80th Birthday Cake

 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 

Ingredients

makes one round cake of 20 cm diameter

 

203 g plain flour

22 g glutinous rice flour

1 ¼ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

1 tbsp vanilla sugar 

114 g kefir (100 ml)

68 g semi-skimmed milk (60 ml) 

233 g granulated sugar

114 g unsalted butter at room temperature

38 g vegetable oil (40 ml)

140 g egg whites 

50 g colourful sprinkles

 

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190 ℃, not fan. 
2. Sift together the flours, baking powder, salt and vanilla sugar and set aside.
3. Stir together the kefir and milk in a jug.
4. Beat together sugar, butter and vegetable oil until well combined and creamy.
5. Whisk in the egg whites in three parts, combining well between each addition.
6. Add one third of the flour mixture and keep whisking.
7. Add half the kefir-milk mixture and whisk in.
8. Add the second third of the flour mixture and incorporate.
9. Add the remaining kefir-milk.
10. Add the final third of the flour mixture.
11. Once all is well mixed, gently fold in the sprinkles just enough to get them distributed throughout the batter.
12. Pour the batter into a greased and floured cake tin and bake for 38 minutes.
13. 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.
14. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before slicing layers. 
15. 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

Ingredients

 

500 g semi-skimmed milk

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

120 g egg yolks

125 g granulated sugar

40 g corn starch

25 g unsalted butter

 

Method

1. Warm up the milk to room temperature in a large saucepan.
2. Whip up the vanilla sugar, yolks, sugar and corn starch in a bowl until pale and fluffy.
3. Add the milk and stir through to incorporate, then pour the mixture back into the saucepan and place on medium heat.
4. Bring to the boil while whisking constantly.
5. Add the butter and stir it in, then remove the saucepan from the stove.
6. Push through a sieve to remove any lumps and into a wide shallow dish.
7. 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.
8. Use within two days, otherwise freeze.
9. 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. 

 This made enough vanilla cream to use as filling between the two layers of both cakes, as well as left a little bit over to use between the cutout pieces and help keep them together.

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.

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.

Summery Swiss Roll

Since the lockdown, my good friend Dr Cutie and I have started having Zoom-fika ever now and then and have been asking ourselves why we've not thought of doing this before now, it's really good to chat about this and that and discuss our latest bakes and ideas. Last time we spoke, I mentioned we always get massive jars with jam from my Mum and it takes us forever to get through, so she suggested using them on Swiss rolls. She says that's a staple for when you get unexpected guests, as it takes very short time to complete. So I decided to make a Swiss roll, it's been ages since the last one.

Following the double batch of strawberry custard I made, I decided to use it as filling instead of jam. When I asked Lundulph if he'd fancy this, his eyes sparkled and his smile went from one ear lobe to the other. And since I've not used my Cordon Bleu book for a while, I decided to use its sponge recipe. This also reminded me why I so rarely use this book, it focuses on cooking techniques, but is relatively vague with the recipes.

Ingredients

4 large eggs
1.5 dl icing sugar
1.25 dl plain flour
2 dl strawberry custard

Method

1. Butter and line two shallow rectangular baking trays with baking paper. Each should measure 23 x 33 cm and be about 1.5 cm deep. It is easier to get the sponge out if the paper comes up around the edges.
2. Place the eggs and icing sugar in a large glass bowl and place this bowl over a saucepan with simmering water. The glass bowl bottom should not touch the water.
3. Whisk until the mixture goes thick and you can drizzle the figure "8" when you lift the whisk.
4. Remove from the heat and keep whisking until the mixture cools down.
5. Sift in the flour and carefully fold in.
6. Divide the mixture between the two baking trays and carefully level each with a dough scraper.
7. Bake for 4 - 5 minutes until golden brown. Then, take out of the oven, cover with a second piece of baking paper and a cooling rack, then flip out of the baking tray.
8. Allow to cool, then prize off the baking paper from the tray. While keeping the sponge on the second baking paper, place it on a towel.
9. Spread the strawberry custard evenly across the sponge, except 2 cm along one of the longer edges - this will be the outer edge of the roll.
10. Now use the towel to carefully roll up as tightly as possible while making sure you don't get the baking paper included inside the roll. Place so that the outer edge ends up under the roll.
11. Wrap with the baking paper and refrigerate to get it to keep its shape, then it's ready to decorate further or serve as it is. You may want to trim the edges, there will likely be custard oozing out from the rolling.

The recipe in the book actually stated that the above amount should be for one baking tray, but it was definitely twice more than it should have been. Unfortunately I'd only prepared one baking tray, so one it had to be and I ended up baking it for some 15 minutes due to its thickness. It also was very difficult to roll. Didn't correspond to the photos in the book at all. But it was very tasty and I think with half the thickness in the sponge, it would have been better. Perhaps heat up the custard and add some gelatin to it and prevent it from oozing out too much. Of course this isn't Dr Cutie's quick recipe, it takes a bit more work, but it's well worth the effort to make and serve guests.

