Red Velvet Cake Taste Test

There's something so intriguing about red velvet cake: the name, color, and hard-to-pin-down flavor. It's got secret ingredients (buttermilk and vinegar), the familiar hint of cocoa, a history, and that luscious and unusual color. Oh that color, visually striking and dramatic, it makes a special dessert for Christmas, New Year's, or birthdays.

My husband Brad is an engineer, which means he likes to make things and experiment. When he first tasted red velvet after I made Sprinkles cupcakes from their mix, he became enamored of the flavor and decided to find the best red velvet cake recipe. This was hitting the motherlode for me, so I've encouraged him at every step.

In our experiments we've tried:

Sprinkles cupcakes from the store and made from their cupcake mix
Duncan Hines moist deluxe mix
America's Test Kitchen Recipe
Cook's Country recipe
ad hoc cake mix from Williams-Sonoma (from award-winning Chef Thomas Keller's Napa Valley restaurant)

Some learnings:
- butter-based recipes taste than better than the ones with vegetable oil
- refrigerating and even freezing improves the cake, with a firmer, yes even velvety, bite and a nice cool temperature
- not surprisingly, the recipes made from scratch taste better, although the Sprinkles mix is great

Brad loves America's Test Kitchen cookbooks and their scientific approach. He insists that they're the only cookbooks we should use. Sometimes I think this biases his culinary experimentation, but I can't complain with the grand winner, an adapted version of a recipe from Cook's Country.

If you want the original recipe, you'll need to register for a 14-day free trial membership. However, below is an adapted recipe that Brad's fine-tuned through his experimentation, with changes made to the amounts of flour, baking powder, baking soda, buttermilk, cocoa, and butter. He also changed the cream cheese frosting recipe since the original makes more than you really need.

Try it out and enjoy. The picture above says a thousand words why it's so velvety good.

Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Cake:
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
3 tablespoons natural cocoa powder
2 tablespoons red food coloring
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

Frosting:
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
2 cups confectioners' sugar
8 ounces cream cheese, cut into four pieces, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch salt
Chopped pecans (optional)

1. For the cake: Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans. Whisk flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in medium bowl.
2. Whisk buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla, and eggs in large measuring cup.
3. Mix cocoa with food coloring in small bowl.
4. With electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat butter and sugar together until fluffy, scraping down bowl as necessary. Add one-third of flour mixture and beat on medium-low speed until just incorporated, about 30 seconds. Add half of buttermilk mixture and beat on low speed until combined, about 30 seconds. Scrape down bowl and repeat with half of remaining flour mixture, remaining buttermilk mixture, and then the last of the flour mixture.
5. Scrape down bowl, add cocoa mixture, and beat on medium speed until completely incorporated. Using rubber spatula, give batter final stir. Scrape into prepared pans and bake until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Cool cakes in pans 10 minutes then turn out onto rack to cool completely, at least 30 minutes.
6. For the frosting: With electric mixer, beat butter and sugar on medium-high speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add cream cheese, one piece at a time, and beat until incorporated. Beat in vanilla and salt. Refrigerate until ready to use.
7. When cakes are cooled, spread about 1 cup frosting on one cake layer. Top with second cake layer and spread top and sides of cake with remaining frosting. If you love pecans, you can sprinkle some chopped pecans on top. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve, up to 3 days.

Steve Jobs: Of Food, Memories, and Thanks

My daughter Amanda's iPad artwork

I finished reading the new Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson in three days, immersed, amused, inspired, and unsettled by what I read. The book paints a fascinating portrait of a singular man who led life the way he wanted to, warts and all. 

It also struck me how much food had an influence on his life. Jobs was not only famously a vegan and macrobiotic eater, he also became more than strict, maybe even disordered, about what he'd ingest and how he thought about food. He felt that fasting gave him a special energy, probably first experienced when he went to India as a young college drop-out.

Some of the ways food played a role in his storied life:

- He worked at an apple orchard and once ate only apples for a week, which inspired him to choose the name Apple for his and Steve Wozniak's company. The name had a friendly feeling, much better than the other names they'd been contemplating like Matrix and Executek.

- He unknowingly met his biological father at a Mediterranean restaurant his father managed in San Jose.

