Alright, so after being suckered in and assembling my troops, I got down to the dirty business of actually a baking cake. Since I only spend about 5% of the process actually baking anything, there's not much to say about this part: lotta mixing, lotta folding, lotta cleaning bowls. Hattie was impressed by the amazing edible egg whites, and I can't say that I blame her:
Egg whites are pretty much da bomb. Their superpowers include: delicious; nutritious; and the power to grow many times their normal size. I find that this last one makes for a good party trick, if you ever need to impress someone and you also happen to have some separated eggs, an electric mixer (or whisk, if you want to really show off and have guns of steel), and a bunch of people who are easily amused (holla!). At this point I also want to give a shout out to my main homie, KitchenAid standing mixer, without whom this whole endeavor would not have been possible, and because of whom my whole life is enriched immeasurably, each and every day. I love you, baby.
MOVING ON. As I mentioned yesterday, I planned to have alternating layers of chocolate and vanilla cake with strawberry filling, which means that I had to make two separate cake batters. For the vanilla I went with a plain white cake recipe, and for the chocolate I chose a German chocolate cake.
FUN FACT: Did you know that German chocolate cake is NOT thusly named because it comes from Germany, but rather because it was created by a dude named German?? The more you know...
Anyanyanyways, the main diff between the two cake batters (aside from flavor), for those of you interested in these finer details, is that the white cake rises mostly due to the above-mentioned Super Egg Whites, while the chocolate cake is all about steam. I'm just cracking eggs of knowledge all over everybody today! TOPICAL.
Because there were going to be two tiers, I made four different cakes: a 6-inch cake in each flavor, and an 8-inch cake in each flavor. And since I doubled the recipes in both cases, this resulted in a whole mess o' cake. The whole baking process took a couple of hours, and one I had them out of the oven and completely cooled, it was time to set about slicing those mothers up.
Firstly, I slice off the top of the cake, a-like so:
This provides the dual benefits of a) giving the cake a flat platform, and b) creating lots of extra cakey bits for Hattie to eat. [EDIT: That's just the kind of helpful helper-slash-photographer I am. Anyone else requiring similar services need only ask.] Next I slice each cake into layers. How many layers, you ask? Well since you're asking, I guess the answer is however many I damn please! Haha, jkjk, actually I just kind of eyeball how thick I want the layers to be and then I cut as many as I can fit. In the case of this cake that ended up to be three or four layers per cake:
There I am using my fancepantsy cake-slicer to slice the layers evenly. Cake-slicer and I have sort of a love-hate relationship, mostly hate, so honestly I really just included that photo to impress you with my crazy baking skills; actually I did most of the slicing freehand with a regular old knife. Bo-ring!
Jumping backwards in time a little bit, if you've been paying attention thus far you may recall that I was concocting a mysterious strawberry-sauce a while back but never finished it. I will address that little loose end now, as we have arrived at the making-all-kinds-of-fillings portion of our show. For this project I made three kinds of filings: white icing, buttercream, and strawberry preserve.
White icing is basically just sugar syrup into which I've incorporated some--guess what--egg whites.
Now if you've been reading everything I've written thus far (and if you have, god bless you), you may be wondering what happened to all the egg yolks during this crazy experiment; I've been all 'egg whites are le awesome,' so why don't the yolks get any love? I have one word for you, dear reader(s): buttercream. The process of making buttercream is (in my opinion) fun, but it's labor-intensive and time-consuming, so I'm not going to explain it in detail here. Suffice to say there's a fair amount of heating and cooling and whisking, and it involves a crapload of egg yolks.
Lastly, the ad-hoc strawberry filling gets made by first dumping a bunch more sugar on the already-saturated sugar/strawberry mixture from yesterday and then boiling the shit out of it. The strawberries get all tiny and sugary and delicious, and the liquid reduces to a delicious strawberry-flavored syrup which Hattie and I have a lot of left over and fully intend to incorporate into all manner of alcoholic beverages. You know, in case you were thinking of coming over.
Having all three handy, we move to the process of icing and assembling the layers. First goes on a layer of white icing, for flavor and also to help caulk the cake against the drippiness of the strawberry goo:
As you can see I am using Mr. Offset Spatula, my trusty gentleman friend. Next goes on a layer of the strawberry filling, and then another layer of cake (opposite flavor), and then another layer of white icing, and then another layer of strawberry filling, and then another layer of cake...this is the song that never ends...until all the layers are layered and we have:
Layer cake! As you can see the cake ended up having seven alternating layers when all was said and done; not too shabby, if I do say so myself. Alright kats and kittens, that's all for today. Come back tomorrow for the next episode of Way Out Of My League, when Hattie convinces me to do something CRAZY! You'll never see it coming!
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment