Baking (and some cooking) while on vacation in Morocco

As some of you know, I recently came back from a wonderful vacation in beautiful Morocco. My mom joined us there too. Since I inherited the culinary gene from my mom, it should come as no surprise that we did a lot of cooking and baking together.

Here are a few highlights of what the mother/daughter team cooked and baked together :o)

Eggless chocolate cake with whipped cream frosting. The "serving indicators" are drawn with homemade strawberry jam.

The sweetest and juiciest strawberries for only $1/kg. Needless to say, we made lots of jam :o)

HCB - Genoise Rose (great for sandwiches too)

This week's recipe for the Heavenly Cake Bakers is the Genoise Rose. The recipe calls for a rose-shaped Bundt pan. I came across one last summer at a garage sale and bought it. At the time, I didn't know about the HCB baking group but I knew this pretty pan would come in handy some day, and it sure did :o)

Genoise Rose served with homegrown strawberries and homemade Triple Berry Jam

HCB - Chocolate Butter Cupcakes (rewind)

e Heavenly Cake Bakers made these cupcakes a couple weeks ago. It was the weekend of my return from vacationing overseas which meant that even if I wanted to bake, I really shouldn't until I was completely over my jetlag. This week, the HCBers are making a coconut cheesecake and since I'm allergic to coconut, I figured this was the perfect opportunity to rewind and try out this chocolate cupcake recipe. Since there is no frosting specified for it, or at least, not that I saw, I decided to use up leftover Chocolate Cream Cheese frosting I had in my freezer (it's a frosting I concocted a while back, while trying to come up with an alternative to "regular" cream cheese frosting).

SMS - Chestnut Honey Madeleines

This week's SMS recipe was chosen by Debbie of Cafe Chibita. I have to admit, I almost passed on this recipe because I don't have a Madeleine pan. Then I read about using mini muffin pans and thought I'd give it a try. While going through my cake pan assortment, I came across some cute molds that I thought would work too, so I used them as well (if anybody has any idea what these molds are called, please feel free to fill me in). I've never made Madeleines before but I sure have eaten them a lot as a kid. My mom would buy a big bag of them. The nice thing about the kind she bought was that they were individually wrapped.

I've made a few changes to the recipes, which you'll find in the "Final thoughts/tips" section below. These little tea cakes were very easy to make. I actually made the batter last night and baked them this morning without any problems. After they were baked, I waited a little bit and tried one still slightly warm. It was melt-in-your-mouth delicious. Hubby liked it a lot too, as did my friend Wafae and her young daughter.

Final thoughts/tips:

• Hubby and I enjoyed this tea cakes very much. I liked them so much that I wished I had made half a recipe because I'm eating them waaaaaay too fast. I loved the soft and spongy texture, as well as the flavor and aroma from the toasted almonds, and not to forget, the toasty buttery flavor from using beurre noisette. Hubby gave them a good 9 out of 10 :o)
• Instead of hazelnuts, I used unblanched almonds which I toasted first, cooled, and then ground in my food processor.
• Since I didn't have chestnut honey in my pantry, I used orange blossom honey that we bought on a recent trip to Arizona late last year. Yum!
• I added the following ingredients to the batter: 2 pinches of salt, vanilla extract, and zest of 1/2 a lemon.
• A big thank to Debbie for choosing another SMS winner. If you'd like to give these a try, check out the recipe HERE.
• Don't forget to check out what the other SMS bakers thought of these little delicious morsels.