2013 Game Changer: Cake on Demand

Soaking Bake E-Z strips. Cutting out parchment circles. Running my oven for hours on end. Washing cake pans. These are a few things I look forward to not doing so much of in 2013.

It's all thanks to a random stop at a Safeway store on the wrong side of the Golden Gate Bridge this morning. On a whim, I popped by the bakery to ask if they'd sell me some uniced cakes. This was not the first time I've tried that move at various grocery stores and bakeries in my neighborhood. Except all the other times the bakery clerks looked at me like I had two heads.

Today, however, I was lucky enough to happen upon the bakery manager, who understood exactly what I was looking for and easily produced two 8-inch chocolate rounds from the freezer.

Courtesy of my new BFF, Phillip, the bakery manager at Safeway in Mill Valley

$10.99 plus tax bought me the two individually-wrapped cakes, with a cake circle and a box as well. Phillip even had 6-inchers to offer.

Decorators: what are your thoughts on buying pre-baked, uniced, frozen cakes? Is it "cheating" if you make no claims to have baked the cakes yourself?
As a buyer, would you be opposed to having factory-baked cakes if the fillings and frosting are made from scratch and the cake is custom-decorated to your specifications?

Mais non! Apparently the French do it as well!

Imagine my delight when I spied these uniced, wrapped genoise cakes available for sale at the G'Detou patisserie supply shop in Paris during my visit last summer. (And then imagine my despair when I realized I knew of nowhere else from which to purchase these cakes, except the G'Detou patisserie supply shop in Paris.)

G'Detou is, naturally, #1 on my abandoned Paris Top 10 list.

Click here to see what some are saying about decorating pre-baked cakes on cakecentral.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts below.

Tutorial: The Easiest Ice Cream

If you're reading this blog, you're probably the type of person who knows that National Ice Cream Month is in full swing.

Or perhaps you caught one of the countless segments about this all-important issue on most every morning news and talk show some time in the past three weeks?

I don't miss those crazy PR blitzes from my days as a morning show producer, but this is a pitch at which I would have happily bit.

It's clear that National Ice Cream Month was dreamed up by the dairy industry in a bid to boost sales, and I've certainly done my part to help. One summer in college, I inadvertently observed an almost all ice cream diet and ended up losing more than a few pounds.

What I'd do for a Wegmans in SF...

This year, on  National Ice Cream Day (the third Sunday in July) my family and I appropriately found ourselves at a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont.

My nephew getting a lesson on where ice cream comes from.

Dukan Diet be damned - of course I also had to sample the local offerings. I wondered how I spent two and half years living and working in the Vermont TV market without ever having being introduced to a maple creemee.

But I digress.

There are still almost two weeks left in this magnificent, once-a-year, 31-day celebration, and have I ever got an idea for how you can mark the occassion: make your own ice cream!

I'm not asking you to run out and buy a bulky machine, or rock salt, or anything fancy at all.
Are you ready for this? All you need are ten minutes, a mixer, and just two very basic ingredients to start making ice cream that will easily rival your favorite brand. 

Flavors and mix-ins are limited only by your imagination. Here I've got macadamia nuts to go with white chocolate, bacon to go with salted caramel, and a mix of strawberries and pomegranate.

 

 

Step 1

Start with 1 pint of heavy whipping cream.
Whip until peaks form.
You don't need a stand mixer, a hand mixer will do the trick.

 

Step 2

Empty a 14oz. can of sweetened condensed milk into a bowl.
Mix in flavors and ingredients of your choosing.

Step 3

Fold whipped cream into condensed milk mixture until uniformly combined.

Step 4

Pour mixture into a container and store in freezer.

(I hit up the clerk at a neighborhood take-out place for these cardboard tubs that were just perfect,  but you can use tupperware.)








And then comes the hardest part - waiting for it to freeze. And when it does, I promise this ice cream will be so creamy and smooth, you'll be able to convince people you slow-churned it by hand.

Caramel bacon on the left, strawberry-pomegranate on the right.

I know. It sounds too good to be true. But try it, and trust me, you'll be snickering to yourself the next time you see someone eyeing the elaborate ice cream maker display at Williams Sonoma.