Cinnamon, Cinnamon, lovely Cinnamon . . .

Welcome to Tuesday's With Dorie, yes . . . that fantastic baking group I belong to, "THE" baking group of all baking groups! Once a week we all bake in unison, one delicious recipe chosen by one of our members from that deliciously wonderful baking book, "Baking, from my home to yours," which was written by the equally delicious Ms Dorie Greenspan, herself! I just love belonging to this group. Not only have I gotten to meet a lot of really wonderful people through it, but I am finally really, (I mean REALLY) using one of my cookbooks the way a good cookbook should be used!

This week Tracey of Tracey’s Culinary Adventures chose Cinnamon Squares on pages 210 and 211.

Mmm . . . cinnamon one of my most favouritest of the baking spices. I could eat cinnamon until it comes out my ears. Just the smell alone is enough to make my tastebud's start tingling.



Cinnamon, and its relative cassia, have long been prized for both flavor and medicine. Romans used cinnamon to make their strong, bitter wine palatable, Greeks to season meat and vegetable dishes, Arabs in tea, and nearly everyone in baked goods. English nobility hoarded delicate Ceylon cinnamon to flavor breads and puddings.

Most of the cinnamon that we use today comes from the Indonesian Cassia tree and it not really true cinnamon, although to be sure, selective plantings, cuttings, pruning and choice locations have enabled its cultivation into a superlative product. This is the type of cinnamon I normally use.



When I really want the cinnamon flavour to shine through though, I use Saigon Cinnamon. This superior cinnamon comes from Vietnam and is much stronger than your normal cinnamon, with a sweet and spicy heat, not unlike that of red hots. For this recipe I used a combination of the two.



What can I say about this recipe? I loved it! The cake batter was very easy to put together as was the streusal mixture that was layered in the middle. We don't do coffee here, so there was no espresso powder to put in with the streusal. I did use the chocolate though. I used Lindt dark chocolate with 70% minimum of cocoa solids. I'm not sure if that is what caused my problem or not, but as you can clearly see, my streusal ended up on the bottom of my cake, which still tasted good, but was not as pretty to look at as it should have been . . . disappointment, truly . . .



The cake was fabulous though, and I would make this again, except maybe next time I will leave out the chocolate in the struesal and see what happens . . . One thing for sure, it smelt heavenly when it was baking and the frosting is . . . TO . . . DIE . . . FOR!

If you'd like to make the recipe yourself, be sure to hop on over to Tracey's page and check it out, and be sure to check out the Tuesdays With Dorie Blogroll as well and see how all the other ladies did!



Next week Jessica of My Baking Heart has picked the Parisian Apple Tartlet on page 319. Todd's gonna really love that. He's a fool for apple anything, especially when it comes to pie! A tart is almost the same thing, well . . . nearly.