Well folks, this is it. The last week of my year-long baking project. I made this cake on January 10th, I believe, ten days later than I should have. I attempted to make Chocolate Covered Hi Hats for New Year’s Eve, but the cupcakes imploded in the oven and I just didn’t have it in me that night to try again. So I accepted that things happen, and plotted something to make a few days late.

Rob and I were watching America’s Test Kitchen one day, and they made the most incredible looking Triple Chocolate Mousse cake. I started scouting around online to see if I could find the recipe, but those Test Kitchen/Cooks Illustrated fans are an ethical bunch. No one had the recipe listed, but I noticed that someone mentioned it was in the November issue of Cooks Illustrated magazine. Sure enough, I had that issue on my shelf. And there was the recipe.

And so, ten days late, I began my final week of baking for the year.

The recipe started with a flourless chocolate cake base in the bottom of a springform pan. The cake layer baked beautifully, other than the fact that it started pulling away from the side of the pan. I noticed commentors on the America’s Test Kitchen message board had this same problem, but I have no idea how one would fix it. Someone mentioned not greasing the pan before pouring in the batter, but I would be terrified that the cake would stick. I just went with it.

Flourless chocolate cake batter:

Baked:

The next layer that went down was a dark chocolate mousse layer. Heavenly:

The final layer was a white chocolate mousse layer that used gelatin as a stabilizer (I’ve really discovered the power of gelatin this year):

I topped it with some dark chocolate shavings because it looked kind of naked with nothing on top. After I refrigerated the cake for a few hours, we took it out, crossed our fingers and unmolded the cake.

It worked!!!

You’ll note that my layers aren’t as distinct as they should be. That’s because the dark chocolate mousse layer seeped down into the area where the flourless chocolate cake pulled away from the side of the pan. But once we cut some slices, the layers became more distinct:

This cake was pretty fantastic. The only problem was that it was so rich, we couldn’t eat much of it. Tragically, half the cake had to be thrown out after a day or two because we just couldn’t keep eating it. But I hope to make it again in the future and take it to an event or family gathering so it can get the proper respect it deserves!

So that’s it! 52 weeks, a little more than 52 baked goods. A few failures, a few standout favorites and a lot of money spent on ingredients, cookbooks and toys. I can’t even put into words how proud of myself I am that I finished this project. The fact that I learned some new techniques, discovered my love of Christopher Kimball and Co. and made croissants from scratch are just the tip of the iceberg; I finished a project that I started! So so amazing.

Now that we’re a month into 2010, I’ve been thinking about what I want to do now. I’m going to take a break from weekly baking. While I enjoyed almost every minute of it, it can be exhausting. But I’ve already baked a few things this year for birthdays, so I don’t think I can stay away for long. Baking has gotten into me and I don’t think it’ll leave any time soon.

I hope by the end of February to launch a new blog that will feature not only things I’ve baked, but reviews of bakeries and cookery stores in my new city, baking news and baking-related events I’ve attended or wish that I could attend (I’ve managed to attend a book signing by Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks fame and Christopher Kimball and Jack Bishop of Cooks Illustrated/Cooks Country/America’s Test Kitchen fame (eeeeeeeee!) ). I’ve already got a website on hold, but I won’t mention the address yet, as I want everything in place before I unveil it.

I want to thank everyone who supported me during this year, especially my husband, who acted as taste-tester, ingredient-fetcher and shoulder to cry on when things didn’t go so well. I love you.

I absolutely cannot believe I’ve made it to the halfway point of this project. Twenty-six weeks have passed and I haven’t given up yet. This is some kind of a record for me.

This week, I decided I would bake some cookies for my dad for Father’s Day (seeing as how I’m not exactly rolling in cash right now). And I thought, “Hey, if I’m driving down to Zanesville to give my dad some cookies, maybe I should make my grandmother’s favorite pie too!” (My grandmother lives right next door to my parents.)

My grandmother absolutely loves Strawberry Pie. My aunt used to waitress at a Frisch’s Big Boy and would occasionally bring home Strawberry Pie for my grandma, who would flip out over it. As luck would have it, the current issue of Cook’s Illustrated features a ‘Diner-Style Strawberry Pie’ recipe and I couldn’t wait to try it.

