Kitchenette

So what do a career crisis, recurring headaches, and general anxiety have in common?  They are all things that have been happening to ME recently.  And while I know that each post lately seems to be not a post, but an excuse for why I am not posting…it’s time to be honest.  I fell off the foodie wagon.  I failed The 366 Recipes in 366 Days project.

Or rather, I chose to let it go.  For the sake of sanity.  And our budget.  And Mr. K’s waistline (hey, someone had to eat all 366 recipe’s worth of leftovers).

But what I didn’t give up on was The Daring Bakers.  Believe it or not, with all this stress going on, the idea of baking up some mad-crazy recipe was one of the few things I had to look forward to last month.

This month’s challenge comes to us from the talented Morven and is for Dorie Greenspan’s Perfect Party Cake, a fabulous white layer cake that Morven was wonderful enough to let us customize to our hearts’ content.

Of course, I was a little less than coordinated when slicing one of the two cakes in half:

But buttercream frosting and orange-mango curd cover all manner of wrongs!  To wit:

I chose to go with the basic white layer cake recipe, filling it with the orange-mango curd for two layers and the suggested raspberry jam for the third. I used lime juice instead of lemon for the frosting.  It turned out fabulous!  We served it in celebration of my brother-in-law’s seventeenth birthday, and a good time was had by all.

Note:  Please visit Morven’s blog, Food Art and Random Thoughts for the complete cake and buttercream recipe - yes, I know I’m too lazy to enter it all here, but she has done it beautifully!

Orange Mango Curd
Adapted from recipe found on Food Migration.com

• ½ cup mango, pureed
• ¼ cup orange juice
• 1/3 cup lemon juice
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 T. orange peel
• 6 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• ½ cup unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces

1.  Heat mango, orange juice, and lemon juice, and orange peel in a nonreactive saucepan over medium heat until hot, but not boiling.  Whisk eggs and egg yolks in a medium nonreactive bowl and gradualy whisk in sugar.

2.  Whisking constantly, gradually pour hot juice mixture into egg mixture, then return to saucepan.

3.  Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until mixture reaches 170 degrees and clings to the back of the spoon, about 3 minutes.

4.  Immediately remove from heat, stir in cold butter until incorporated.  Strain through a mesh strainer into a nonreactive bowl.  Cover surface directly with plastic wrap and refrigerate until needed.