Plus, Lundulph was happy and so was I, because it was very tasty and although it seemed to be massive, we got through it quite quickly. Another bonus with 2 Swiss rolls for a larger dinner party.

Birthday Under Lockdown

We've now been in a lockdown for some 2 months and I've found a wondeful baker whose videos are just mesmerising. She publishes videos as Boone Bake and I believe she's from Korea and after spending a few hours watching her lovely creations, I decided to try this one for my birthday.

Ingredients

Pastry

125 g strong flour
125 g plain four
150 g unsalted butter
55 g water
6 g sugar
1 g salt
1 large yolk

Mould

grapeseed oil

Glazing

1 large yolk
5 g full milk

Strawberry compote

200 g strawberries
60 g granulated sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice

Vanilla cream filling

4 large yolks
60 g granulated sugar
20 g plain flour
10 g corn starch
400 g full milk
2 tsp vanilla essence
50 g white chocolate
60 g condensed milk
280 g double cream,whipped to stiff peaks

Decorations

selection of colourful fruit

For each part of the recipe, I measured up each ingredient in its own bowl and lined them up in the correct order before starting. I pretty much followed the video instructions, however, I split up the different parts and made them on different days, since I didn't want to go tired and mess up my cake by doing a shoddy finish.

With regards to the pastry, one thing that isn't clear from the video is how long it takes to get the butter mixed in with the flours, I think I chopped and chopped around in the bowl with the dough scraper for ages, changing hands as they got tired. I tried using both hands with two scrapers and I also tried holding two scrapers in one hand with a finger inbetween, but still I didn't manage to get things well incorporated. So I think pinching with my fingers next time will be the way forward, as long as I can keep the kitchen and my fingers reasonably cool. It's been hot this week in the UK, so I've had difficulties keeping the kitchen below 25 °C. What I must remember to do is to use glass bowls for the mixing and chill them as well overnight before starting.

What I really liked is that once the egg mixture had been stirred into the dough, it was just pushed down to the bottom of the bowl to form a lump and then moved to cling film, shaped into a square and wrapped tightly before chilling. It clearly was still very much in a crumbly state, but the three rolls and folds made it turn into a lovely smooth dough, so I'll keep this in mind for other shortcrust pastries I make. I did notice that when I made the basket handle at the end, having rolled out all the offcuts from the previous rolling, the dough had become elastic, so it developed gluten fairly quickly, thanks to the strong flour. But I think it is important to have it there, to make the basket sturdy enough to be filled with things.

I was most nervous about the weaving part, but this turned out to be easier than expected. For the basket shape, I used one of our soup bowls, which has a diameter of 19.5 cm and is possibly a bit deeper than the one used in the video. It is important to make sure to have everything ready and organised and also to make space in the fridge for the basket, if it's a hot day, so that it can be placed there while rolling the dough and cutting new strips. Another thing to keep in mind is to try and weave as tightly as possible and have a small container with water and a small brush handy, to glue together the dough strips as required. During baking, the dough shrunk quite a bit and left largish holes in the basket and it came apart in a couple of places where new strips had been added.

I had severe doubts about how long this contraption would hold, given that its filled with a pastry cream and fresh fruit, so I chose to be cautious and baked the basket for 40 minutes, which is almost twice as long as the video recommends. Of course the pastry wasn't as melt-in-the-mouth, but it tasted OK to me. The handle and the remaining dough were baked for 23 minutes as per the instruction.

So on the morning of my birthday, I finished the vanilla custard cream, which is extremely tasty and ended up a bit firmer than it looks in the video, which was good. But bacause my basket ended up a bit larger than the one in the video, there wasn't enough vanilla custard cream. It barely filled half the basket and I struggled to cover the strawberry compote, so I've doubled the amounts in the ingredients above. It was so tasty, any left-over will not go to waste for sure.

The baked fruit basket was ready just after lunchtime, so I was able to show it to my parents and my sister when it was looking its best. They were impressed. Lundulph then managed to get the barbecue going and we spent the early afternoon grilling a lot of meat and veggies before having a leisurly festive meal in the late afternoon. The fruit basket had started sagging a little, but was holding together OK. If I manage to make a tighter weave next time, it should hold even better.

The only thing is, this pastry is not possible to cut in a gracious manner. So as soon as I stuck the knife into it, it collapsed, but it was extremely tasty and light, with a very good balance of crunch from the pastry, vanilla custard and fruit. A perfect dessert for a Summer's day and it did hold together for the 4 hours between completing it and cutting it up, though it had started to sag a little. Since I had lots of fruit left over, I had placed some underneath the basket and that added a little support.

I suspect we have at least 2 more portions each to work through, so I'd say this makes enough for 6 - 8 people and for anyone who wants some extra crunch, they can take a piece from the basket handle.

I how have 4 egg whites left over, so I will be making meringues in the coming days.