Why does she carry on about cake so?

Greetings from Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China!  Can you believe I’m posting from an IPhone in Southwest China??? Hazzah!

I realize I still haven’t shared photos from my Hong Kong/Shenzen trip in March.  Perhaps there is a mid-summer China post in my future.

Anyhow, shall we continue with the cake theme? Yellow cake.  Milk chocolate frosting.  Lots of colorful sprinkles.  Can you get any more “birthday” than that?  I have to admit up front, that this cake didn’t come together as I would have liked.  It turned-out fine…just not what I was going for.  The issue was the frosting and for this reason, I’m just going to give you the cake recipe as I continue my quest for the perfect milk chocolate frosting.  Life is tough.

This cake recipe comes from Epicurious via the Well Decorated Cake and is unassumingly called, “Moist Yellow Cake.”  Three words I like to see together.  The recipe starts with five eggs.  Yes five. And quite a bit of buttermilk.  We love buttermilk in cake recipes!

The batter will be quite thick.  If you have controls issues like I do, you’ll weigh your batter, figure out the half-way point and distribute to your pans accordingly.

Once the batter is in the pans, smooth-out the top with a knife and then whack the pans a couple of times of the counter to purge air bubbles.

The cakes won’t rise much so no threat of over-flowing pans.  I wanted this cake to look like someone’s grandma made it and so skipped cutting layers and just went for two, big fat slabs of cake separated by an equally thick slab of chocolate frosting.

I gave the whole thing a crumb layer and then a nice even layer of chocolate frosting.

And got out the sprinkles.  And made a huge mess.  I’ve seen professional bakers pick up a frosted cake, tilt it and smother-on sprinkles.  I was too chicken to do this and sort of gingerly flung the sprinkles in the direction of the cake.  My results looked about as mediocre as my efforts.

But, everything together, this birthday cake was not-too-shabby.

That is, if you like sprinkles.

Moist Yellow Cake

Epicurious, August 2004, The Well-Decorated Cake

Ingredients

  • 3 C cake flour
  • 1 TBS baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 C unsalted butter, room temp and cut into pieces
  • 2 C granulated sugar
  • 5 large eggs
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 1/4 buttermilk

To make

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, butter, flour and line line with parchment, 2 8″ pans.

  1. In medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
  2. In a standing mixer, beat butter for 3 minutes until light and creamy.  Scrape bowl and then cream the butter for an additional 60 seconds.
  3. Add the sugar, 1/4 C at a time beating 60 seconds after each addition.  Scrape down sides of bowl occasionally.  Add in eggs one-at-a-time.
  4. Reduce the mixer speed.  Stir vanilla into buttermilk.  Beginning and ending with the dry ingredients, add dry ingredients and buttermilk in alternating turns.  Mix until just incorporated.  Scrape-down bowl and mix one more time.
  5. Spoon batter into prepared pans and smooth top with knife.  Life up the pan with the batter and let it drop on the counter top to release any air bubbles in the batter.
  6. Center the pans on the lower-third of the oven and let bake 45-50 minutes or until the cake is lightly brown on top and springs away from the sides of the pan.
  7. Remove from oven, let cool for 10 minutes.  Turn out onto wire cooling racks and let cool completely.

One thought on “Why does she carry on about cake so?”

  1. Good thing cake isn’t a sensitive topic in China (or is it?!). Thank you for the tip on weighing and dividing the batter — genius.

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