Seven layer vanilla cake

Layer cake, and not a regular one. I don't even know where to begin with this, except to say that Mr T's belated birthday party gave me the perfect opportunity to go all out and do something a bit different from the norm. I'd read about Zumbo's V8 cake (8 different vanilla flavoured layers) somewhere on facebook when a lucky person was surprised with such a cake! Me being me, time to adapt it - I wasn't even going to try and make a replica because....

• I can't follow recipes to the letter. Zumbo has far too many complicated and weird sounding ingredients which I don't think are required for my home baking. I mean, titanium dioxide? gellan? Definitely the too hard basket - if I need to get it from a super specialty store then its not gonna work for me.


• Time constraints - I had the birthday dinner to think about as well as the cake!


• I needed something foolproof and wasn't really willing to gamble with things that had a high potential for fail (I know I'm crap at stuff like custard and creme chantilly so just had to find a substitute layer instead)


• I'm not really into total replicas anyway since it doesn't have a "me" stamp on it!


• I'm into shortcuts,e g. using vanilla bean paste instead of scraping out vanilla seeds from the pod saved me washing extra knives, a chopping board, wasting all the actual pods themselves

The other option was the 8 texture chocolate cake by Quay, as suggested by Miss G, however Mr T isn't really all that into chocolate, and I thought that doing alternate chocolate / vanilla layers might still just be a bit too chocolatey. However, I will try a version of the 8 texture cake as well. Recipe is here if you're interested in what that looks like.

 

I ended up with 7 layers (no recipe posted since I don't have one for 4 of the 7 layers - though I have put a * where I borrowed the recipe from Zumbo):

1. Dacquoise* - not sure if this is a fancy way of saying meringue; the method of making it certainly made it feel meringue like. This was the bottom layer and had to be sufficiently dense to hold up the layers on top.


2. White chocolate ganache - white chocolate version of regular ganache. Mine wasn't setting properly in the time given and was too runny to spread properly, but the internet suggested I whip it up with electric beaters to stiffen it, and I ended up with wonderfully whipped thickened ganache. No idea why I didn't think of this before... if my ganache has whipped cream in it of course it will whip! Duh...


3. Brown sugar crumble - regular crumble you'd put on a bog standard apple crumble, except with brown sugar.


4. Chiffon cake* - lovely smooth textured cake, but a pain to make. Next time I'll go with a regular vanilla cake and slice it up.


5. Macaron* - almond meal, icing sugar, egg whites, similar to the dacquoise. Isn't it amazing that the same few ingredients can yield a whole bunch of different textures???


6. Cream cheese frosting - since I was in a hurry I didn't have time to be precise in measuring out perfect circles for every single layer and making sure everything was exactly the same height. Unfortunately this also meant the cake looked a little like a dessert burger so I needed the cream cheese frosting to cover all the gaps. Unfortunately I didn't make quite enough and so the sides of the cake are not perfectly regular.


7. Piped whipped cream roses - Mr T thought the top of his cake was looking rather bare. I was going to pipe a picture of the Sydney Opera House but he wanted something that would provide more coverage.. so I pulled out my trusty Wilton 2D and he ended up with a lot of roses and flowers instead. It looks a little wedding cake-ish (that was not the intention!) since I got slightly carried away. Oops.

All in all it was a pretty tasty vanillery (is that a word?) concoction. I would really have liked to reduce the sugar level, but frosting wouldn't be frosting and the macaron / meringue layers won't set without sufficient amounts of sugar.

Happy Birthday (again) Mr T and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as your carrot cupcake.



Ideas for the next cake experiment anyone?

Rose Swirl Vegan Cupcakes

So tonight was a surprise birthday dinner for Miss G, who must have been feeling the "unlove" when Mr T's birthday party has been in discussion for several weeks. Somehow Mr M managed to get her to the meeting point without her finding out, though it did require a flurry of deliberately misleading messages and a pretend phone call.

After cajoling Mr M into being allowed to make cake for the occasion, the request was for a dozen cupcakes, with mixed flavours if we had the time - that would allow Mr M to focus on getting a JLO friendly dessert (egg, dairy and peanut allergy). I thought I'd save him the trouble and decided to try vegan cupcakes in all different flavours, and made a base batter to which I then divided up in 3 parts and added different flavours - lemon / strawberry, coffee, and banana. I also wanted a chocolate one as well and a bit of googling for an egg-free recipe resulted in a number of pages with chocolate avocado cupcake recipes (weird but good!), so I started made these as well. Finally I was super excited to have an opportunity to test my Wilton 2D, and I think the roses came out pretty well.



