Culinary Adventures with Camilla

Our friend Stella loves pink, pigs, chocolate, and marzipan. So, it was pretty easy planning her cake. It had to have pink, pigs, chocolate, and marzipan. Surprise, Stella Bella! D did a great job on the cake. Cake Components 2 layers Sour Cream-Chocolate Cake (click name to go to the original recipe post) 1 layer Marzipan Cake (see below) 2 batches Simple Chocolate Frosting   Fondant Pigs 2 7-ounce tubes almond paste pirouette rolled wafers (I used almost 2 full canisters to go around an 11" cake) 3 yards of 2-1/2" ribbon Ingredients for the Marzipan Cake 1 7-ounce tube almond paste 1/4 C butter, softened 1/2 C organic granulated sugar 1 C ground almonds 2 eggs 1/4 t organic hazelnut extract 1/4 t organic chocolate extract 1 C flour 1 t baking powder Procedure Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter and line an 11" cake pan with parchment paper. Cream the almond paste with the butter and sugar. Mix in the ground ...

I had some 'leftover' cooked rhubarb from when I made a batch of rhubarb syrup and decided to use that as a compote in a rhubarb dessert for our mothers' day dinner. I did some searching and came up with a layered dish with tangy-sweet rhubarb compote, fluffy whipped cream, and cookie crumbles, a fool. Why a fool? Wikipedia reports : " Foole is first mentioned as a dessert in 1598 (together with trifle), although the origins of gooseberry fool may date back to the 15th century. The earliest recipe for fruit fool dates to the mid 17th century. Why the word "fool" is used as the name of this fruit dessert is not clear. Several authors derive it from the French verb fouler meaning "to crush" or "to press" (in the context of pressing grapes for wine), but this derivation is dismissed by the Oxford English Dictionary as baseless and inconsistent with the early use of the word." So, I still don't have an answer to t...