Bookish Baking Journal (#1)

Cookies and Cream Cake Pops and For the Summer by Abby Jimenez

Back during the first iteration of this blog, I would occasionally post about baking, a second hobby of mine into which I am prone to deep dive. In fact, I have wished to make my living baking as often as I have wished to do so reading and writing about books. In both cases, I would want to do so on my own schedule and suiting my own tastes, so what I’m really wishing for is to be an independently wealthy person who either bakes or reads and writes about books for pocket money.

One of the many aspects of getting older that is stressful and exciting in equal measure is that eventually you reach a tipping point at which you are closer to retirement than you are to the start of your working life. If you are lucky, like I have been, you have managed to work long and well enough that retirement will be a mostly comfortable era during which you will work a little, but mostly only at your leisure. Thus, my not terribly distant future may actually involve me getting to bake/read and write about books for spare cash. To that end, and for a measure of self-accountability, I’m going to start chronicling my baking misadventures here.

Don’t worry: This is not going to turn into a recipe blog.¹ I will share what I am doing in the kitchen and how it all went, and I will include links to recipes and to baking sites that I find not terrible.² What I am reading or listening to will always be included in these posts. There is also a long list of book-inspired bakes I want to try. Reading and books will always be part of the formula is what I’m saying. So if that’s what you’re here for, you will keep getting it.

As with anything else I share here, I write for me. But if you’re here too, I hope you enjoy it.

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Cake Pops: A Journey

A few years ago, the Washington Post’s food section started publishing newsletter series organized around various themes. I followed one on baking that took you through eight common recipes considered essential to every baker’s arsenal, including chocolate chip cookies, birthday cake, basic yeast bread and biscuits, among others. The writer of the series noted that she started out as a baker by necessity. Her parents wouldn’t buy her sweets, but they allowed her to eat anything she made herself. Enter Nestle Toll House Morsels. For her, the recipe on the bag was the start of a long, fruitful journey. For me, that same path has sometimes felt more like a long descent into madness. I baked that same chocolate chip cookie recipe many, many times as a kid. Turns out, it was a gateway drug.

Who could resist chocolate wrapped in flour, butter and sugar? Nobody, that’s who. But that’s not what made the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe dangerous. Its lure lay in its simplicity. The ingredients are grocery store staples, and the instructions sensible, offering the final product within the hour. There was no insistence that you weigh your ingredients. No expensive stand mixer required. Chill the dough for 24 hours before baking? Please. My 11-year-old attention span could barely sit still for the dozen minutes it would need in the oven. So easy. So tasty. So accessible. Of course, I was hooked. I stayed hooked. For good and ill.

You see, baking is both a hobby and skill, like playing the piano. As you get better, it gets harder, not easier. It starts with chopsticks (chocolate chip cookies). Then comes Fur Elise (cheesecake bars), until one day you find yourself giving up your weekends so you can master Chopin (French macarons). Thus, for me, baking can feel like trying to solve an unsolvable mystery. I love it, but it sometimes makes me feel a little crazy.

Anyway, here I am making cake pops. Tasty? Yes. Easy and accessible? Not quite. Honestly, only a baking addict nursing a now 35-year habit would subject themselves to this because cake pops aren’t just the product of one recipe. It’s three. Cake pops are cake and frosting (and sometimes other mix-ins) all blended together, shaped into not-quite-bite-sized balls that are then coated in chocolate. They may look cute sitting there all perfectly spherical, perfectly sprinkled and perfectly upright in the glass display case at your local bakery, but the making of them is so perfectly finicky it will test your every last nerve. Certainly, they tested mine.

Notes on the flavor

My family has a soft spot for “cookies and cream” desserts, so when I decided to try making these, that flavor was at the top of the list. The cake pop “dough” is a mix of vanilla cake, vanilla buttercream frosting and Oreo crumbs, and the coating can be white or dark chocolate. For the cake, some cake pop recipes will simply point you to the nearest Betty Crocker mix and leave it at that. Others might include a recipe that will result in the exact right amount of cake you will need. Naturally, I was drawn to the least helpful recipe, which did neither of those things.³

The website I Scream For Buttercream is the same assault to the eye that most recipe blogs are, but I have found on it a handful of things I loved making, including these cookies and cream cake pops and what my husband and daughters agreed was the best vanilla cake ever. They even preferred the cake without the frosting!

Notes on the ingredients

• Cake flour—I used to think requiring any type of flour that wasn’t all purpose flour was a bridge too far. These days, I keep four or five different types of flour in my house. Currently, the pantry is stocked with all purpose flour, almond flour, bread flour, masa and, yes, cake flour.

• 2 cups granulated sugar—I realized as I started making this recipe that I was low on granulated sugar and only had about a cup and a quarter in the house. I made up the difference with dark brown sugar. This change can affect the taste of what you’re making. In this case, the resulting cake was even more delicious.

• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder—I used 1 and 1/4 because I live a mile above sea level. High altitude baking is its own hellscape.

