become more evenly distributed.
The frosting is a little unusual as it starts with a white chocolate custard base to which butter is added. Though easy to make, the custard is extremely temperature sensitive so an accurate thermometer is a must. It keeps well in the fridge or freezer so can be made in advance.
The lemon, almond and white chocolate flavours complement each other perfectly, without one overwhelming any of the others. Though delicious, the cake is very rich so a little goes a long way; its moist, dense texture lends itself well to very thin slices.
The cake recipe also appears in the book as the “Golden Lemon Almond Cake”, a bundt-style cake, on page 37. I’ve linked to a review of that recipe as well as one for the buttercream.
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Heavenly Coconut Seduction Cake : page 20
Wonderful moist cake with great coconut flavour topped with a froth of whipped cream …..surprisingly light and much less sweet than most.
The recipe for cake and topping called for a few ingredients that I had a little difficulty finding. I located the coconut cream powder for the topping in an Asian grocery store but the canned cream of coconut for the cake remained elusive. I was prepared to substitute with coconut milk and sugar when I read a description of it online as being “a sweetened syrupy product often used in substandard pina coladas”! I knew exactly where to find it then.....and there it was, nestled amongst the bottles of angostura bitters and grenadine in the beverage aisle of my regular grocery store.
Rose suggests eating this à la minute which wasn’t practical for the occasion but it was beautifully moist and delicious hours after assembly.
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Marble Velvet Cake : page 52
As one reviewer put it, the best marble cake ever. Not just because it’s easy to make and has a good balance of great chocolate and vanilla flavours but because the crumb lives up to its name, velvety soft, even made with all purpose flour.
I omitted the chocolate glaze - it’s just not necessary.
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Miette's Tomboy : page 145
I love this little cake - it’s moist, chocolate-y and the perfect size for 8 small servings.
The recipe is for an oil-based cake and is put together differently from most of Rose’s cakes as it originates from Miette’s bakery in San Francisco. It includes both chocolate and cocoa powder and ends up being a very dark cake that’s like a cake-y brownie in texture.
I don’t have a 6”x3” cake pan so couldn’t bake it as 1 cake split into 3 layers; instead, I baked 2 layers in 2” high pans.
The frosting is an Italian meringue buttercream made with the addition of hot sugar syrup and butter to an egg white meringue. The recipe suggests flavouring it with vanilla or raspberry preserves, but I had some white chocolate on hand so used that instead.
I've made this a few times now as it's so easy and delicious and always a hit!
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Sicilian Pistachio Cake : page 65
Californian Pistachio Cake in this case. Because my pistachios weren’t of the vibrant green Sicilian variety, I decided to approach the cake differently and bake as 2 – 6” layers and omit the decorative arrangement of nuts on the frosted cake.
The cake was easy to make but did include the extra steps of blanching the pistachios and then chopping them finely. The cake was somewhat dense but moist, and nutty with a hint of almond.
The French buttercream, made with egg yolks and hot sugar syrup had a nice butterscotch flavour from the Lyle’s Golden Syrup and was a good complement to the cake.
I’ve made this cake a few times now as it seems to appeal to fans of both vanilla and chocolate, without actually being either.
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Swedish Pear and Almond Cream Cake : page 58
On the outside, it looks like the plainest of vanilla bundt cakes, but once sliced, the hidden layer of juicy pears enrobed in sweet almond cream is revealed.
The cake is a very good, basic vanilla coffee cake – moist, dense and a little tangy from the sour cream. The batter is spread into the prepared pan and on top of that an almond cream made of almond paste (I use this recipe and keep it in the freezer until needed), butter, egg etc is added. The final touch is a generous layer of sliced, fresh pears. Remarkably, the pear/almond cream “topping” sinks into the cake during baking, ending up near the top of the cake once it’s inverted.
It reminds me of a lovely French pear and almond tart…..it’s nice to enjoy those flavours in cake form for a fraction of the effort.
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Whipped Cream Cake : page 29
I like to have a few cakes in my repertoire that use basic ingredients, come together and bake quickly and require no special embellishments. This is one of those cakes: a moist, delicious vanilla cake with a tender crumb that’s made without butter!
The cake starts with whipping some cream. Eggs and sugar are added to this and the dry ingredients are folded in by hand. I used cake flour this time and the cake was a little more crumbly – I prefer the tighter crumb of the cake made with all purpose flour. Unlike most bundt cakes, this one bakes in only ~30 minutes, and cools quickly once removed from the pan.
A dusting of icing sugar for adornment, and the cake is ready to be served.
The recipe can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000407421
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White Gold Passion Genoise : page 173
I've wanted to make this cake since I purchased the book. Two things held me back: the inability to locate frozen passion fruit puree and the intimidation of a 5 page recipe. When I found the fruit puree at my local grocery store, (quite by accident next to the samosas!), I knew it was time to tackle the recipe. And I'm so glad I did.
This is the most delicious cake I have ever tasted: a moist vanilla sponge flavoured with passion fruit syrup, filled with sweet-tart passion fruit curd, and frosted with a delicate, white chocolate cream cheese frosting. Every bite is sheer bliss.
Each component is relatively simple to make and can be made in advance. The cake itself can be assembled ahead of time (the recipe recommends the day before serving). And those 5 pages?....the detailed information included in those pages ensures success. Be particularly mindful of ingredient temperatures where specified: eg don't overheat the white chocolate for the frosting as it's prone to break emulsion (speaks the voice of experience); make sure the eggs for the genoise are warm enough so they reach the required volume when whipped.
As with most frosted layer cakes, this one does require a little bit of planning but the experience of eating it will make it well worth your time and effort.
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