- He celebrated Pixar's Academy Award for the animated short 'Tin Toy' at the wonderful vegetarian Greens restaurant in San Francisco. 

- His non-alcoholic bachelor party took place at another favorite, Cafe Jacqueline in North Beach. 

- He had Odwalla juices and Peet's coffee available for employees at NeXT.   

- He thought he could use a disciplined diet to beat his cancer, but his inability to eat protein and other nourishment his doctors recommended contributed to a vicious cycle that sapped his strength.

- His sister Mona Simpson even referred to his eating habits in her touching eulogy, describing a typical dinner in his backyard with only broccoli served (and lots of it).

The book brought back memories of Jobs. Since my husband Brad worked for him at NeXT and we used to live in his Palo Alto neighborhood, we saw him throughout the years. Most notably, I invited him to speak at Stanford business school as a guest of the Marketing Club, and it was there he met his wife Laurene on October 5, 1989, exactly twenty-two years before his death. That night, as described in the book, he blew off a business meeting and instead asked her out to dinner. They walked to downtown Palo Alto and had their first date at St. Michael's Alley restaurant. And so I played an accidental matchmaking role that day, and have enjoyed telling this story many times since. (BTW, that was a memorable month for another reason: the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake struck just twelve days later.)  

The book also described his erratic driving and rule-breaking parking habits. This brought back another memory of when he swerved and parked illegally in the red zone in front of Whole Foods in Palo Alto once when I was pushing my son in his stroller. I thought who is this jerk? Out of the car popped Jobs, who said hi to Brad. 

His wife started a vegan food truck business called Terravera, and I remember ordering lunch from it many times when it would park in front of Intuit where I worked. Jobs enjoyed many local eating spots including: Fraiche frozen yogurt, Evvia Greek restaurant, and Jin Sho Japanese restaurant. It seemed as if Japanese food was the one kind of cuisine he ate with pleasurable gusto, especially at his favorite sushi and soba noodle restaurants in Kyoto.       

From my mom's Apple II purchase to my daughter's new iPhone 4S, Apple products have benefited our lives for over thirty years. We still have the original 1984 Macintoshes and a NeXT cube in our garage. My daughter's iPad 2 sits on my desk next to me as I type this. My iPod gave me a whole new and better way to experience music. Jobs wasn't perfect, but he was perfectly fascinating and complex. I'm grateful for his contributions, awed by his inventiveness and determination, inspired to teach his lessons, and compelled to think different. Thanks, Steve.

Cold and Creamy, Pumpkiny Dreamy

If you haven't tried pumpkin frozen yogurt or ice cream, put it on your to-do list for this fall. What a luxurious blend: cold, creamy ice cream paired with the autumnal, spicy flavors of pumpkin pie, all combined in orange-y perfection.

Many local frozen yogurt shops now offer pumpkin varieties as a seasonal flavor including Fraiche, Pinkberry, and Mix. I love them all, and they're flavorful enough to enjoy without any toppings. But if you're in the mood, any kind of chocolate topping adds a sweet touch.

Jamba Juice also makes its refreshing Pumpkin Smash smoothie this time of year, which I especially enjoy after a workout. It's got yogurt, pumpkin spice, soy milk and ice, and I add their immunity boost vitamins for extra nourishment.

For a richer dessert, try pumpkin ice cream. Both locally based and family-run, Rick's Rather Rich and Treat make wonderful pumpkin ice creams. They can be enjoyed along with Thanksgiving pies, or scoop and spread them into a graham cracker pie crust for a twist on the traditional.

For mass market pumpkin ice cream, both Trader Joe's and Dreyer's (headquartered in Oakland) are sold widely.

If you'd like to create your own pumpkin ice cream at home, here's an easy way to do it. This is one of those halfway recipes with no ice cream maker required.

Easy Homemade Pumpkin Ice Cream 

(adapted from Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Cookbook recipe for from-scratch recipe)

1 quart of vanilla ice cream (less dense varieties will be easier to use, such as Dreyer's vanilla bean ice cream)

1 cup canned pumpkin

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1. Let vanilla ice cream soften by thawing for about 30-45 minutes.

2. Scoop ice cream into a blender. Add the pumpkin, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and blend until combined.

