I like to bake. I guess that’s obvious if you’ve been reading for a while now, but it’s not necessarily because I love sweets (and don’t get me wrong, I do).

It is truly the best form of therapy, especially if you do late in the evening, watching The Nanny while trying to mix your batter and then subsequently fill the house with intoxicating baking smells at 2 a.m.

It’s glorious and I will tell you why.

Because you can go through the worst day in the world, a day that doesn’t make sense, a day that makes you cry, makes you wish you could dig your head in a hole because nothing is going right and people are annoying and you wish you could transport them all to a barren island so they can just revel in their annoying-ness and then hopefully die off and then you can come home, get together a few ingredients, mix them together and know at the end of the day, that if you follow the directions and put some love into it, you will have made something good, and that’s enough to make everything in the world seem better.

Honest.

That’s the same reason why I love to write, although I would compare journalism more to making macarons or boston cream pie than to your regular muffin.  It’s grueling, you’ll want to give up, but if you keep pushing on you realize that when it’s finished, you are beaming from ear to ear. And that’s the type of fire you need to have, whether you’re reporting or baking, or just even living really.

Creating new things to eat or read is all I need to melt away all the stress in my life. At least until it appears again, anyway.

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.” – William F. Buckley, Jr.

Let me preface this by saying that this Boston Cream Pie was perhaps the most demanding yet gratifying thing I’ve ever baked. Demanding in the sense that it took two people meticulously reading directions (how anyone could make this without help is a mystery)  to finish it and gratifying because when I was finished, when I had put my blood, sweat and tears into it – ok maybe not blood and tears, but there might have been some sweat mixed in with the batter, when I put this magnificent piece of baked good on display, it looked like it had come out of the kitchen of Julia Child, or Nigella Lawson or Paula Deen, except with not nearly enough butter as she would have liked. In short, it was without a doubt amazing.

You see those two sponge cakes above? They have enough spring in them to send you to the moon and back. Getting them that way was the most difficult task in the entire process. It wasn’t just a matter of mixing dry and wet ingredients together, oh no, it was a whole other ball game. Egg yolk and whites were separated, both beaten with sugar, until the whites became more or less like meringue and the yolks turned into a yellow gooey paste. Then, the whites were folded in the yolk mixture ever so gently, while the cake flour and other dry ingredients followed. But that’s not all. Milk and butter, heated and kept warm were poured down the side of the batter and folded in as well. A few daunting tasks later, and I had the most fluffy, light and airy pieces of cake I had ever seen.

Once I had crossed the sponge cake hurdle, I was ready to call it a night. My feet were aching, my hair was frazzled and frankly, I was afraid of making custard, the delicious filling that accompanies a Boston cream pie. But I decided to keep on keeping on. It’s a good thing I did, because I could have missed potentially the most amazing moment in all the years I’ve been baking: having  a simple combination of egg yolks and heavy whipping cream turn from liquid to semi-solid right in front of your eyes.

Assembling was easy. The custard went on smoothly, but the next hurdle I had to cross was making the chocolate ganache. This particular recipe had an interesting way of melting chocolate, one which I loved. The trick was to heat up the heavy whipping cream first and then pour  on the chocolate in a separate container. Boiling cream melting chocolate – what a genius idea. It made the glaze very smooth. After the ganache had cooled down, I realized the cake looked a bit empty, so I looked around the kitchen for a bit until I discovered some sliced almonds. What a life saver they were, because they instantly transformed this Boston Cream Pie from ordinary to extraordinary.

Despite the hard work, I had an amazing time and there are quite a few details I’m missing from this post, but making this dessert, in between a full-time job and freelance work just about knocked me out of my socks.

Recipe from JoyofBaking

I put sheet in parentheses because it didn’t turn out like a true sheet cake. First off, I was out of wax paper to put in the bottom of the pan. Second, my pan was not nearly wide enough or long enough as it should have been, and also, I did not sprinkle confectioner’s sugar over the top and cut the pieces in triangles. So my cherry sheet cake, was more of a cherry flat cake than anything else. I found the recipe while browsing Martha Stewart.com, a website that never fails to be a good thing. I had been wanting to make something with cherries for a while now and it just so happened that we had a bag of frozen dark cherries sitting in the freezer.

The difference with this dough and regular cake dough was that it had the consistency of cookie dough and used more baking powder than usual. In fact, the dough turned out amazing, it was light and fluffy, not overly sweet, but just perfect. The cherries were really the icing on the cake.

It definitely didn’t turn out as good looking as the Martha Stewart version, but it tasted great, so I’m ok with it. The recommended cooking time was 35 to 40 minutes, however because my pan wasn’t wide enough and the dough was packed tight, it took the middle section of the cake about 50 minutes to fully cook. Serve with a warm (not piping hot) cup of tea!

It seems that every Saturday, I develop a greater desire to bake than any other day. This is probably due to the fact that I’ve spent the greater part of the day relaxing, doing nothing and de-stressing. I got around to looking at recipes last night to see what kind of concoction I will make this time around and it occurred to me that I had been thinking of rum cake all week long. I set off to Epicurious to find a recipe, however, my search didn’t yield and desirable results, so I headed off to the next best thing, Google.

I searched for “rum cake” and amidst all the results, I found one from Recipe Zaar entitled “Almost Tortuga Rum Cake.” Oh how the memories came flowing back to me. The first time I ever lay eyes on Tortuga Rum Cake, a food fit for the Gods, was when Nat returned from The Cayman Islands, cake in hand. “This is the best thing you’ll ever taste,” she told me. I had my doubts, as at 16, I didn’t think anything that combined cake and alcohol as ingredients could ever taste good.

Oh was I wrong. I was so wrong. One bite and I was hooked. The cake melted in my mouth, the essence of the rum dancing around on my tongue. It was the best thing I had tasted. After that, me and Nat forgot about rum cake for years, as it was sold exclusively in the Cayman Islands, Jamaica and Barbados. We could have it shipped to the U.S., but the cost and the hassle was just a bit too much for two teenagers.

So last Saturday, I had my eyes set upon making this luxurious cake, that is, if I already had all of the ingredients. It was 9 p.m. and I was not about to go down to the super market to buy missing pieces of my rum cake puzzle. Miraculously, I happened to have it all, even the vanilla pudding mix the recipe called for ( I used French vanilla, I don’t think it makes too big a difference, if anything it made it better). The real hunt came for the rum. I need whaler vanille rum, otherwise known as Hawaiian style rum. What I found instead of Bacardi Puerto Rican Rum. I had my doubts, but when I took a whiff, it smelled more or less like Tortuga Rum Cake. Thank God for ingredient substitutes, as the recipe called for cake flour and I only had regular flour. Turns out you can substitute about a quarter of corn starch in with regular flour (for a 2 cup measurement) to make cake flour, which means I used 1/4 cup corn start and 1 3/4 cups flour.

So I set off to make my rum cake. And let me tell you, it might be the creation I am most proud of to date.

Although nothing can ever beat the taste of Tortuga, this almost takes the cake.