Mad Bakeware: Fat Daddio's Mad Dadder Cake Pans

Image from Colette's Cakes

What!? That cake looks crazy! It’s so tilted and delicious looking that I’m getting dizzy! 

It’s called a Mad Hatter cake, a style popularized by baker Colette Peters of Colette’s Cakes. It totally broke the cake mold (pun!) and I don’t see how anyone could go back to baking regularly-shaped cakes after seeing this. 

And now, thanks to Fat Daddio’s Bakeware, you can make a Mad Hatter cake at home. Fat Daddio’s has constructed a pan that bakes tilted cakes that can be stacked to create the Mad Hatter cake effect. The closest object I can compare it to - and this is not meant to be appetizing – is a pool: one end is shallow, one end is deep, which creates a kind of right triangle with its top cut off.

The innovation with Fat Daddio’s Mad Dadder pans is that it comes with a stand to hold up the shallow end so that cakes bake up level. These pans come in square and round shapes and in 4 different sizes (6, 8, 10 and 12 inches). 

The Mad Dadder. Notice the stand on the left that keeps the pan level.

Buy one pan and you can use frosting to illustrate different tilted layers (good for creating a Cat In The Hat hat cake). But even better, buy several different sizes and you can stack the cakes up like a pyramid, creating that wonderful whirling effect. 

Square, round and rectangle cakes have had their day. They are bland (not in taste, just the way they look), staid, old news.  Buy a Mad Dadder pan (or pans) and start having fun with your cake and eat it, too.

Hot Chocolate With Whipped Cream

iSi 1 pint

I was half watching the evening news on Monday when I witnessed the weatherman make a grim prediction: “lows in the mid-30s.” He was talking about a town tens of miles from where I live, but it’s inevitable that chilly temperatures are coming. (And will stick around for, oh, I don’t know, 5 months?)

The best defense? Hot chocolate with whipped cream. 

Maybe apple cider with whipped cream is appropriate right now or at least until Nov. 1. Then it’s time for hot chocolate with whipped cream. Deeper into winter I’ll go for an Irish coffee with whipped cream.  The point is: whipped cream can get you through most grim situations. 

iSi 1/2 pint

Those fluffy, sweet clouds of aerated heavy cream complement almost anything (toast, strawberries, and even hot dogs). So would it not be prudent to have a device handy that can produce whipped cream in seconds?

Chef Tools recently added several fine whippers by iSi. These attractive, durable little stainless steel devices (“little” is an understatement, they have up to a 1 pint capacity) use nitrous oxide to produce whipped cream. You can also store your cream inside them in the refrigerator.

More, they can whip almost any liquid in a frothy cream. Turn butternut squash soup into delicious topping for vegetables (or butternut squash soup!). Cut down on calories and whip soy or coconut milk for a delicious non-dairy topping. You could even whip hot chocolate and use it as a topping for hot chocolate. These are just examples. Prepare for winter the right way and get an iSi whipper to keep your mind, body and soul from freezing in snowstorms and frigid temperatures.