Happy November everyone! It’s gotten a little chilly in State College lately. We’ve dug out our heavy coats and some extra blankets, and all I want to eat are what most people call “comfort foods” – you know, deep fried, warm, cozy, cheesy, all-of-the-above kinds of foods. Yet the thing I’ve been eating more than anything else lately has been cake. |
I’ve got a good reason! My cousin Aria is turning one this January 2nd, and her parents, my Uncle Kyle and his fiancé Marlena, have asked me to make Aria’s birthday cake :D
Now I love to bake, but I typically stick to recipes that:
Now I love to bake, but I typically stick to recipes that:
1) Dan and I can finish ourselves
2) result in more handheld things I can easily distribute around the PSU Anth department and/or 3) that I saw somewhere and really wanted to try to bake myself :)
2) result in more handheld things I can easily distribute around the PSU Anth department and/or 3) that I saw somewhere and really wanted to try to bake myself :)
I’ve bookmarked plenty of large/decorative cake recipes for future bakes, and now the time has come to start practicing for my beautiful little nugget of a cousin. This blog post will largely feature lessons I'm learning along the way, and I encourage you to please share advice/recipes with me as I go!
I began a few weeks ago by sifting through the countless GBBO recipes I’ve wanted to try. My first “big cake” attempt came from Andrew Smyth (Season 7), or more accurately Andrew’s grandmother. Her chocolate cake recipe with chocolate icing, chocolate shards, roasted hazelnuts, and raspberries had an awful lot of compliments from the judges, and it looked so damn pretty that I just had to give it a go.
Lesson #1: Line the tins properly. You’ll see below that my cake layers had little divots left from the paper lining, and since I was following the recipe exactly I couldn’t just coat the sides with frosting to cover up my mistake. My error aside, this cake was delicious, 10/10 would bake again. Also, Andrew is a total sweetheart and complimented the cake on Instagram <3 (Thanks Dan for tagging him, I was too much of a coward haha.)
Lesson #2: Watch a couple of YouTube videos when attempting advanced techniques. I learned this lesson during my second "big cake" attempt: another GBBO recipe, this time from Season 2's Janet Basu. Her chocolate marble cake with chocolate truffles sounded easy enough on paper, but then my truffles didn't firm up enough to shape and my marbling attempt was pretty shoddy (see right). I sandwiched the cake layers with raspberry jam and Janet's chocolate buttercream frosting, then covered the cakes with the chocolate buttercream. PJ might've been this cake's biggest fan, he really loved the texture. |
Then I attempted a more decorative raspberry buttercream by mixing the same raspberry jam into a basic buttercream mix. While it tasted *alright*, the jam made the buttercream a bit too loose to maintain a shapely volume. Lesson #3: Flavor your buttercream with a small addition of concentrated extract. I also attempted a two-tone effect on my raspberry buttercream by lining my piping bag with drops of red food coloring. This actually came out rather pretty-looking (see left), but can be improved. Lesson #4: Use food coloring gel to line piping bag - drops will leak out and make a big mess. |
Side note: it was during the chocolate-marbled cake weekend that Dan decided he was going to get into baking too. His first stab - melonpan, a sweet Japanese pastry that is essentially a yeast-leavened bun covered with a layer of thin cookie dough. | He followed a video recipe from Cooking with Dog, and was insanely successful for his first attempt at baking. He also claimed to "finally understand why I love kneading by hand so much." Lesson #5: Kneading bakes by hand is fun for everyone. |
After learning so much about buttercream, I spent this past weekend attempting to practice my frosting techniques. I also wanted to mess around with flavorings. I'm a big fan of keeping everything as natural as possible, and didn't want to add too much liquid to my buttercream mixture. I bought some freeze-dried fruits from Trader Joe's, blended them into powders, and mixed these powders into the buttercream recipe from Thomas Keller's cookbook Ad Hoc at Home, to go with his white cupcake recipe. I was actually a huge fan of the flavor, color, and appearance of my freeze-dried frostings, but they were a bit lumpy. Lesson #6: Freeze-dried fruit powder wants to not be freeze-dried anymore, and will suck moisture out of the air. Blend right before sifting into frosting to avoid clumps.
I ended up with a blueberry frosting with blackberry jam filling in the cupcake, strawberry with strawberry jam, raspberry with raspberry jam, and mango with mango peach jam. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the cupcakes, but they were very well received by my Anth building buddies. Lesson #7: Record your progress with photos and notes.
This weekend I've decided to take a break from fancy big cakes and frostings. I'll be baking a "poison apple" something (the theme for our lab meeting on Monday is "Favorite fictional villain"). This kuchen was in a recent NYT Cooking email and sounds rather tasty. Next weekend I'll dive back into big cakes with a chocolate espresso layer cake adapted from Proof Bakery in California - found that one in a Buzzfeed Worth It video. Eventually I'll get into a hardcore decorating spirit. Luckily, one of my favorite Instagram accounts has awesome decorating videos that I can attempt to mimic for a cute 1st birthday cake for tiny Aria. I'll also be testing some baby-friendly cake recipes that contain no refined sugars or cow milk. I'll post again in a few weeks with an update on my progress :) Cheers everyone, and happy baking!