raspberry lemon heart cakes/ FAMILY valentine's day: a semi-success story?

In their February issue, Bon Appetit planned out a menu for a FAMILY valentine's day. So, I decided to tackle the dessert portion of that menu, Raspberry Lemon Heart Cakes. Here's their picture from the magazine:

And here's my family's version! (NOTE: I don't have any children and am currently living in a separate state/city than my husband/ spent my Valentine's night alone, baking.)

Surprisingly close, right?!!

If only the actual cake would've turned out as similar... I've been mulling over what I think I did wrong and I think part of it was that I pulled it out of the oven too soon. See that weirdness in the center? I should've waited...but it had already been in the oven for 32 mins and their recipe called for 26-28.

Despite having zero children helping me, I still made a nice mess.

Their version looks so light and airy!

Mine were dense and sort of rubbery.

It wasn't a Valentine's completely devoid of my husband, though. Check out the bowl I mixed everything in:

The Orange Polenta Cake: A Success Story

Timeline

8 pm: Though the recipe told me to pre-heat the oven as the first step, I knew myself better and instead, went to the second step--lining my cake pan with parchment paper, which I'd never used before and which was sort of fun, in the Martha-Stewart sense of the word.

8:15 pm: After zesting two oranges (I used cara cara because I think they're prettier), I had to slice them down/ get rid of all the pith. Another first for me.

8:40 pm: I was a little nervous about the caramel sauce since I'd never done that before either and the recipe called for a pastry brush to brush down the sides of the saucepan, but i just used a spoon, which seemed to work fine for me?

8:40-9:30 pm: I really don't recommend grinding almonds without a food processor unless you're A. fine with breaking into a sweat while baking or B. you enjoy manual labor. At first, I put them in a ziploc bag and beat them with a rolling pin, but my right arm started to cramp up on me. So then I started chopping...

MIDNIGHT: So I don't have a picture of the mixing process, but beating sugar and butter without an electric mixer is also tough and when I had finally finished adding the flour mixture, I had made a huge mess, which I probably freaked out about and had to clean/ couldn't even pause to take a picture. Anyway, this cake baked for an hour and I pulled it out promptly at midnight. It smelled delicious...

All I had left was one last, potentially disastrous step: to flip it over...

TA DA!

It doesn't look as golden and glistening as Gourmet's, but I think I needed this post-peppermint cake. And all the self-esteem I gained, I promise, will go straight into tackling another cover recipe. Like maybe this one.

Next up: Gourmet's Orange Polenta Cake

Things that could prove ridiculous:

1. calls for Orange-Flower water...whaaaaa?

2. calls for ground almonds (I have no food processor.)

check the recipe out here.
(image via Gourmet)

Bon Appetit's Devil's Food Layer Cake with Peppermint Frosting

their cover

my cover

But how did that happen?? Well, the below begins on Christmas day, a day after all the baking and making of the ganache layer, the white chocolate cream layer, and the peppermint frosting. All I had left to do was assemble it...

Have you ever cut a cake across horizontally? Alton Brown spent an entire ten minute segment on Good Eats on this very thing. I ended up using floss, which worked somewhat well if not jaggedly.

Oh and thank you, Sara, for letting me use your KitchenAid mixer. I really don't think I would've attempted this without it. (The peppermint icing involved seven minutes of whipping.)

Oh, whaddya know? All FOUR cake layers and SIX icing layers are assembled and popped into the fridge to set up!

One last step, to ice it. Ina (Garten) would be like, "How easy is that?"

But then... "Uh oh, babe (my husband is helping at this point), it's sliding."

"nooooooooooooooo!!!!! quick, get a plate or something. we'll slide it onto that. we can save this... oh no, that's not working. oh, no. oh, no! wait, let's at least get a picture."

the recipe