As if this wasn't enough, I had a sudden panic that all up I only had just enough for 12 cupcakes and 4 mini samples of the banana flavoured one, which meant that I couldn't really go through and taste test the rest of the flavours. I'm usually pretty confident with my regular baking but vegan? The niggling feeling in the back of my mind that it might be a bit too floury, too sugary, not cook properly ... a whole host of potential unexplored issues could come up and I'd be completely stuffed. Solution? Whip up a batch of regular red velvet cupcakes from a tried and tested recipe just in case.

I've made vegan cupcakes a couple of times now but I must admit that a) I don't know much about vegan baking; and b) recipes often call for unconventional ingredients - I can't imagine that I'll be using a whole lot of xantham gum, agave nectar, ener-G egg replacer ... etc. all the time. I think my biggest fear (which I probably should just get over) is not being able to get the cake to rise properly and it being too dense and heavy, and I have found that soy milk also sometimes gives a strange aftertaste. The recipe I ended up using was the most uncomplicated vegan one I could find as a base batter (i.e. vanilla). Here's my adaptation of Lauren's latest recipe (makes 9-12 cupcakes depending on the size of the pan):

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter substitute (I used Pure Sunflower which whips surprisingly well - if you are making cupcakes for someone with a dairy allergy make sure you check the ingredients as olive spread / margarine / i can't believe its not butter often has dairy in it).


• 3/4 cup caster sugar


• Spoon of vanilla


• 1 cup soy milk + 1 teaspoon vinegar (I don't think it matters if you use white / red etc. I only had rice vinegar in the house and that was fine)


• 1 1/3 cups all purpose flour


• 1 teaspoon baking powder


• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda


• Salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180 deg C. Line a muffin tin with paper liners and set aside.


2. In a large bowl, cream butter substitute with sugar. Stir in vanilla extract.


3. Stir soy milk together with vinegar. Set aside to curdle.


4. In a separate bowl, measure out dry ingredients and stir to incorporate.


5. Alternate stirring in wet and dry ingredients beginning and ending with dry.


6. Bake 15-20 minutes or until very lightly browned and toothpick comes out clean.

Frosting

Mr T always makes the frosting so I'm never entirely sure about the quantities. However, the Pure Sunflower worked as well as regular butter - simply whip this up and when the colour has lightened and its fluffy, add icing sugar and keep beating until its icing consistency. Flavour however you want (I made mocha flavour using cocoa powder and a teaspoon of instant coffee mixed with a tiny bit of water [a spoon or two at most], and lemon flavour by adding lemon juice). If this seems too soft to pipe then there's two troubleshooting options to stiffen it up: 1) put it in the fridge; or 2) beat in a small spoon of cornflour.

There's no secret to piping buttercream roses like this; all you need is the magic Wilton 2D or 1M tip (its the one on the left hand picture) and pipe starting from the middle and move in a circular motion outwards. There's a great tutorial by Bella Cupcakes if you're interested in technique. My Wilton 2D came with my piping tip set (see post here).



I made the mass of star looking things (the mocha frosting) using the Wilton 108 tip. These weren't particularly tidy for my standards; I think I was so tired by then since it was 1am on a school night that I was incapable of controlling my piping bag as well as I would have liked.



 

Verdict

We sang Happy Birthday to Miss G and everyone took a cupcake. Mr T tried the lemon vegan cake and it was surprisingly good! Since I had overcatered yet again, our porter was more than happy to relieve us of some cupcakes so I can only assume they looked appetising enough to eat. Think I had better investigate the vegan baking option so I'm less panicked next time round...

Carrot Cupcakes

It was Mr T's birthday last week, and after responding to the first request for banana bread, I ended up making carrot cake with cream cheese frosting as well. After all, no birthday is complete without a cake right? I was running short on time but fortunately carrot cake isn't a complicated one and only required a speed trip to the local Sainsbury express for carrots, walnuts and sultanas. I ended up making cupcakes as they were quicker to bake, and I wouldn't have to divvy them up into slices afterwards. Carrot cake is a funny beast; some people love it, and other people say that vegetables have no place in a cake. What do you think? No need to tell you which bucket Mr T falls into...

