An Unexpected Masterpiece

You might recall my insane task of baking 120 cupcakes for a wedding a few weeks back, but the result was awesome and totally worth it…yet it’s worth mentioning that I had also volunteered to bake cakes for the office’s birthday celebration three days later! Oops…I of course forgot about it, and had to resort to a crazy brainstorm session: ‘how about cookies? No, those won’t work…I can bring in cookies any old time…but wait, why not cookies…in cake form!” Following a mad dash of altering cookie recipes and finding a ridiculous amount of butter I was able to create two last-minute beauties: Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting and Chocolate Brownie Cake with Coconut-Almond Frosting.
This cake is proof that freezers are necessary to our survival. You completely forget you are having friends over (or in my case, bringing in treats to the office)…yet suddenly remember that cookie batter you froze a few weeks back! It will need to thaw, but luckily I placed the dough into my fridge (to make space for ALL of those cupcakes). It’s one of the BEST chocolate chip cookie doughs I have found to date, and the peanut butter frosting was a no-brainer. Anyone who doesn’t love a chocolate and peanut butter pairing should not be trusted (unless they are allergic to peanuts…they can still be trusted) Click HERE to see the secret behind this amazing cake!
This next recipe was inspired by an “I-need-to-use-very-soon” bag of shredded coconut sitting in my pantry. I wanted something similar to an Almond Joy, mostly because I was secretly craving the actually candy…and somehow I decided on a brownie cake. I modified the recipe that I just featured on this blog, trusting the result would be delicious. The topping is what makes this a winner, hands-down – it’s a spin on the frosting for German Chocolate Cake, only with almonds in place of pecans. The finished cake definitely reached my candy-craving standards. Get your Almond Joy fix by clicking HERE.
I loved the idea of pairing these cakes with a work that was similarly “last-minute” in origin. As a flutist, I immediately thought of the perfect piece – Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2 in D Major. A bit of history: flutist Ferdinand De Jean had commissioned Mozart to compose four flute quartets and three concerti…yet Mozart was the living representation of procrastination. So it was no surprise that only three quartets and two concerti were presented to De Jean for the commission. Yet like these cakes, Mozart pulled a work from his own “stock” of repertoire to complete it: the Oboe Concerto in C Major. He reworked the piece to fit the flute more appropriately, but basically transcribed the whole thing to D Major and handed it over to De Jean as a “flute concerto.” De Jean wasn’t fooled, and never paid for it. That being said, it has become vital to the flute repertoire and is undeniably beautiful. Sometimes, last-minute creations can be far greater than anything you could have planned (yet while this often worked for Mozart, I wouldn’t recommend it as a life practice…) The recording below is of the first movement with flutist James Galway – enjoy!