Banana Caramel 2-Tier

More stress baking!

There was a presentation coming up in a week and I was NOT prepared soooooo... I baked a giant cake?

The result of a serious commitment to procrastination.

The construction of this cake was the result not only of a strong desire not to confront months of readings but also a few super, super old bananas.

See that? The mummified peel had reached a blue-black hue. Mmmm.

I'd had them in the fridge for months and was getting ready to pitch those bad boys in the trash, but I thought, hey, why not take a peek under the peel and see if they merit salvaging? Honestly I thought they'd've been reduced to semi-liquified banana alcohol or totally ruined by mold, but to my surprise they were perfectly banana-bread-ripe.

So I baked myself some banana cake (recipe at the end of the post) and leveled the top,





carved nine layers for the top tier and nine for the bottom, soaked them in a brown sugar simple syrup and layered them with a caramel Italian meringue buttercream (recipe here, but with the coffee omitted and the buttercream divided into two halves, one of the portions then mixed with a full batch of caramel from this blog post),

smooth iced the stacked layers with vanilla buttercream (the other buttercream portion mixed with vanilla bean paste and a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract),




and then stacked and decorated the tiers with piped caramel buttercream!





It was a simple design pumped out in a timely (read: frantic) fashion, but it came out well! Clean, balanced, and I'll be damned, I can still pipe a fairly even shell border after all this time (I think it's been over a year since I piped a shell border; SAD).




A vanity shot from above:




Yep, it came out pretty well, although I got a little hung up after not being able to get the vanilla buttercream quite as smooth as I would've liked. I was left with some seams and gaps, but after
a little reflection (and once the Diet Shasta Cola caffeine wore off) I could convince myself to appreciate the elegance of the small moments of irregularity in my work's vanilla bean-flecked façade.

Moment of Elegant Irregularity I

Moment of Elegant Irregularity II

I hauled the finished cake out to Haskell Hall and left it to be picked over by the circling grad students... Well actually, I joined fray this time and grabbed a bite with some of my lovely peers before running off to the liberry. It was a pretty fantastic afternoon snack/hangout =)

I love that our resident wizard Anne Ch'ien has beautiful flowers put on our
mezzanine every week; they make for some pretty awesome cake pictures.

Aaaaand the inside!




And a slice my friends saved for me that I took home after library time. Note the unintentional ombre color gradient in the cake itself:




Cool.

Now on to the recipe!

This cake has a pleasant banana flavor, present but not overbearing. It's an excellent foil for a strong, dark caramel buttercream! The cake is fairly firm, which makes it easier to cut into (relatively =P) neat thin layers.


Banana Cake

4 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups + 4 tablespoons cake flour
6 tablespoons buttermilk powder
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 eggs
3 egg yolks
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
1 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
3 very ripe bananas, puréed
1 1/2 cups water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Set oven to 350°.
Grease, line and flour a seven and an eight inch pan (one each if you have three-inch-deep pans, but two each if you're using shallower ones).
Whisk the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Set aside.
In another large bowl, whisk the eggs and yolks together with the oil, and then add the two types of sugar, the puréed bananas, the water, and the vanilla. Fold the dry into the wet in several additions.
Divide the batter among the cake pans until each is 3/4 full. Bake until an inserted knife comes out clean (for the 3 inch deep pans, this will take over an hour).

This cake rose beautifully. Do yourself a solid and cut the crust from the top of the cake straight out of the oven and eat it. So. Good. Use the cake within a couple (2!!) days, because the scraps I had left over got stale super fast.

Happy baking!
Azara

Amy's Mocha Birthday Extravaganzaaaaa

This is the cake I made for my friend Amy's birthday. I wanted to play around with the whole ombre fad that's been sweeping across all of cakedom recently, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! I was crunched for time, so the icing job was a little slapdash, but my method worked and I'm excited to try it again soon.


Here are five of the six shades I used to create the ombre look. I started out with a very lightly colored coffee buttercream (recipe to follow) and varied the shades by adding melted bittersweet chocolate and cocoa powder. This gave the darker shades a tiny bit of texture, which wasn't terribly noticeable but seemed like a bit of a shame given the superb smoothness of the Italian meringue buttercream.

Here's the method I used to ice the cake:



After I'd layered the two tiers, I did crumb coats with the plain coffee buttercream and refrigerated them. Then I started the ombre icing by using a very small palette knife to spread a fairly even ring of the deepest chocolate buttercream all the way around the base of the larger tier.



I continued with the second and third darkest colors, and iced the top with that same third color. Then I smoothed the layers together with a large palette knife.