3. Transfer ice cream into your preferred freezer-safe container and freeze to desired consistency.

Makes a generous 1 quart of pumpkin ice cream. Enjoy!

Trader Joe's: Another Stanford Startup Success

Stanford University is widely known as the birthplace of many entrepreneurial minds and businesses, especially in the high-tech industry. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Intuit, and Google all sprung from Stanford alumni. But what many people do not realize is that the low-tech, high-touch Trader Joe's grocery store was also started by a Stanford alum, a business school graduate named Joe Coulombe. 

Coulombe stated that he created the store in 1958 "for people who were overeducated and underpaid, so they could have a certain richness on the table they otherwise could not--like brie, olive oil, French mustard, wild rice, and wine. The customers I had in mind were the Fulbright scholar who returns with no money; schoolteachers, above all; plus young lawyers, museum curators, and classical musicians." (Sunset magazine, July 2011) That goal translated to inexpensive, high quality, and unusual items for sale. He added a friendly touch by creating a Hawaiian-like atmosphere in the store with employees' Hawaiian shirts and Polynesian decor. By offering fewer items in a smaller space than the typical grocery store, TJ's also makes it easier and quicker to shop.

One of the elements customers love about TJ's is the sense of discovering new items while stocking up on old favorites. We love:

- dried mango (my go-to sweet and healthy snack)

- mochi ice cream (green tea, mango, strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate flavors)

- orange chicken (savory and sweet)

- fruit tarts (lemon, raspberry, blueberry pear- so easy and good)

- Joe-Joe's cookies (in different varieties, a sometimes splurge)

- pre-packaged nuts and trail mixes (great for quick snacks on-the-go)

- sweet & spicy pecans (great combo of flavors)

- ice cream bon bons (small, sweet, and creamy)

- chana masala and naan (easy and quick way to get an Indian food fix)

- chicken potstickers (good over ramen)

- chocolate croissants (they rise so high and smell so good coming out of the oven)

- vegetable samosas (easy and yummy way to get your vegetables)

- hummus (we like the 4-flavor package)

- peanut butter filled pretzels (great for kids who exercise a lot, including the salt)

- turkey jerkey (chewy and tasty)

- fresh pizza dough (for making marguerite pizza)

TJ's is so popular that it's spawned cookbooks with recipes based on items you can find at the store. On the website Cooking with Trader Joe's: Where Mere Mortals Cook Like Chefs, you can find many recipes to try. Pictured above is a sweet chocolatey dessert that my 11-year-old daughter Amanda helped me make, the Chocolate Truffle Pie with Joe-Joe's Crust. It's so simple with only four ingredients, plus it's vegan. While its taste is different than the usual chocolate pie due to the hidden coconut milk, and not for everyone, it's something we enjoyed trying. I love the idea of simplifying recipes by using tested items easily available at TJ's. And as someone who sometimes feels overeducated and underpaid, I appreciate the tasty and fun items I can find there for a great price.  We love TJ's, and its Stanford connection just makes it that much sweeter.

Mrs. Fields' Halloween Pumpkin Spice Cookies

Long before Sprinkles cupcakes, lavender flavored macarons, and organic frozen yogurt, we've been eating Mrs. Fields' cookies. Super-sized, thick, soft, and chewy, packed with large chocolate chips, walnuts, macadamia nuts and more, these cookies make it easy to fall in love at first bite.

So what does the queen of cookies have to do with Silicon Valley? Surprisingly, the first Mrs. Fields' Chocolate Chippery cookie store opened in downtown Palo Alto in 1977 about a mile from the Stanford campus. With this humble start at the tender age of twenty, Debbi Fields pioneered an entire business built around freshly made cookies, and led the way for other gourmet dessert companies to follow.

Once autumn arrives I get in the mood to bake pumpkin treats. Mrs. Fields' pumpkin cookies offer a fresh way to achieve pumpkin nirvana. The recipe is simple and flexible enough that you can add whatever you like to the batter. We like to use Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips, pecans, and crystallized ginger. They're also delicious with walnuts, butterscotch chips, and dried cranberries. The texture is soft and cake-like, not as dense (or intense) as her chocolate chip cookies.

Whip up a batch when you're in the mood for a pumpkin treat. And while you're enjoying them, remember Mrs. Fields' motto that fueled her entrepreneurial determination: Good Enough Never Is.