The simplest carrot cake recipe I found was in Mr T's trusty Stephanie Alexander book - such a bible for all things food. This recipe featured brown sugar, self raising flour and oil ... whereas Martha Stewart and Hummingbird preferred vegetable oil , buttermilk, white sugar and plain flour. With so many great recipes how does one choose what to use? Solution - I can't. So, I adapted one instead (based on the Hummingbird recipe) and turned the carrot layer cake recipe into a cupcake version, substituting the buttermilk with creme fraiche and regular milk (that was what was in the fridge at the time!) I quartered all the quantities so we wouldn't die from cake overload - the recipe below made about 8 cupcakes, more than enough for 2 people, birthday or not!



Cupcake recipe (adapted from Hummingbird Cake Days)

1. Mix together wet ingredients (I used a stand mixer for this) until well combined:

• 1 grated carrot


• Bit of grated ginger


• 2 eggs


• Spoon of vanilla


• 100g caster sugar


• 80ml vegetable oil


• 20ml creme fraiche / buttermilk / sour cream / regular milk (whatever you have!)

2. Sift dry ingredients into another bowl:

• 120g plain flour


• 1/4 tsp bicarb


• 1/2 tsp baking powder


• Couple of shakes from the salt, cinnamon, ginger, cloves jars (I'm guessing this equates to 1/4-1/2 teaspoon of each)

3. Add dry ingredients progressively to the wet ingredients and keep mixing until combined.

4. Add in optional extras to the batter (handful of chopped walnuts or pecans, handful of sultanas soaked in alcohol).

5. Bake at 170 degrees for about 10min until golden on top.



Frosting recipe

Beat together around 40-50g softened butter (about a quarter of a standard 250g block), 100g of cream cheese (about half a tub of Philly cream cheese) until smooth and fluffy. Add in icing sugar progressively and keep beating until the desired consistency. I have actually no idea how much icing sugar I end up using. I'm guesstimating its about a cup, but could be more or less depending on the texture. The trick is to do the butter and cream cheese first and make sure this is well beaten before adding in the sugar. Also, if you don't want an excessive amount of icing, a small handheld mixer tends to be more effective than a stand mixer in this case as it seems to "grab" small quantities of butter a bit better.

Here are some snaps of the finished product. Doesn't Charlie look cute examining the cupcakes? He's so fluffy! (yes, this is a Despicable me reference).



Happy Birthday Mr T and I hope you enjoyed your carrot cake

Love

Red Velvet Cupcakes / Pink Ribbon Day / Hummingbird vs Kate

It was Pink Ribbon Day on Monday and on the weekend I was feeling motivated enough to make cake to celebrate the birthday of Penny bear (my Pink Ribbon bear). My friend Helen is doing Baketober so I thought I should participate too. Since I had two pairs of hands (Miss B was in town) it seemed like the perfect opportunity to make a cupcake from the Hummingbird Book, and compare to a real Hummingbird cake. Miss B said red velvet is her favourite so that’s what I went with. It was SO hard for me to follow a recipe precisely but in I managed to measure ingredients to the gram (and include the whole quantity of sugar stated) and monitor my timings with herculean effort.



I have an interesting relationship with red velvet cake – I never know whether I like it or not. Its not quite chocolate but has cocoa, it uses a whole tube of food colouring per 12 cupcakes, and a has a cream cheese frosting which always seems to me to be a bit sweet. But nonetheless Miss B loves it so this was the one I tried. I used a half recipe (luckily!) and the wrappers were ones I had leftover from Diamond Jubilee season, purchased on a whim from Waitrose (choice of wrappers does matter in terms of size / shape / thickness!)

Key noteworthy things: 20mL of food colouring is needed for 12 cupcakes; buttermilk can be substituted with normal milk mixed with lemon juice (just under 1C milk: 1 tbsp lemon juice); cream the butter and sugar for at least 5 minutes in the mixer for a super light and fluffy mix; and do not fill each case more than 2/3 full. I was really happy with the height of the cupcakes when they came out of the oven.

Verdict: Miss L and Miss B indicated they liked my version better but they might have been biased. Mr T did a blind tasting and also liked my version better! In all cases they said that the cake wasn’t as dense as the real Hummingbird cake which was a good thing. Hmm...