The recipe started with a single pie crust. This was your pretty standard flour/sugar/salt/shortening/butter/ice water pie crust, which came together pretty easily. No vodka this time! Once the dough was gathered into a ball, it was wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated for an hour:

Once it had chilled, it was rolled out to fit into a 9-inch pie pan:

I had some trouble getting the dough into the pan. On my first try, I ripped the dough and had to roll it out again. I was more careful the second time and managed to get the dough situated, but I’m sure re-rolling it made it tougher than it should have been:

I got to buy a few new toys at Sur La Table for these projects, including some ceramic pie weights. I know I could have just used beans or rice, but these were under $7 and I love the jar:

The weighted pie dough went into the oven. It came out a little too brown for my taste, but, having never baked a single pie crust before, this may be perfect. I never see the top of the bottom parts of my pie crusts, because they’re covered with filling!

While the pie crust baked, I went to work cooking down some frozen strawberries. Cook’s Illustrated stated that it would take about 25 to 30 minutes for the strawberries to cook down to two cups of a jam-like goo. It took more like an hour. I’m not sure what I did wrong with that…maybe I didn’t have the heat up high enough, or maybe using the Dole frozen strawberries that the magazine strongly suggested I not use affected the time (the Cascadian Farms frozen strawberries the magazine wanted me to use were going to cost me around $12. No thank you!):

Once the strawberries cooked down, I added sugar, lemon juice, water and gelatin and the mixture was left to cool to room temperature. While it cooled, I hulled and sliced a pound of fresh strawberries, which were then folded into the cooled strawberry/gelatin mixture. This was poured into the cooled pie crust:

The whole thing went into the fridge overnight. The following morning, we loaded a cooler up with ice and packed up the pie. I was afraid that if I just held it on my lap for the drive, that it would turn into strawberry soup. The cooler worked really well! I highly recommend it as a means to transport icebox pies. Look at how pretty it turned out:

My parents, Rob and I trekked up to my grandmother’s house and cut into the pie. To my relief, it did not fall apart on me! I whipped up some cream cheese/heavy cream topping to dollop on the slices:

It seemed to go over very well. My grandmother kept the remaining three slices or so. I’m sure she ate all of them by herself!

While I was working on the pie, I was also trying to deal with the cookies I was baking for my dad. Two of the toys I picked up at Sur La Table were cookie cutters that fit my dad to a T:

Yup, that’s a hammer and saw. My dad’s a construction worker.

The cookie dough was a pretty simple combination of butter and sugar, a little salt, a couple of eggs, vanilla and flour. That’s it. No chemical leavener. It was rolled up into two discs and refrigerated. I was planning to cut cookies out of both discs, but it turned out that one would be quite enough. The dough was refrigerated overnight (it can keep up to a week in the fridge – I still have another disc in there that I need to bake!)

Cutting out the cookies went just fine, as did the baking. They came out golden brown and have just the slightest crunchiness to the edges. The centers have a great toothiness to them:

(I sneaked a corgi in there too! Some friends gave us a corgi cookie cutter, and I had just enough dough left to make one little corgi cookie!)

Once the cookies had cooled, I went to work making Royal Icing. I was super excited, as I have always wanted to make and work with Royal Icing. Since I was only making half my cookies, I decided to half the icing recipe as well. So I doled out half the confectioner’s sugar, half the meringue and half the vanilla. And then I dumped in the full amount of water. Yup. And didn’t even realize it! I was mixing and mixing and the icing was not fluffing up at all. I stared at the recipe for a good five minutes before I realized my mistake. So I added the other half of the sugar, meringue powder and vanilla, but my icing never did reach a good consistency. I divided what I ended up with and colored one batch gray and the other red. My plan was to make the handles of the ‘tools’ red and the rest gray. I spooned the gray icing into a piping bag and started in on a cookie.

It was a disaster. The icing immediately started running off the cookie, leaving a lovely blue/gray stain. I got so frustrated that I threw out all the icing and cracked open a can of (gasp) Pillsbury white icing:

My dad didn’t seem to care. The point of the cookies was the shape, not the icing, so I’m trying to not beat myself up too badly about screwing up the icing. I will try it again someday, but maybe not for a while. I need to wrap my head around it.

This weekend is ComFest!, the greatest three-day outdoor free local music/art festival ever! It’s a big gathering in Columbus’ Goodale Park that features local music on about six different stages from noon to ten Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Rob and I help run the Band Merch Booth where we sell the performing bands’ CDs and t-shirts. Set-up is always a fun but trying time, so I thought that some homemade muffins might make the day a little better. So I’m going to bake some blueberry muffins and maybe some cranberry ones as well. Might as well start the weekend off right, and get some food in people’s stomachs before they start drinking!