Halloween Pumpkin Cookies
(adapted from a Mrs. Fields recipe)

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1 can pumpkin (15 oz.)
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips
pecan halves
chopped crystallized ginger

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugars together with an electric mixer. (This is easiest with a KitchenAid stand mixer.)
3. Add eggs and vanilla, beating until smooth.
4. Add pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, baking powder, and baking soda, mixing at medium speed for about one minute. Slowly add in flour until a thick batter forms.
5. Place rounded spoonfuls of dough onto a prepared cookie sheet (sprayed with Pam). Smooth the top with a spoon or spatula, then place chocolate chips on top to form a face. Be sure to push the chocolate chips into the dough as they will pop out a little during baking. Or add in other preferred ingredients like pecans, chopped crystallized ginger, walnuts, or dried cranberries to taste.
6. Bake for 12 minutes, or until bottom edges are golden brown. (We needed longer since we baked two cookie sheets at a time. Rotate sheets between top and bottom racks halfway through, or just bake one cookie sheet at a time.) Cool and serve.

Edgewood Eats: A Habit Worth Having

Chances are you've heard of the gourmet food truck craze. If you live or work close to Palo Alto, take a chance at the Edgewood Eats food truck fiesta. You won't regret it.

It took me a while to make it there, but once I started I haven't stopped. It's easy to become obsessed knowing those food trucks are lined up, their sweet and savory scents wafting from kitchens on wheels to hungry hordes waiting with anticipation.

Not only is the food delicious and different, it's also just plain fun. Each person in your group can pick what to eat from a variety of trucks. There's a lot to choose from, so the dilemma is what to have that night, with hopes of trying other trucks in the future.

Now running every Monday from 5-8:30 PM, the schedule shifts to the first Tuesday of every month from October to February and then turns weekly again in March when the weather warms up. It's located at Edgewood Plaza, 1161 Embarcadero Rd. between St. Francis Dr., Channing Avenue, and West Bayshore Rd. If you're coming down Embarcadero Rd. toward 101, turn left on Bayshore Rd. right after the Shell gas station. Bring cash.

Some of our favorite Edgewood eats:

Butterscotch-on-the-Go: Where else would a retired police chief and his wife refurbish a Red Cross disaster relief truck and turn it into a gourmet food truck business? Their specialty is luscious butterscotch pudding topped with toffee almond brittle, the kind of dessert that makes you go WOW when you take the first bite. Full of rich, creamy, buttery flavor with a crunchy, chocolatey topping and whipped cream to gild the lily. It's a crazy-good mixture of textures and flavors. Their triple vanilla pound cake with sweet vanilla cream and strawberry chunk puree is another swoon-worthy summer dessert, a magical combination. Also amazingly good: rich butterscotch sugar cookies, big and crinkly with a wonderful flavor. All their desserts are really, really, really good.

BBQ Kalbi Korean fusion: Kimchi quesadilla? Bibimbhap burrito? Each dish we tried was delicious, different, and immediately loved, familiar ingredients put together in a new way. Isn't that the definition of innovation? See Korean ingredients with new eyes and newfound appreciation. We tried the kalbi beef burrito, teriyaki chicken burrito, and kalbi cheese steak sandwich with no regrets.

An the Go: Garlic noodles- soft, fragrant, simple and oh-so good, especially nice topped with a skewer. We tried and enjoy beef, lemongrass chicken, and shrimp skewers. The smell will linger in your car for a few days.

Chairman Bao:  Asian steamed and baked buns made fresh and delicious. I loved the pork belly with daikon radish on both steamed and baked buns. The white steamed bun is small, like a little taco, full of flavor and very satisfying. The baked bun is sweet and soft, similar to King's Hawaiian bread. This truck consistently boasts the longest lines, about thirty people at one count, and for good reason. It's worth it.

Treatbot, the Karaoke Ice Cream Truck: Yes, you read that right--a gourmet ice cream truck with a karaoke machine. I thoroughly enjoyed my raspberry sorbet on a sugar cone, and my daughter loved the old school vanilla.

Shack Mobile: Lobster Shack on wheels! I've sometimes lusted for their award-winning lobster roll with chips and coleslaw. I've already publicly declared my undying devotion to this perfect sandwich.

