This year has several round birthdays in our family, one of which was Lundulph's mum turning 80, so we threw a huge party and I had the pleasure of making a cake large enough for about 50 people. Lundulph suggested I make it in the shape of "80" and I wanted to make it a bit more festive when cutting it up, so I settled on the Funfetti cake from Preppy Kitchen.
Having had a few mishaps when converting an American recipe to metric, I decided to do a trial run first with half of the recipe. As with others of Mr Kanell's recipes, this one worked very nicely too. Lundulph certainly didn't complain about the trial run, which gave 24 very tasty muffins.
Cake
- Preheat the oven to 190 ℃, not fan.
- Sift together the flours, baking powder, salt and vanilla sugar and set aside.
- Stir together the kefir and milk in a jug.
- Beat together sugar, butter and vegetable oil until well combined and creamy.
- Whisk in the egg whites in three parts, combining well between each addition.
- Add one third of the flour mixture and keep whisking.
- Add half the kefir-milk mixture and whisk in.
- Add the second third of the flour mixture and incorporate.
- Add the remaining kefir-milk.
- Add the final third of the flour mixture.
- Once all is well mixed, gently fold in the sprinkles just enough to get them distributed throughout the batter.
- Pour the batter into a greased and floured cake tin and bake for 38 minutes.
- Take out of the oven and let cool in the cake tin for 10 minutes, then remove the cake and put on a wire rack to cool down completely.
- Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before slicing layers.
- Freeze if not making the cake straight away.
Because this cake uses only egg whites, the crumb is paler than if using whole eggs and I think it makes the sprinkles stand out a bit more. But it also results in a lot of yolks. I was lucky in that I had 8 leftover egg whites frozen from a previous bake, and I used them for two of the cakes. So I only needed 8 more eggs for the remaining two cakes. It still left 8 yolks to deal with and I used them for the vanilla cream (crème pâtissière) that I used as filling. I used the recipe that I should have used for the vanilla hearts all those years ago. This is a really nice one.
Filling
- Warm up the milk to room temperature in a large saucepan.
- Whip up the vanilla sugar, yolks, sugar and corn starch in a bowl until pale and fluffy.
- Add the milk and stir through to incorporate, then pour the mixture back into the saucepan and place on medium heat.
- Bring to the boil while whisking constantly.
- Add the butter and stir it in, then remove the saucepan from the stove.
- Push through a sieve to remove any lumps and into a wide shallow dish.
- Cover the surface with cling film to prevent a skin from forming, then place the dish in cold water to cool down the cream as quickly as possible and refrigerate.
- Use within two days, otherwise freeze.
- If using from frozen, thaw in the fridge, then bring to the boil in a microwave in short 20 s bursts with stirring through inbetween to bring it back together again.
Once I'd settled on the recipe, the next thing to figure out was how to get the shapes of an "8" and a "0". The "8" was easy, two round cakes need to overlap a bit, so the overlap needs to be cut out from one of the cakes. I used the cake tin as a guide and cut carefully with a knife. Note that I swapped the overlaps between the two layers to make sure the cake wouldn't split during transport.
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The "0" however was a bigger challenge. I originally planned to make a rectangular cake and cut out an oval, but this would have been wasteful in the extreme. I also couldn't find anything helpful when I searched on the internet, but it occurred to me that I could probably manage with two round cakes here as well. Just cut them out like the "8", then use all the cutoffs to fill in the "waist" and turn it into a "0". I'm very pleased that I managed to work this out and it saved me making a large rectangular sponge which would definitely have been different to the two round ones. There were still some leftovers afterwards, I've frozen them to use for cake pops.
An annoying thing was that although I used the same cake tin for all four sponges, there were some visible differences in size between them and I'm not entirely sure why this happened. I did my best to repeat everything exactly the same. But I made the sponges over a couple of days, so clearly something was different.
I should also mention that I had some frozen light syrup from canned peaches, about 2 dl, which I thawed and drizzled on the bottom layer of each cake as I was putting it together. I didn't have enough for the upper layer and since I covered the cakes with marzipan directly without a crumb layer, I thought the marzipan might soak up some of the syrup and go runny. In hindsight, I should have made a crumb layer to level out between the edges. This would need to be buttercream, again to protect the marzipan.
Lundulph's mum had done some serious marzipan shopping by mistake, so I used most of it to cover the cake. I spent an evening after work colouring it green and discovered interesting differences between brands. The Dr. Oetker one was ground much more finely and was much easier to work with. Sainsbury's and Tesco's were fairly similar to each other, but a bit coarser. I should perhaps mention that I am not sponsored by any of these brands, this was just an unexpected opportunity to compare. I'm very pleased that I managed to get the same tone on all, because I did the colouring in batches.
I then found this video on YouTube, which was very helpful in how to roll out the marzipan thinly and I blended and heated up some of my runny rhubarb jam to use as glue. I followed the steps in the video and managed to roll the marzipan to about 3 mm, maybe even a little thinner.
Earlier in the year, I'd spent a few evenings making the golden cake lace. This time I found ready mixed paste and the instructions helpfully said the lace could be set much faster in the oven, so I ended up doing about a metre and a half too much. It was fun and easy. Hopefully, I'll find use for that at some point. I used edible glue to fix it to the marzipan.
All in all, the cake was a success, but with all the other food, the guests didn't eat as much of it as anticipated, so we had a lot of cake on the following day.
