I started yesterday by making the cake part of the caramel cake. Good thing I hadn't planned to make the icing yesterday since it was rainy and cloudy all day and ANYONE from the South knows you can't cook candy or icing on a rainy, cloudy day. I'm making the assumption that it's because there's too much moisture in the air. So anyway, I made the cake. Keep in mind that the only "from scratch" cake I've made before was a pound cake. It turned out well but that didn't keep me from worrying about these.
I whisked my dry ingredients (that's my version of sifting), creamed my butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla, added in the flour and milk (alternating, ending with the flour because that's how the recipe did it). I divided the batter into 2 springform pans coated with Baker's Joy (Thanks Kisha!) and waxed paper. Everything was going great. I got them in the oven with no trouble. The recipe said to make sure not to overcook them, and to start with 20 minutes, then check them. And there's where the trouble began.
At 20 minutes I could see they probably weren't ready, but I thought I would check anyway. Wrong move. Why? Because as soon as I opened the oven door both layers sank in the middle. Not a little bit - a LOT. I thought maybe they would rise back up a little, but no. Two sunken-in-the-middle layers. This was not going to do, not at all. One sunken layer? That I could probably deal with...but TWO? No. So I set about making a third layer. I halved the recipe, got it in the oven, turned on the oven light and set the timer for 30 minutes. I watched it but I did NOT open the oven at all. That one turned out much better - not perfect, but close enough. Still, I only needed 2 layers soooooo what to do with that third sunken layer? Why treat the Voodoo Biker and his employees that's what!
Here's what I did: I peeled and chopped two pretty big peaches (almost softball sized). I melted 2 tbsp butter, about 1/4 cup brown sugar and a little vanilla and lemon juice in a pan. I threw in the peaches and sauteed for a few minutes. In the mean time, I poked some holes in the layer with a toothpick. Then I dumped the peaches and glaze over the layer and took it down to the store. I heard it was great ;)
Anyway, I put the other two layers in the freezer overnight. Today after an awesome bike ride with my friend A, I set about making the icing. I read the recipe twice before I even began. It involved melting sugar (the "burnt" sugar portion of the recipe) in a cast iron skillet while at the same time bringing to a boil a milk, sugar, butter and vanilla mixture in a separate pan. Eventually all this gets combined. Tip #1: Always use a bigger saucepan (like a 4 qt) than you think you'll need. This was mistake #2 for me as I did not do that.
When I poured the caramel mix into the milk mix it rose up to the top of the pan and over the sides as I was screaming to no one in particular, "This isn't going to work! It's not going to work!" I set the saucepan down on top of the cast iron skillet (although it had already poured melted sugar onto the stove eye) and grabbed a bigger pan. As I was pouring from one to another my candy thermometer fell onto the floor. Smoke was coming off the one burner, I was throwing the pan and sugar mix onto another burner and the candy thermometer was lying on the floor. I turned on the fan, picked up the candy thermometer, and went back to whisking the mix to get it to the soft-ball stage. The candy thermometer was sitting on "Soft-ball" after only a minute or two. Wow, that was fast, I thought. I took the mix off the heat and continued to whisk. It was supposed to get thick and creamy. It wasn't. That's when I realized the candy thermometer was broken.
At this point I suppose less stubborn people might give up, or at least start over. I was determined to make this work. I threw the candy thermometer away, got the pot back on the heat, and started whisking again. They call it the "soft-ball" stage for a reason. I grabbed a glass of cold water and a spoon and set them beside the stove. I thought back to all the times I made fudge with my mom and sister. Soft-ball stage literally means the mix will form a soft ball when you drop it in water. So I whisked and every minute I would drop a little drop of mix into the water. The caramel began to change, to get hotter - you could see it from the way it bubbled. I checked again - still no soft ball. After probably a full 5 or 6 minutes of whisking and checking, it finally changed - it didn't exactly form a ball shape, but it formed a shape instead of just streaming to the bottom of the glass.
I took it off the heat and kept whisking. I looked at the clock and figured I'd give it 5 minutes. If nothing had changed by then I could assume it was ruined. But it did start to change! I thought again to the candy making from my childhood and knew to whisk until some of the sheen was gone from the caramel. It started to thicken and get dull and I stopped whisking and picked up the phone. "Mom? The fact that this caramel icing worked is all because of you."
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| The bottom layer was the sunken one and you can tell that even here. I tried to get the icing to flow prettily over the edges... |
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