Then I put the bottom tier in the fridge and did the same to the top tier with the three lighter colors. That tier went into the refrigerator and the larger came out for some chopstick stabilization. They're inserted, marked, removed, cut to size, and inserted again.



I placed the top on the bottom, secured with a little room temperature buttercream which glued the tiers together as it cooled and solidified.



I sprinkled some chocolate "crumb" on there for good measure (and also to hide the seam between the two tiers). The crumb also made an appearance inside the cake, but I'll get into that in a minute.

Then I gave the top a swirl and I was ready to go! Except that the cake was so tall it didn't fit in my cake carrier. So I just sort of draped the thing over the top and got a ride to the restaurant, and fixed it up with a little more crumb once I got to the party.

RIP adorable swirl... you were too beautiful for this world!

The crumb is a mixture of flour, cocoa powder, sugar, salt and a little cornstarch mixed together, bound with butter and baked for a bit. It's basically a shortcut for making cookie crumbs, although it's got a bit more of a sandy texture. These preparations are also called "soils," which I thought was appropriate as Amy is an archaeologist.

Mmmm, soil.

I added the crumb to the layers of coffee buttercream inside the cake, like this:


But the coffee buttercream wasn't the only filling; I also made caramel and mixed it into some buttercream to make a delicious butterscotchy filling. It turns out you can force and incredible amount of caramel into buttercream and still maintain a smooth yet sturdy consistency.

And here is the lovely Amy with her cake, ready to tuck in:



And here's a slice! From the bottom up it goes chocolate cake with coffee-n-cream simple syrup soak, thin layer of caramel buttercream, cake, thick layer of coffee buttercream with crumb, cake, caramel buttercream, cake, etc.


On to the recipes:

Light and Springy Chocolate Cake

Because the chocolate cake I made a few weeks ago came out so well, I decided to stick to the same basic recipe, tweaking just a little bit. The procedure is the same as last time, dries and wets mixed separately then combined, nothin' fancy, but I'll detail the process below.

I used an 8" round (3" high) and a 6" round (3" high), and had enough batter left over to make six extra-tall cupcakes (cupcake pan from Ikea).

4 oz unsweetened chocolate
2 1/2 cups white sugar
2 cups unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups plus 4 tablespoons cake flour
6 tablespoons buttermilk powder
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
4 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
1 1/4 cup milk
3/4 cup sour cream
1 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 350•.
Grease your pans, line the bottoms with baking paper (like a boss), grease again and flour.
Chop the unsweetened chocolate and put in a bowl set over simmering water to melt. Set aside once melted.
Put the sugar, flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and whisk together. I used my hands to work out the bigger chunks in the brown sugar.
In a separate, deeper bowl, whisk together the eggs, yolks, buttermilk, vegetable oil, and vanilla.
Add in the dry all at once and mix just until combined. Use your hands! Amazing.
Distribute the batter between the pans and bake until the cakes are done. I've stopped paying attention to the length of time I bake things; it always works better for me just to keep an eye on them, adjusting the temperature as I see fit and testing them with a sharp knife once their tops spring back when poked gently. These cakes took somewhere around 40 minutes, maybe a little longer.
A note on this particular cake: when it rises it does so very delicately so it is best not to test it with a knife until it springs back when poked in the very middle. If you spear it too early, you risk deflating the cake.
Let the cakes cool in their pans, refrigerate for a couple of hours for best results, run a knife around the sides and overturn to release. If you're having troubles getting the cake out, run some warm water over the bottom (being sure to keep your hand on the top of the overturned cake in case of sudden release).

Some notes of comparison between this cake and the last: this one has the same amount of chocolate in it as the other, but the consistency is lighter, the air pockets larger and the crumb springier. This consistency difference made the cake seem a bit less chocolatey, not a problem in this case because the chocolate doesn't outshine the coffee, it's muted flavor actually complimenting the combination very nicely. In any case, if you're looking for something with a denser chocolate cake, stick with the earlier recipe.

Here are the cupcakes: they baked up quickly and beautifully, like delicious chocolatey mushrooms...

Right? Mushrooms!

And finally, because it came out so amazingly light and fluffy, here's the buttercream recipe I used. It's adapted from the vanilla buttercream recipe in the Miette cookbook, tweaked a bit, but it's basically your classic Italian meringue buttercream. A fair amount of effort, but for a result that is about a million times more silky and delicious than buttercreams that rely on powdered sugar. You'll end up with more than you need for the amount of cake the above recipe calls for, but better safe than sorry!


