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:
- - -
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.
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.
And to finish, my fave shot:
BAKE HARD,
Azara
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?
- - -
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.
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.
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.
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
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