Mayo & Mustard Sandwich Truck: Great sandwiches made to order. Pick your meat, bread, cheese, condiments, toppings and size (4", 6" or 8"). Really good, really reliable, especially if you aren't feeling adventurous enough to try the more creative combinations on other food trucks.

Armadillo Willy's:  We've always enjoyed the BBQ fare at this restaurant, and their truck offerings live up to their spicy standards. What a great deal to get BBQ brisket or pulled pork sliders for only $3 each. Their yummy BBQ sauce in regular and jalapeno versions made a delicious finishing touch, and the Texas corn salad with red onion, jalapeno, ciltrano and pepper add a nice kick for a side dish.

Sancho's Taqueria: Basic bean & cheese burritos, and fabulous fish tacos. Their little restaurant is on Lytton Avenue in Palo Alto.

If you haven't been to Edgewood Eats, try it soon. You'll see why it's habit-forming.

Chez Pim Artisan Jams: Taking Fruit to the Next Level

Pim Techamuanvivit started food blogging around ten years ago, which makes her one of the first. Besides writing about food, Pim holds cooking classes and sells artisan jams made from sustainable Northern Californian ingredients. After she recently tweeted @chezpim about her artisan jams and marmalade for sale on Etsy, I decided to try some for myself.

I ordered three flavors from her 2011 summer collection, with her descriptions and my reactions below:

"Berry Figgy Jam: This jam is indeed berry, berry figgy. It's a blend of olallieberries, raspberries, and my own Desert King figs. Olallieberries, pronounced oh-la-lie berries (or oh-la-la berries if you're saying it quickly), are very special Northern California treats. It's a hybrid of blackberries, raspberries, and loganberries. The flavor is quite similar to blackberries, but brighter and a lot more delicious!"

I found this jam an extremely yummy concoction, pleasing to the eye and palate. Purply-red goodness, with chunks of flavorful berries and little seeds. I couldn't taste the fig at first but then its flavor emerged as the aftertaste (and its little seeds to nibble on). What an interesting combination, with berry as the top note and the fig revealing itself later as the lingering base note. Hmm, fruit jams designed like perfume? Makes sense (pun intended).

"Clementine-Ginger Marmalade: Made from delicious Corsican clementine from Gene Lester's farm in Watsonville, this tangy sweet marmalade got a little lift from julienne of young ginger."

This one took me longer to figure out, like a puzzle to unravel. Its consistency was quite thick, almost viscous like honey but not as sticky. The flavor came through more subtly and less spicily than I'd imagined. The chewy clementine rind had a sharp, bitter citrusy taste, with hints of ginger. I would have preferred more of a ginger kick, perhaps with small bits of candied ginger. Instead of tangy-sweet, I would have liked it tangy-spicy. It does give me the idea of adding some candied clementine peel to a nice gingerbread or ginger cake recipe...that could be divine. Also it started to grow on me over time, especially when I slathered it on a bite of butterscotch sugar cookie from Butterscotch-on-the Go. Yum.

"Strawberry Rose: This is a whole berry conserve or compote. Big, juicy, whole strawberries preserved in their own syrup, infused with rose geraniums. That is all."

I actually didn't get what I ordered but in no way, shape or form can I complain, because the strawberry jam I got instead was the best I've ever had. I was surprised by how sweetly delicious it was. Spooned into Greek yogurt, this fruity puree tasted like sweet summer in a spoon, a velvety version of strawberries and cream, an improvement on the original fruit with its full flavor shining through with the additions of sugar, lemon juice, and TLC. If strawberries could only taste this way all the time I'd be a very happy camper but for now I will carefully guard my precious jar while it lasts.

Bottom line: Chez Pim artisan jams are pricey, exquisite, and worth it for a splurge. Total cost was $54 for three jars including shipping. My favorite way to eat them is swirled into Greek yogurt or slathered on buttered toast. The textures are entirely different than the usual jelled consistency of store-bought jams. These are fresher, more natural, tasting of intense, pure fruit essence and goodness. Eating these concoctions elevates an ordinary breakfast. The wonderful flavors demand the taste buds to wake up and pay attention. Delicious. That is all.