Is it June already? These past couple of months have gone by way too fast. So much has happened in Cake Merchant Land. I got engaged, adopted a puppy, bought a house, and moved! Needless to say, things have been a little crazy around here. My first blogiversary has come and gone. It was actually May 20th, but I still wanted to do a belated blogiversary post and share some of the things that I have learned this year.

First, I have to say how much I love blogging. It has been such a fun creative outlet for me, and I’m convinced that nothing relieves stress like a freshly made batch of cupcakes. Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading and for all of your supportive comments. Your thoughts and opinions mean a lot to me. My goal for the second year of blogging is incorprate more healthy dessert recipes into the mix, since several readers have asked for it. I think it will not only be good for the blog, but for my waistline as well.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’m slightly terrified of vanilla cake. I find it to be rather unforgiving, and after a few vanilla cake fails in my early baking days, I pretty much stopped making them from scratch. One of my blogging goals was to find a great vanilla cake recipe without using a mix. What I found was that is was not only the ingredients that made a good recipe, but the mixing method as well.

There are a few things that have changed the way that I make (and view) vanilla cake. The first is The Cake Bible. In fact, this book has pretty much changed the way I bake altogether. If you’re new to baking, or even a seasoned baker, I would recommend getting your hands on it and reading it cover to cover. The Cake Bible introduced me to a method of mixing called the reverse creaming method. Instead of creaming the butter and sugar together first, the fat (butter or shortening) is beaten with the dry ingredients along with part of the liquid. The remainder of the liquid is then beaten into the mixture in installments, which results in a lighter crumb.

So the question is, can you reverse cream any recipe? That’s what I wanted to find out. I took a traditional vanilla cake recipe (from Sprinkles cupcakes) that I used all the time, and just changed the order of how I mixed the ingredients. Did it work? Yes and no. There are a few keys to success that apply to all cakes and cupcakes, but especially when using this method.

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Have I mentioned how much I love my Bouchon Bakery cookbook? I got it for my birthday back in February, and even though I’ve spent hours staring at the lovely photographs (it’s my new coffee table book), I’ve hardly made any of the recipes. I’ve been dying to try the devil’s food cake, since it’s one of my very favorite desserts ever, so I was really excited to try Thomas Keller’s version. You might remember the devil’s food cake I made for my birthday this year, which I absolutely loved, so I wanted to see how this would compare.

The recipe differs quite a bit from the Baking Illustrated version. There’s no melted chocolate, and mayonnaise is used instead of milk or sour cream. I know what you’re thinking. Mayonnaise? In a fancy French cookbook? I thought the same thing. Chocolate mayonnaise cake was popular in during World War 2, when certain ingredients were in short supply and people had to get creative. If you think about it, it makes sense. Mayo is made of egg, oil, and vinegar, which are all common ingredients in cakes anyway.

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