Cranberry Anadama Cake

As part of an initiative to improve my mental and physical health through baking, I'm starting a personal project which, for lack of a better title, I'm going to call "The Claire Saffitz Project." (If anyone is more creative than me in that department, let me know. I'll credit you.) I'm not going to give myself a time limit per se, but my goal is to work my way through every recipe in both of Claire's books, Dessert Person and What's for Dessert. I'll write more this week about the background of this project and the general outline of it, but for now, this is all you need to know.

I was inspired to start with this Cranberry Anadama Cake from What's for Dessert because I still had a bag of frozen cranberries in my fridge that I had bought in November and never used. I am, for the most part, a very frugal person who hates waste - especially in the kitchen - so most of my inspiration of what to cook and bake comes from seeing what I have that needs to be used up. That'll probably be a pattern here. You are probably wondering what the hell anadama cake is - I had never heard of it either before making this. In the headnote, Claire says that it's a yeasted wheat bread made with cornmeal and molasses that's found in New England. For some reason I couldn't imagine how all those ingredients would taste together, so I really had no clue what to expect with this recipe.

This is a good recipe for beginning or casual bakers - it's a pretty standard mix-and-bake cake for the most part with no elaborate assembly required, and it makes use of simple and easy-to-find ingredients (save for cranberries, which can be somewhat of a seasonal thing). One of the most ingenious things about this cake, in my opinion, is its use of multiple forms of cranberry. Two thirds of the cranberries get cooked down with the molasses into a jam-like mixture that gets folded into the batter itself, while the remaining third are left whole, coated in sugar, and scattered on top of the cake before it gets baked. I've never seen this technique before - usually, the cranberries would just get mixed in like chocolate chips - and I think it's a really smart way to get cranberry flavor throughout the cake. Side note - I didn't realize how unpleasantly sour plain cranberries are. Now I realize why they are never eaten that way.

This recipe does call for a hand mixer. I imagine you could do it entirely by hand, but it would be a lot more difficult to cream the butter and sugar to the appropriate fluffiness. I am extremely spoiled, so my parents gave me a hand mixer in October (that being said, you can get the cheaper ones for around $20). This was actually my very first time using it, though. While it doesn't crush through things like a stand mixer does (I really had to go at the butter for a while to break it apart; next time I'll cube it beforehand), I found that it was easier to control the spots that need a little more mixing than others, and it was actually a little more fun than a stand mixer as well! Perhaps most importantly, it's a lot easier to clean. It definitely took some adjustment to maneuver, and mine only has two speed options so I had to adjust the instructions a little, but it was easy to get the hang of. Oh, it was also very loud, so be aware of that. But considering it can do most of the things a stand mixer can, I honestly think it's a better value between the two.

After the cake gets baked, you drizzle it with a pretty standard powdered sugar icing and grate some more orange zest on top (some goes in the batter). For some reason, my orange was not zesting well at all so it didn't look as beautiful as a garnish as it was supposed to, but that's okay. Considering I didn't really have any concrete expectations for this cake, it was very delicious. All of the flavors married really well with the tartness of the cranberries. The molasses provided a nice deep, warm note in the background while the cornmeal added an interesting textural element (I've never really had cornmeal in a baked good like this, so I can't really say definitively if it was good or bad - just interesting). The orange came through really well, and there was also a scant 1/8 teaspoon of cloves added which, though I couldn't really detect per se, probably added another layer of warmth that would be notable had I omitted it. The cake itself is not particularly sweet, so the very sweet icing on top is a welcome edition. I maybe would've liked it to be a tad bit thinner - after baking, the cranberries on top looked so beautiful and the icing obscured that a little (sadly, I did not get a picture of the un-iced cake). I think this cake would probably be better seasonally suited to the holidays, but I happened to make it on Valentine's Day which I think is somewhat appropriate because of the red color of the cranberries. Lol. Anyways, this is also one of those cakes that feels appropriate any time of day - as a sweet breakfast, an afternoon snack, or dessert. 

Overall Rating: 8/10

Yes, my lens is cracked. I will not be apologizing.

I didn't celebrate Valentine's Day in the traditional sense - it's always sort of been my least favorite holiday, and I know there are plenty of people out there that can back me up on that. However, I thought it was appropriate this year to approach the holiday with new eyes. These past few months have been a little rough for me. After panicking over my finances, I got a restaurant job for a while. It was fun in some respects, and it gave me a steady income for a while, but its odd hours and physical demands got to be too much for me on top of my already pretty intense course load. I also found that I've been very preoccupied these past few months over my weight, what I could and couldn't eat, and the like. I'm still carrying on a bit of that mentality, which is one of my primary motivations for this project and a theme I'll probably discuss more at length in the future. Anyways, this Valentine's Day, I decided to celebrate and look out for the person I love most: myself. I quit my job - my last day of work was Sunday - and on Monday I spent over $100 on groceries. I do not regret that one bit - literally the only food in my house before that was pasta and a few stray jars of mustard and kimchi. I think starting off this project on Valentine's Day, with this cake, is a really beautiful symbolic gesture to myself. I'm starting a new chapter in my life, focused on feeding myself properly, finding balance, and ultimately putting myself first.

This is my first post for this project, so it's bound to be a little imperfect. I almost feel a little bad for this lovely cake for having to be my guinea pig. I want to strike the right balance of covering as much detail and observation of the process as I can while also using a narrative/creative style that's fun to read and connects baking to my life as a whole. I feel like I could do that a little bit smoother. Anyways, I like the idea of ending with a song, but if that feels irrelevant and superfluous I'll stop. Here's a bonus tract from Taylor Swift's Evermore - "It's Time to Go", which is all about finding strength in backing out of difficult situations and has really been getting me through these past few weeks.