Chocolate Mochi Cake with Vanilla Buttercream

This week I made chocolate cake... with a twist! Over half of the flour in it is Mochiko rice flour, and it baked up just like a slightly chewier medium-chocolatey cake. 

Some delicious vanilla Italian meringue buttercream, and boom! A fancy schmancy cake. Recipes at the bottom!

Here are a million pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

Chocolate Mochi Cake

1 1/4 cups mochiko
3/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1 cup bittersweet chocolate, either in chips or chopped up
12 oz evaporated milk
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 egg whites at room temp
pinch of cream of tartar
1 cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 350°. Oil and flour two 9" pans or, if you're doing a little tall cake like me, one 3" tall 6" diameter pan and one 9"x13" pan.
Mix dry ingredients (mochiko, flour, baking soda, and salt). Set aside.
Melt the butter and add in the chocolate, mixing until completely melted. Add evaporated milk and vanilla extract.
Mix the wet into the dry and set aside.
In a super clean bowl, start whipping the egg whites. Add the cream of tartar. When they're completely foamy, start to add the sugar, a little at a time until it is all incorporated. When the meringue keeps stiff peaks when the beater is lifted out of it, it is ready to be mixed into the batter. Fold a third of the meringue into the batter, and then do the same with the remaining meringue.
Pour the batter into the pans. For me, I filled the small pan halfway and put the rest in the large pan.
Bake for 35-40 minutes for a shallow cake and 45-50 for one in which the batter is deeper.

Vanilla Italian Meringue Buttercream
(makes enough for one 9" cake or a small and tall one like that pictured above)

1 1/2 cups butter (3 sticks) at room temp
3/4 cups sugar
1/4 cups water
3 egg whites at room temp
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
2 Tbsp vanilla

Beat the butter until light and fluffy, for around 10 minutes with a hand-held beater.
Place the sugar and water in a pan over medium heat and cook, stirring intermittently until the sugar is melted.
While the sugar boils, begin to whip the egg whites in a super clean bowl. Add in the cream of tartar, and whip until the whites are thick and fluffy. Keep the beater going while keeping an eye on the syrup temperature. Once it reaches 238° pour it slowly into the whites with the beater going (being careful not to pour the syrup over the beaters to avoid splatter) and continue to beat until the bowl is cool to the touch. Add the butter in a half cup at a time, add the vanilla and then beat a few more minutes to fluff the buttercream up. Done!


Bake Hard,
Azara

Sweet Potato Cake with Green Tea Buttercream

On the night before my birthday I went out for drinks with friends. On the day after my birthday I went on a super fun picnic at the beach. On my birthday proper, however, I stayed in and baked to my heart's content!

I'm not posting any recipes because I want to work on both of them, but here are a ton of pictures because I'm vain:

Layers

 Bake Hard,
Azara

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

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

Chris' Southern Disco Kitsch Pineapple 7-Up Birthday Cake

This one goes out to everybody with a crazy sweet tooth. Chris' SDKP7UBC was a massive effort, but it led to a major payoff. This cake got me the coveted "this tastes like my childhood" compliment from my friend Karma, a native of South Carolina. A clear win for the recipes I will be sharing in this post! But first, some terrible pictures (some day I will get a new camera... promise).

So kitschy! So Fabulous.

Little stars piped on top.

My friend Meghan working on a sidewalk chalk rendition of the cake.

Aaaand recipes:


7-Up Cake (adapted from the Whiteout Cake from BAKED bakery's first book. Love their stuff)

5 cups cake flour
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter, at room temp
1 cup vegetable shortening
2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp vanilla
2 large eggs at room temp
3 cups (1 normal-sized bottle, like not the giant one) ice cold 7-Up
6 large egg whites at room temp
1/2 tsp cream of tartar

Preheat the oven to 325°. Prep two 2" high 8" round pans and two 2" high 7" pans or one 3" high 8" pan and one 3" high 7" pan. (For this recipe I found it better to bake smaller amounts of batter at a time, so if you only have one each of the 3" high pans then bake half the batter first, prep the pans again and bake the second half. This will prevent the delicate cake from collapsing under its own weight or over-baking)
Sift the flours, baking powder, baking soda and salt together into a large bowl. Whisk to combine.
Beat butter and shortening for 3-4 minutes until creamy and lightened. Add sugar and vanilla and beat for 3 more minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating continuously until completely combined.
Add flour mixture in three additions, alternating with the soda.
Whisk/beat egg whites with cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Check often and do not overbeat! Fold the egg whites into the batter.
Dole batter into prepped pans until half full and bake for 35-45 minutes: keep an eye on this one! You want to pull it out as soon as its finished to avoid over-browning and drying of the inside of the cake.


Macerated Pineapple (Makes enough pineapple and syrup for the whole cake)

2 cups sugar
2 cups water
2 pineapples, chopped finely (looking for roughly quarter-inch pieces)

Create a simple syrup by cooking the sugar and water together and boiling for five minutes.
Cook the pineapple in the syrup, boiling for about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand for at least 8 hours.
Drain and reserve syrup for soaking 7-Up cake layers. Add a little rum if you like!


Pineapple Italian Meringue Buttercream

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
1/2 recipe Macerated Pineapple (above)

Beat the butter until smooth, light and creamy, about 3-5 minutes. Reserve. Thoroughly wash and dry bowl if using a stand mixer.
Cook sugar and water over medium heat to 240°. As soon as it reaches this temperature beat egg whites and cream of tartar together in a clean bowl at high speed until the soft peak stage. By now the syrup should have reached between 248° and 250°; remove from heat and slowly pour into the egg whites down the side of the bowl as the mixer remains at medium. Turn it up to high and whip until the bottom of the bowl is cool to the touch.
Turning the mixer down to a low setting, add the butter in a spoonful at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the vanilla. Divide in half and reserve one half for frosting the cake.
Put the macerated pineapple in a food processor or blender and blend well. Fold into half of the buttercream.

*Note: this buttercream may weep a bit; keep this in mind when soaking your layers, by which I mean do not oversoak in order to leave a little room for the pineapple juice that may leach out of the buttercream.


To Assemble the Cake

Split the cake into however many layers you wish. I did seven and seven to play on the 7-Up content of the cake. Nobody got it until I said something. Such is the plight of the detail-oriented baker.

Soak each layer in the maceration syrup and spread on a thin layer of pineapple buttercream. Use the reserved macerated pineapple to add some texture to some of the layers of buttercream; I put it in the two middle layers. Continue until you reach the final layer of cake, and then frost the cake in the reserved plain vanilla buttercream. I fortified the bottom tier of cake with some chopsticks that I cut down to size. Decorate as desired.

Bake Hard!
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