Coffee Italian Meringue Buttercream

2 lbs butter (eight sticks) at room temp
4 tablespoons instant coffee
2 2/3 cups sugar
1/2 cup water
7 egg whites
1 1/3 teaspoons cream of tartar
2 tablespoons vanilla

Beat the butter and instant coffee together at high speed until the coffee is totally incorporated and the butter is very light and fluffy, at least 10 minutes. Remove the butter from the bowl if it's the one you'll be using to make the meringue, and clean it very well, with soap. Any lingering fat may inhibit the development of a light and fluffy meringue, or so the lore goes.

Heat the water and sugar in a pan over medium low heat, stirring until the sugar melts. Clip a candy thermometer to the side of the pan and cook the syrup until it reaches 240° F. As soon as it hits 240, start to whisk the egg whites and cream of tartar at high speed until they form soft peaks, keeping an eye on the boiling syrup. When the candy thermometer reaches 248°, remove the syrup from heat and, with the mixer on medium, slowly pour the syrup into the whites, being sure to avoid pouring it directly on the spinning whisk attachment to avoid splatter. Raise the speed to high and continue to whisk until the bowl is cool to the touch, at least 10 minutes.

Switching the mixing speed to medium-low, add the butter a quarter cup at a time, allowing each addition to be completely incorporated before adding more. Once it's all in there, add the vanilla, raise the speed and whip for another minute or so just to get it good and fluffy. At certain points it may look like it's deflating or curdling, but keep beating and it should come together and fluff up nicely.

Cool, that's about it!

Bake hard,
Azara

18-Layer Pumpkin Cake with Caramel Buttercream (with Recipe)

This is a cake I made to entertain a couple friends this weekend in a dinner get together-turned-seven hour long wine and friendship marathon complete with a showing of the last twenty minutes of The Emperor's New Groove both subbed and dubbed in Mandarin Chinese, a Patsy Cline singalong, and a lengthy brainstorming session in an effort to determine what livelihoods fifteen or so of our mutual acquaintances would have in a medieval English village.

18 layers! Count 'em

I chose a pumpkin cake to complement the leftover caramel buttercream from the previous post (recipe here), and it came out so moist it didn't even need a soaking syrup. Because of its incredible spongy consistency, I decided to try slicing the cake into as many super-thin layers as possible.

The assembled cake before being rough-iced

That elasticity produced by the egg and oil emulsion used in this cake (I thought about classifying it as a chiffon cake, but it wasn't leavened with stiffly beaten egg whites... regardless, the consistency is pretty chiffony) kept the layers flexible enough that even fairly thin ones wouldn't crumble to pieces while being handled.

Vanity shot

The cake recipe is basically a pumpkin bread that I've been playing around with for several years. While I usually replace as much as half of the flour in the following recipe with cocoa powder, giving the cake a much more dense consistency and delicious chocolatey flavor, I decided to keep the cocoa out this time so that the flavors of pumpkin and caramel could be the center of attention.

* * *

Pumpkin Cake (AKA Re-purposed Pumpkin Bread)

4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup powdered milk
2 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 29 oz can pumpkin or two 15 oz cans (the extra oz won't much matter)

Preheat the oven to 350°. To achieve the results I did, grease two six inch by three inch cake pans, line the bottoms with parchment paper, grease again and flour. Whisk together dry ingredients including the sugar in a large bowl and set aside. In another bowl whisk the eggs and oil together until an emulsion forms, and then add the vinegar, vanilla and finally the pumpkin. Fold the dry into the wet, handling the batter as little as possible. Split the batter between the two pans, and bake until done, maybe around 45 minutes (I don't much trust set baking times and tend to just keep an eye on the cake and test with a skewer when the cake springs back then poked). Let cool and refrigerate for at least a few hours before carving the layers.

* * *

A note on cake slicing technique:

I slice my layers by first using a serrated knife to mark the line I'll be following by cutting very shallowly into the side of the cake as I steady it with my left hand, apply a little pressure, and twist it on the turntable. Once the entire circumference of the layer has been marked with a groove, I go around again cutting deeper, making sure to keep the entire length of the knife perfectly horizontal and completely in the groove, until I've sliced all the way through. I slip a cutting mat underneath the layer and remove it onto a plate, and continue to apply the same technique to the remaining cake. In order to keep the layers properly oriented I sometimes cut a notch in the side of the cake running from top to bottom before I begin to carve slices, using that to line the layers up when reassembling with frosting.


The slices held together perfectly when cut and transferred to the plate, thanks to that firm

and flexible consistency of the cake as well as the thinness of the layers of buttercream.

