Baking in Redmond

 

Had a lovely time in Redmond with the family last weekend. One of the fun things that I try to do each time with my high-school aged grandson is to bake something. This time it was a pie baked in a cast iron skillet, in this case Apple Caramel pie. He peeled the apples and made the caramel. I cored and cut the apples into slices, mixed them with corn starch and microwaved them, lined the skillet with a ready made pie dough round, mixed in some caramel and loaded up the pie filling, then topped it with another pie dough round, sealed it, cut slits, did a cream wash and sanding sugar on top and baked it. It was delicious! A small scoop of ice cream and additional caramel drizzled on top made each piece irresistible. 

Another baking project, this time done with my daughter, was a multi-layered key lime pie cake. I'm including photos as we went along, but not a recipe because we found the recipe to be far from helpful for a few of the components. The key lime curd was wonderful and so were the cake and the graham crumbles, but two other parts were way too liquid. One was repurposed into cake batter and the other took a lot of additional ingredients to become thick enough to use. We were able to use that thickened ingredient plus some of the graham fine crumbs to make an icing for the top that worked well for flavor and texture, but it was quite a journey to get it all to work together. The cake itself was delicious and impressive and quite like a mash-up of key lime pie and cake. I'm not even going to mention the cookbook because I think that there were mis-steps made in stepping down the amounts of ingredients between the industrial version of the cake and the recipe in the cookbook. Not throwing any stones...it's pretty difficult to scale some recipes.

Piping filling over first layer of cake that has been brushed with lime juice. This filling ended up leaking...too runny!

The graham cracker crumbles...made in advance...get added next.

The lime curd, also made in advance, is put into the piping bag, then piped over the crumbles. This element was super delicious!

Isn't that curd yummy looking?

More cake, more Key lime juice, more runny filling, more graham crumbles.

Cake ...three layers... ready for the freezer.

Finished cake, ready to serve. An additional layer of graham buttercream and more crumbles were added and then more freezer time before serving.

Now we're looking forward to creating a multi-layered cake for Sweetie's birthday in mid-March, plus a few other treats, so there should be some recipes then to share...and photos!