Experimental Cake with Bavarian Cream and Mango

Yesterday I went off-book and made up a weird cake recipe. I can't say I'm completely in love with it, but it was a worthwhile experiment and I'm going to keep playing with it to see what I can come up with. I started with what was essentially a kasutera batter, in which whole eggs and sugar are beaten together until quite thick and foamy folded together with flour, but I added some extra flour, a little baking powder and a little oil and milk. The oil of course completely deflated the eggs (which is why I added baking powder), but I wanted to see if beating them affected the quality of the finished product. I did end up with a loaf that rose beautifully and had a very lovely, very fine crumb; however, the cake was fairly coarse once it cooled completely, and quite dry.

What I'd like to do is bake another cake with the same ingredients but with no beating of the eggs to see whether beating them made a difference despite the oil-induced deflation. Then I'd like to bake one with more oil or maybe some butter in order to try for a soft, moist cake.

It did come up beautifully though, and baked through without threatening to over-brown! All too rare in a cake recipe.

To add some zazz I whipped up an eggless Bavarian cream and made some layers (Bavarian recipe below). The layers are so crazy uneven because I was in a terrific rush. I put this cake together in about ten frantic minutes, so think about the skill needed to achieve that before judging!
 

Also we didn't have any baking paper (I'm at my family's house in NYC) so I lined everything with foil... Looks kind of awesome, I have to say.

I also took some dried mango and boiled it in sugar syrup, let it soak for a while, drained it and studded one of the layers of cream with it. I used the syrup as a soak for the cake layers, but they still managed to remain remarkably dry. To my surprise, this coarse texture ended up working with the soft Bavarian cream, and my family likes the cake quite a bit! I'll still want to play around with the recipe before I post it though. 

 

Eggless Vanilla Bavarian Cream (adapted from festivalfoods.com)

1 Tbsp gelatin 
2 Tbsp very cold water
2 cups whipping cream
1/2 cups milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp vanilla

Bloom the gelatin in the cold water for about five minutes.
Mix one cup of the cream with the milk, reserving the second cup of cream in the refrigerator. Put the cream and milk mixture over a medium heat and scald it, removing it from heat before it boils. Stir in the sugar and the salt, and stir in the bloomed gelatin until it dissolves completely. Chill it, adding in the vanilla once it's cooled but is not yet set (ten minutes or so). Once thickened, beat it until fluffy.
Separately, beat the reserved cup of cold cream until soft and pillowy. Fold it into the gelatin mixture, or beat it a bit if the gelatin is so set that it remains chunky after folding.
Pour the Bavarian into whatever mould is being used, lined with wax paper or wetted, or if using the Bavarian as layers of filling in a cake, build the layers immediately, using the pan in which the cake was baked in order to keep the Bavarian from squishing out as it sets. Here it helps to have very deep cake pans available, three or four inches works well.


So there we have it! I'm excited to be playing with vanilla cake and fruit combos. I am a committed chocolate person, but these flavors were great and I look forward to more fruit projects coming up, especially since I'll be hanging out in California for the next month and a half (starting the day after tomorrow!) and will be surrounded by gorgeous produce.

Next time I post it'll be from not-always-so-sunny Northern California! Maybe a fruit crisp or even a pie... yes...

Bake Hard!
Azara

Tiny-Checkerboard Cookies and New Camera!

I got a new camera! And I am terrible at using it.

I am pretty sure this is a terrible picture. But it's the best terrible picture I took all day so... you're welcome.

I'm hoping to improve with time, although it might be a while since it's really important to me that I learn to properly adjust aperture and shutter speed and other such confusing things manually. It is quite difficult and my shaky hands make for so many blurry pictures. Sigh. I'll get there!

Today I had more fun with cookie dough extrusion, abandoning the small circular template for the tiny square one and using the resulting pieces to fashion pretty hardcore little checkerboard cookies. I didn't have a ton of dough since I was using what was leftover from the clouds and another project, but it was enough to get eleven solid cookies.

Ready for baking!

 

Baked.

A little jumble of checkerboard.

While time-consuming, this process resulted in some nice cookies and I'll be keeping it in my back pocket. I will also be working on refining my technique and the recipe as time goes on, so keep an eye out for updates.

Bake Hard,
Azara

Cookie Clouds

These are some cookies I made while playing around with my Play-Doh extruder. So much fun to be had with that thing, although I wouldn't recommend first using the extruder with the Play-Doh that comes with it. You may end up finding little bits of blue and neon yellow in your cookies... Oh well, it's not like it's poisonous! If it was, let's be honest, we would all have been chronically ill as children.