The colour was the pretty close to the real Hummingbird cake though mine were still more brown than red. There is a whole lot less frosting on there too – whilst I like frosting I don’t think it needs to be a 3:5 proportion (though I guess I’m weird in this respect if bestselling cakes have piles of frosting!)



The frosting was a bit too sweet for my liking so I had to break the rules at the last minute and throw in some lemon juice to counter it. Obviously this made it less stiff so I didn’t swirl it Hummingbird style. It also wasn’t quite as cream cheesey as I liked so I added some additional cheese. The overall cake is smaller – the book recommends using 2” deep tins but I only had shallow cake tins.

Finally, it was Penny’s birthday so I had to go pink! I was a bit too heavy handed with the red food colouring so threw some white frosting back in and ended up with an unexpected swirl effect.

Also, ballerina bear Penny also got some home stitched shoes for her birthday from Mr T, complete with pink ribbons which match the rest of her outfit. Happy Pink Ribbon day everyone!

Macarons or Macaroons?

Australians have been mad about macarons since an early series of Masterchef, where one of the challenges was to make a macaron tower (visit this page for more info). I recall there were 2 flavours - olive and beetroot/raspberry - and the recipe used by Adriano Zumbo was endlessly complicated.

Loving a challenge, Mr T and I attempted macarons using the Zumbo recipe a couple of years ago – big mistake! It was SO complicated, calling for fairly obscure ingredients like 3g of powder eggwhites (which I actually found in Coles, but never used again… what a waste), that it wasn’t until the second attempt that they began to look like macarons.

I had put macarons out of my memory to the point where I couldn’t even remember the difference between macaron and macaroon, but fortunately for me, a bit of googling revealed that Helen from theresnoplacelikeoz.com had posted about this on her blog. And what do you know, she's a Zumbo fan too :-)

So, Mr T and I went to a macaron making class. It was run by Loretta from the On Café in Clapham, who makes macarons too lovely to eat and she shared a bunch of useful hints and tips as well as giving the most thorough and best quality cooking class I’ve ever been to.

If you are have never made macarons before and are thinking about it, here are some do’s and don’ts to help prevent failure (taken from previous experience and Loretta’s class). Oh, and I highly recommend Loretta's class!

1. Try making a French macaron first, this is the most uncomplicated of the different macaron types (more on this one later!).


2. Make sure you age the egg whites for 3-5 days.


3. If using colouring, go for pastes / gels, not liquid (this will affect the consistency of the mix). Warm colours tend to bake better than cool colours.


4. Do not undermix the meringue with the almond meal, else you’ll end up with an unpipeable macaron (or if you still can pipe it, the shell will come out of the oven lumpy).


5. Do not overmix either, else you’ll end up with a flat macaron (like I did).


6. Use a template to pipe the shells, and bake them on a silicon mat else you’ll end up with half the shells stuck to the tray.

Here is a series of photos from the class, it turns out Mr T made probably the best batch of macarons (his ones are the yellow ones). He even got a well done from Loretta! At least I can claim to have made the lemon buttercream frosting to go inside, the chocolate ganache that we got from class was just a bit heavy and a bit sweet.

Happy macaroning!




 

Triple-toned cake

It is always inspiring reading cake and food blogs, watching food tv etc. and I came across this pastel swirled cake by Sweetapolita.

I was so excited to try it but didn’t have the patience to make buttercream, so instead I modified a blackforest cake. Several hours later I had a chocolate & beetroot cake (over beetrooted this one... oops) filled with cherries, whipped cream, and iced with tinted whipped cream!  Can’t wait till I have a cake turntable and a scraper to get those sharp edges back, but in the meantime, my trusty palette knife is doing just fine.

Cupcake bouquets

When Mrs A asked me to bring cupcakes for a BBQ, I immediately knew I wanted to do something a little different from the bog standard cupcakes on a stand – so I decided to try a cupcake bouquet.

Four shops and a whole lot of googling later I had my foam halves, flowerpots to fit, and new set of piping tips. As I was in a hurry I didn't end up with the specific piping tips I wanted but they did the job relatively well anyway.

I had promised chocolate beetroot cupcakes but then also wanted some light coloured cakes to make a yellow and purple bouquet so I made mini lemon cake and lemon frosting. Here is the finished product:



Here are the chocolate beetroot cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I added some stabiliser and it did hold up a bit better than usual to being piped. More experimenting required on this one!