parsnip cake v. #2.5

[rushthatspeaks]

Some time ago I made up a parsnip cake. Since it's one of the best cakes I make, I've made it several times, most recently this week, and I have a few notes to add to the recipe.

Changes to the Basic Cake Recipe:

The cake will taste a lot more of parsnips if, after you squeeze the liquid out of the shredded parsnips, you beat oh let's say 1/2 to 1 cup of that liquid back into the cake batter when you are putting in the rest of the liquid ingredients. If you are doing this, decrease the blackstrap molasses to 1 tablespoon, so the cake won't be too wet, and add an additional tablespoon of light brown sugar to help make up for the missing molasses. (No, you cannot just take out an egg. Tried. Wrong consistency. Yes, you do need some molasses for flavor reasons.)

A Substitution:

So sovay and I were making this cake, at my usual baking hour of probably not yet midnight (so glad sovay lives close enough now for that to work), and I could not find the star anise. I don't use it that often, fond as I am of it, because I don't like it in most savory applications and most other people don't like as much of it as I do in sweet ones. Eventually I concluded I must have used the last of it in five-spice powder the last time I made char siu bao, so we made a grocery store run, and they didn't have any either.

What they had was aniseed. I had never had any personal experience with aniseed, but we knew it was meant to be Also Licorice-y and got some.

This is not quite one of those cases like cassia for cinnamon where I open a jar and inhale and go oh, somebody is selling me something on this one, but aniseed and star anise are not remotely similar to one another. It turns out they are not even related species. I cook by smell, so I think of spices by scent, and I think of scent as something similar to a musical scale. Star anise, using the musical analogy, is verging sharp but still in tune and hits a chord in the Dorian mode right in the middle of the audible range, loudly. Aniseed is in tune, certainly, but is very soft and wavery about it, unassertive. And the notes it's hitting are the fifth and seventh of the chord and the second below the tonic, and the tonic and the third are just... not appearing in this smell. Oh dear, I just lost all the non-music-theory people. A distressing gap in the scent, is what I am saying here. Giant obvious SOMETHING MISSING IN THIS TASTE.

So a one-for-one substitution was out of the question because it would taste not only different but bad without some other futzing around. The internet suggested that aniseed + cinnamon = star anise, but this turns out not to be true of cinnamomum verum and I don't like cassia so don't have any in the house. It needed something in the middle ranges. We proceeded to snort some of pretty much everything in the spice cupboard by way of consideration. Cloves? Oh god no. Turmeric? Ouch. More nutmeg? OUCH. Cumin? I am not ruling it out but it would have pushed the spice balance into savory. Tarragon? Ah ha ha ha ha no. Five-spice powder? Didn't have any homemade and the jarred kind was terrible. Coriander? Same issue as cumin. Garam masala? MY SINUSES. By this point I was starting to wonder if I had any chai teabags I could just deconstruct for the fricking star anise.

Then I found the right thing in the back. Amchur! Amchur is powdered dried mango and you can use it for everything and I do. It is sweet and savory and sharp and bright and you can eat it out of the bag, which I try not to. Toasted some of the mixed spices a little after grinding the aniseed, to give it a darker edge, and we had a viable substitution.

To substitute aniseed for star anise in my parsnip cake, add to previously described spices:

1 tsp. aniseed + 1 additional tsp. cinnamon + 1/2 tsp. amchur

and grind together until everything is powder. This will take a while because aniseed is tough. Then in a small dry pan over low heat toast 1/2 tsp. of the mixed spice powder for thirty seconds or just until you smell it, and mix back into the rest of the powder. Proceed as usual.

Sadly this does not do the thing star anise does of strengthening with every day the cake sits, so the cake will not be better on the fourth day than on the first, but it does make a good stable approximation of the first-day cake-with-star-anise.

Changes to the Basic Icing Recipe:

oh just use creme fraiche, I don't even know what I was thinking when I tried sour cream, silly me.

I have not yet solved the flavoring issue with the icing, which is that lemon juice structurally destabilizes it, and lemon essence keeps it stable but has to be added in ludicrous quantities and even then isn't either complex or strong-tasting. With lemon essence and creme fraiche the icing is good and it is stable and can be gotten smoothly onto a cake. I would prefer spectacular. Next time I am going to try lemon essence and a small quantity of lemon juice and the zest of a damn lemon and if that doesn't do it I am not sure where to go from there.

Will let you know how that turns out.

Comments

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Huh - to me, all actual freesias smell exactly like white pepper (and I had them in my wedding bouquet for exactly that reason). What do they ordinarily smell like to you?

-Nameseeker

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

What I think of as the standard freesia smell is the essence of flowery -- something like daphne or honeysuckle. But I can't at the moment call it to mind well enough to be very exact.