*No recipes in this post; these are works in progress.*

In order to achieve this look I extruded long ropes of soft vanilla dough and rolled them up, stuck them together and made a frame with chocolate dough. I'm happy with how they came out but I'm going to keep playing with the recipe until I can get the dough to extrude more smoothly. I am tempted to try less flour and more milk, which will make for very soft dough that I may only be able to handle when cold. Also less flour might help the dough to melt a bit more, softening the crackles. I do kind of like the textured appearance, but if the dough could be just a bit more forgiving I'd be totally happy.

 Bake Hard,
Azara

Two Nearly Identical End of the Year Cakes

To celebrate the end of the quarter I made two little cakes, one for my anthropological methods class and the second for my Tamil language class. The bigger one was an 8" round, and the smaller a 7", and while I worried about having enough for my 15-person methods class, the cake was so rich and the slices so thin that there was enough left over for me to leave some on the mezzanine!

The cakes had a moist almond-chocolate base with hazelnut buttercream filling and cocoa-hazelnut buttercream for frosting. I wanted the hazelnut flavor to come through a little more strongly, but it ended up getting a little buried under the chocolate and almond. I couldn't find hazelnut extract at the grocery store (America's Most European Supermarket my ass) and didn't want to use nutella because I felt like that would make it a nutella cake. Nothing wrong with that! I just didn't want to feel compelled to label this a nutella cake. Hrm.

8" rough-iced with a nice swirl.

7" rough-iced with a nicer swirl.

To add textural interest and because I'd been on such a macaron bender I decided to pipe out two macaron discs for each cake. They are the light-colored layers below. They stayed crisp for days, which I found out after eating a piece of cake I stuck in the fridge. Totally delicious and amazing, totally planning on doing it for pretty much every cake I ever make again. It also made for nice high cakes, so it's great for adding height without adding heaviness.

A macaron layer.

Stacked cake with macaron.

I was in a bit of a rush when I made the cakes, so I decided to use a rough-icing technique that I learned at Cakeman Raven. Slowly draw an icing spatula up the side of your cake as you give it a few spins. Keep this slow movement up until you reach the top of the cake. Then, starting on the edge of the top of the cake, spin again and slowly draw the spatula towards the middle at a slight angle. It takes a bit of practice (which I was out of when I made these cakes) but you can end up with a nice looking finished product without spending lots of time piping.

I am going to finally stop being lazy about this and post the recipe for the basic Italian meringue buttercream I use below, and will add instructions to create the hazelnut buttercream I would have made had our stupid market carried hazelnut extract. The macaron recipe can be found here (I only needed one batch to make all four discs), and to make the chocolate hazelnut buttercream I just added several ounces of melted and cooled unsweetened chocolate to half of the hazelnut buttercream. I wasn't a huge fan of the flavor of the almond chocolate cake so I will be working on the recipe and will post it in the future when it is more awesome.



Italian Meringue Buttercream Base (Adapted from the Miette Bakery cookbook by Meg Ray)

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

Beat the butter at high speed until it is very light and fluffy, at least 4 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.

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 if you like, 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.


Hazelnut Buttercream

1 recipe Italian Meringue Buttercream Base (above)
Hazelnuts (I got 4 of the very small packets which came out to maybe a cup, but I would say put in as much hazelnut as you can afford! Probably two cups max)
1 tsp salt (or to taste)
1 Tbsp hazelnut extract

Chop hazelnuts if they are whole, and leave them be if they came chopped. Toast them in a 350° oven until lightly browned and fragrant, stirring them around once, for maybe 5 minutes or a bit more depending on how toasty you like them.
Pulverize the toasted hazelnuts and salt in a food processor until they become as close to a butter as you can get them. You will probably end up with a paste.
Fold the paste into the buttercream. Fold in the hazelnut extract.


To Assemble the Cake

Cut five layers for each cake. Layer as follows: cake, buttercream, cake, buttercream, macaron, buttercream, cake, buttercream, macaron, buttercream, cake, buttercream, cake. Next time I'm just going to have a layering schematic! You can sort of see the pattern below. Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to cut a slice of this cake right out of the fridge: that makes for a cleaner cut and easier-to-identify layers. In any case, here it is!

This was a good-looking one, I have to say.

Clean plates all around... That's what I like to see.

This plate's been scraped! Yes.

Bake hard,
Azara