Yep. A very autumnal cake in the dead of winter. Try it out! You can also bake the pumpkin cake into muffins or a loaf, and then you can get away with eating it for breakfast.

Or you could throw caution to the wind and have 18-layer pumpkin cake with caramel buttercream at 8 am. Screw cheerios!

xo
Azara

Red Velvet Cupcakes and a Three-Tiered Salted Caramel-Chocolate Cake with Recipes

Last quarter, back in late November, I made some red velvet cupcakes for my friend Jenni's birthday. Because I am lazy and hadn't gone down to the baking shop six or seven blocks away to pick up the recycled-paper cupcake liners I like to use, I fashioned these liners out of squares of recycled baking paper. I think they look pretty nice!




The red velvet cake was fairly standard, adapted from the Red Hot Velvet Cake recipe from Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito's book Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. It's a beautiful book, and the recipe turned out well despite my reducing the sugar just a bit to lessen the cloying taste that in my opinion ruins most red velvet. I actually think the recipe would've been fine with the full amount of sugar indicated in the recipe, but I was trying really hard to impress people with my grown-up baking skillz.

I didn't use the frosting recipe from Lewis and Poliafito's book; while I appreciate their effort to provide a non-traditional spin on the classic red velvet formula by pairing the cake with a cinnamon frosting, I decided to play it safe and stick to classic cream cheese. I ended up going completely off-book and eyeballing the amounts of cream cheese, butter, sugar and vanilla I used, and it came out great! Kept the sugar low here too, and avoided using powdered sugar altogether as it often leads to that same damned cloying sweetness that is the downfall of so many otherwise solid cupcakes. A also added vanilla paste to give the frosting those swanky little flecks of vanilla bean. Check it out:

See those flecks?

Classy!

Unfortunately I don't think most guests noticed this particular detail in the mood-lit restaurant, although I did take the (kind of obnoxious) liberty of pointing it out to a few sitting near me. That's what they get for sitting next to the ultra(over?)-committed baker.

- - -

More recently (actually yesterday and this morning) I embarked upon yet another bakeventure guided the same Baked book I used for the red vel as well as the second wonderful volume by the same folks called Baked Explorations. This baking episode was far more compulsive (and consequently a good deal more frantic and harrowing) than the well-planned red velvet fun. Despite the insanity, the cake came out really well and I managed to impress myself by pulling it all off in a fraction of the time this sort of project generally takes me. I think the process of constructing multi-tiered cakes has become enough of a habit for me that I no longer need to agonize over ever little detail or draw up a schedule to maximize efficiency. I can just bang it out. That is pretty awesome.

Now about the circumstances of this particular episode. You see, I am a stress baker. When the going gets , I tend to give up on my readings and exchange my pen for a whisk. Therapeutic baking! It is the best. Last night after four hours of agonizing over a two-and-a-half page response to several hundred pages of reading from eight or so sources, I was suddenly seized by a powerful need to work it out in the kitchen. I wanted chocolate and I wanted caramel, salted caramel. The grocery store is around the corner, so it was no hassle to make a quick trip to stock up on chocolate and such.

Unfortunately I didn't check my sugar supply, so many of the alterations I made to the Baked recipes revolved around maximizing use of the 1.5 cups of white sugar, 2 cups of brown sugar, and the cup or so of powdered sugar (blech.... oh well) in my pantry. Actually I think it all worked out for the best: chocolate cake made with just brown sugar is SUPER delicious.

By this morning I had ended up with a moist and deeply flavored chocolate cake with incredibly light and fluffy salted caramel buttercream with a bit of cream cheese in it to cut the fattiness of the butter (weird to think of a fatty dairy product cutting another's fattiness, but it's the tang that does it!! Promise!). I used a dark brown sugar soaking syrup that deepened the flavor of the chocolate cake. Mmmm.

The finished cake had three tiers and fourteen layers total, and was decorated with a new technique I decided to try out. Here it is! Not bad for a slapdash job thrown together (read: cake bases cut into 14 layers, caramel made, buttercream made, soaking syrup made, cake layers soaked, iced, and stacked, stacked cakes crumb-coated, fortifications put into place, tiers stacked, and piping technique applied) in three hours, ey?

Alright, it's a little lumpy, but this morning was a struggle. I didn't
wake up until 7:30, and I had to be in class by 11:30. Sigh.

- - -

Recipes!

First, the chocolate cake, which is awesome because it doesn't require any beating so you won't wake up your neighbors at two am when you find yourself to be in the feverish grip of a powerful bakelust.

