Back to Baking~Lemon Crunch Cake

A belated Happy Birthday to Michael! Mike's birthday occurred a couple weeks ago so we celebrated with a game night get together with some friends.

Here's Mike's birthday cake. I wanted to bake him a cake from scratch so I attempted to make a lemon crunch cake. My mom kept raving about a cake she had tasted in San Francisco from a lemon crunch cake she tasted at a Japanese bakery. I searched online and found this recipe. I had also tasted The Alley's lemon crunch cake the last time I was back home in Hawaii, so at least I had a frame of reference of what to strive for.

The lemon crunch cake recipe is basically a chiffon cake recipe without the oil. It had a light texture and flavor and reminded me of a Japanese-type cake. The recipe tasted great and people who prefer less sweet desserts would really enjoy it. It's pretty much the opposite of a Costco or Sam's Club type birthday cake (although I am not complaining about these cakes, because some times they taste good too). If I were to tweak the online recipe to make it more like "The Alley's" cake, I'd stick with a traditional chiffon cake with oil, add more lemon flavoring and sugar, add more lemon flavoring to the whipped cream, and add a really good and tart lemon curd.

Here's the birthday boy with his cake.

Check out this cake that was made for a friend's birthday. If you're a fan of "Settlers of Catan" you'll like this cake.

Spiked Gummy Bears

My favorite type of candy is gummies. I love Haribo (it has to be Haribo, because they are extra hard and chewy) mini frogs and bears.
So when Aaron made these vodka-infused bears last month, I had to try them. They were so addicting, but that may be the alcohol talking.
The texture of these vodka-infused gummy bears is a cross between jello and those asian lychee jel candies (the ones that made the news for being the cause of kids choking).

The beginnings of my experiment. I had a bunch of mini bears which were becoming super chewy and dried out.
Recipe (modified from "Instructables")
3/8 c. apple juice
1/4 c. vodka
1/2 c. gummy candies (bears, worms, frogs, etc)

Combine all ingredients in a container and cover it. Refrigerate.
Stir the gummies daily, so that they do not end up sticking together.
Soak the gummies for at least five days (you can taste the gummies prior to the five day soak, but the middles might be super hard)

**Modifications***
*If you like the taste of a different alcohol, use it. The dominant flavor is the alcohol, so you can make tequila or rum-flavored gummies. I am not sure if Bailey's is a good idea.
*Non-alcoholic gummies can be made. Just use a flavored juice instead. Or, li hing mui juice. (that's how my sister used to eat gummy bears when we were younger).
For those of you who have ever gone drinking with me, you know that I cannot handle my alcohol. I think I can get drunk off less than one shot of alcohol. So, I modified the recipe. I used more apple juice than vodka. When Aaron made his gummies, he soaked the bears in grape juice and vodka, so all the bears were a dark shade of plum, and you could not appreciate the colorfulness of the bears. Aaron, Erika, and I discussed that a white cranberry juice or apple juice would be better to help retain the colors.

I made a tiny portion of gummies, so just multiple the recipe if you want to make more...and believe me, these are quite yummy so you might want to make more.
So if you want to be that "uuber-cool" person at your next social gathering, bring these gummies. How cool would it be to sip an apple martini with floating chewy gummy bears? or frogs?
Look how much liquid the frogs absorbed! The marshmallow portion of the frogs remained intact, but might have not survived a 10-day soak. They were slightly disintegrating, so marshmallow-type gummies might not fare as well as traditional gummies.