• Unsalted butter, “only slightly cooler than room temperature”—This is the kind of nonsense instruction that makes me hate a recipe. What the hell does “only slightly cooler than room temperature” actually mean in practical terms? The average temperature in my kitchen is roughly “too cold.” I ignored it.

• Whole milk—When a recipe blog says you absolutely need to use whole milk instead of anything else, I get a sick pleasure out of using milk with some other level of fat content. I have given into having multiple types of flour around at all times. I can’t do that with milk too and expect to stay sane. In this case, I used 1 percent because that’s what I had in the fridge. The world did not end.

• Vanilla bean paste—What happened to good old extract!?! I did, in fact, go out and buy this, the most recent fad among online bakers. I’m genuinely sorry to say that it makes a huge difference in taste and is the reason behind the best vanilla cake ever. Unfortunately, paste is more expensive than extract (not cheap to begin with), but it offers a more concentrated flavor that will make you understand why “vanilla” shouldn’t be a synonym for “basic.”

• Almond emulsion—I didn’t use this optional ingredient. There are lines into impracticality that even I can’t cross. See note on milk above.

Notes on the process

• The vanilla cake recipe results in two 8-inch cake layers. The cake pop recipe calls for four cups of cake crumbles, which turned out to be about three-quarters of one layer, but you could probably use the whole layer if you add extra buttercream. Speaking of . . .

• The vanilla buttercream recipe is enough to frost a two-layer cake. The cake pop recipe calls only for half a cup.⁴ In retrospect, this didn’t feel like enough. Cake pop recipes vary on how much of you need of both for the right consistency, which should be thick enough to hold its shape, especially when you dip the ball in the coating, but not so dense that a bite no longer feels like eating cake, descriptors for which can be words like “fluffy” and “moist.”⁵ Following the instructions in this recipe, the cake pop balls didn’t fall apart, exactly, but they didn’t feel super strong. Several dips into the melted chocolate coating, I decided to stop flirting with disaster and put the dough balls in the fridge to harden them first. This helped a lot, but the “dough” might have held together a little better with an extra quarter-cup of frosting. Using an entire layer of cake for the cake pops would probably require a cup of buttercream for true cake-pop-ball-dough alchemy. As it was, I had enough cake and buttercream for the cake pops, and a bonus single-layer frosted vanilla cake.

• The third cake pop ingredient in this recipe is Oreo crumbs. Because I have a bougie baker’s kitchen these days, I put the Oreos through my food processor, but a plastic baggie and a spoon do the job. The recipe calls for 1 cup of Oreo crumbs. A recipe asking for a specific number of cookies would be more helpful, wouldn’t it?⁶ I used nine cookies for the cake pop “dough” and three for topping.

• Meltable chocolate-flavored candy coating wafers are now easily available in most grocery stores in both white chocolate and dark chocolate. This recipe suggested melting actual white chocolate chips instead. I followed the instruction because instruction-following is written into my DNA, but I should have known better. Melted chocolate chips are heavier and thicker than flavored candy coating, so if your cake balls are not thick enough they will start to break apart in the melted chocolate and/or fall off the cake pop stick or both. Refrigerating the dough balls helped, and the melted dark chocolate did better than the melted white chocolate.

Notes on my accompanying audiobook

I got on a bit of a romance kick toward the end of last year. The well-produced audiobooks in this genre are reliably entertaining and easy to get through. So I started Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez, which had the Good Morning America Book Club seal of approval, thinking it would make for a nice listen as I made a vanilla cake, then vanilla buttercream and then the cake pops that required both.

Like egg whites approaching perfect peak stiffness that are accidentally whipped for three seconds too long, it started out strong but turned into a mess. There’s a cute graphic of a guy and a girl frolicking on a beach with a dog on the book’s cover, and I’m not sure what story those people were inhabiting because it was’t this one, which does include a dog and a lake beach, but a lifetime of abandonment trauma and no frolicking that I remember. I’d give the author credit for touching on some deep mental health issues, except she did it so superficially that—at least for me—there was no real impact. If you want a better story about a woman working through issues stemming from being raised by a terrible mother, check out Canadian Boyfriend instead, the audio of which comes courtesy of perennial fave Joshua Jackson. Even his special brand of magic couldn’t have saved this one.

Listening to it cured me from further interest in modern romance—at least for a while. The cake pops came out good enough that I want to try baking them again and again.

1. I mostly hate those and use them only for cost efficiency’s sake.

2. “Not terrible” is the only way to describe the best of them. Truly, recipe sites are a scourge.

3. A box of cake mix? Never. Not because I’m a snob about flavor, but what I love about baking is the very mixing and measuring of ingredients that a box avoids. For me using a box of cake mix is like buying a puzzle that is already three-quarters done. Where’s the fun in that?

4. Again, you could use store-bought frosting, but again, I’m here for the brain teaser. As I have made obvious, I complain a lot about how complicated things can get, but the thrill is in the challenge.

5. This is how we get instructions like “only slightly cooler than room temperature.” Baking is this nutty space where you must be precise and the margin of error is extremely slim but sometimes there is no real way to measure how to do what you need to do without trying and failing until you get the “feel” of the recipe.

6. Again, I hate recipe blogs.