Deep Chocolate Cake
Makes enough for two seven, two six and two five inch round cakes; it's a lot, and if you're shooting for a single eight or nine inch round, halve this.

4 oz unsweetened chocolate
2 1/2 cups firmly packed dark brown sugar
2 cups unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
4 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 350•.
Grease your pans, line the bottoms with baking paper (if you're hard core like me WHAT UP), grease again and flour.
Chop the unsweetened chocolate and put in a bowl set over simmering water to melt. Set aside once melted.
Put the sugar, flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and whisk together. I used my hands to work out the bigger chunks in the brown sugar.
In a separate, deeper bowl, whisk together the eggs, yolks, buttermilk, vegetable oil, and vanilla.
Add in the dry all at once and mix just until combined. I used my hands. It was awesome. Add in the chocolate.
Distribute the batter amongst your various and sundry pans, and bake until the cakes are done. I've stopped paying attention to the length of time I bake things; it always works better for me just to keep an eye on them, adjusting the temperature as I see fit and testing them with a sharp knife once their tops no longer give when poked gently.
Let them cool in their pans, refrigerate for a couple of hours for best results, run a knife around the sides and overturn to release. If you're having troubles getting the cake out, run some warm water over the bottom (being sure to keep your hand on the top of the overturned cake in case of sudden release).
Just a note: if you like to taste your final batter like I do, this one might taste a little chemically from all the... you know... baking chemicals. No worries though; the taste bakes out.

And on to the caramel!! Randomly I saw fit to force as many different kinds of dairy into this recipe as possible. Hurray!

Salted Caramel Sauce

1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup butter (2 sticks)
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup (or so) sour cream
1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons fleur de sel

Melt the butter in a deep and heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat and add the sugar. Stir slowly but constantly, being sure to keep the bottom of the sugar-butter from burning, as first the butter takes on a deeper color and nutty smell and then the sugar begins to color, eventually melding with the butter to form a smooth, deep caramel. Note that the sugar will remain separate from the butter for quite some time, so don't worry if it takes more than ten minutes for the caramel to form. For the buttercream recipe that follows I cooked the caramel until it was quite dark which imparted a lightly bitter and ultra classy taste, but you can use your discretion. Once the caramel is cooked to the desired color, remove from heat and gradually pour in the heavy cream, stirring constantly. The caramel will froth up like crazy! So be gentle. Finally, add in the sour cream and fleur de sel. Hurray! Set aside and let cool for 15+ minutes before adding to a buttercream.

Delicious caramel sauce. Brought to you by a terrible picture taken by my
terrible camera. Some day... some day I will invest in better equipment.

Salted Caramel Buttercream à la Azara

This recipe makes so much buttercream, but if you halve it, you probably won't have enough for the six cakes you've baked if you're shooting for the 3-tier. If you halved the chocolate cake recipe though, halving this recipe should be fine. Leftover caramel can be enjoyed in so many ways. Like basically on everything. I would even like to try it on oatmeal, even though I never eat oatmeal. That is how delicious caramel sauce is.

2 lbs butter (8 sticks... just... don't think about it too hard) at room temp
8 oz cream cheese at room temp
1 recipe salted caramel sauce
1 cup or so powdered sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla

Beat the butter and cream cheese together on high speed until super light and fluffy, for at least ten minutes. Add in the caramel sauce and beat to combine. Taste it and use your discretion in adding enough powdered sugar to make the buttercream sweet enough to balance the heavy duty and not-too-sweet chocolate cake. Add in the vanilla and beat well.


Brown Sugar Soaking Syrup

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water

Bring the sugar and water to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring until the sugar melts. Let the sugar syrup boil for five minutes. Remove from heat.

- - -
Alright! That's it! My buttercream came out a little soft because I thought I'd over-caramelized my caramel and used some milk on top of the cream to keep the sugar from continuing to cook. Still worked okay, but I may have gotten a cleaner design had I not had that additional liquid in there.

Anyways, here are some deets!







The above pictures were taken in my tiny kitchen! Below, some pictures of the cake on the mezzanine in the anthropology building at the U Chicago, where I left the cake with an up-for-grabs note, a knife and some napkins.






People loved this cake. As someone who bakes often, I have developed a fine sense for the degree of sincerity in a compliment given by someone trying a baked good. This cake was real. People were grooving.

A sorry state of affairs three hours after the cake was left on the mezz. By
the time my second class was over an hour and twenty minutes
later, there were only about three pieces left.

And to finish, my fave shot:

Bam.

BAKE HARD,
Azara