Frosticles

Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting

chikacooks:

Yet again I have attempted a cake from @SmittenKitchen. Not only A cake, THE cake. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting. So simple yet so easy for it to go terribly wrong. This is the classic. Everyone knows what it should taste like, at least in their opinion. It’s my fiance’s favorite type of cake. When I stumbled across this recipe, I asked “What do you think about this?” His response? “If you make it, I will eat it. All of it.” And on that note, on to the cake.

Yellow Cake Recipe:
This recipe is supposed to yield two 9-inch round, 2-inch tall cake layers but my experience shows either my 9” cake pans are slightly smaller than average or the recipe yields slightly more than this. Either way, only fill your pan 2/3 of the way full, just to be sure.

4 C plus 2 T cake flour (not self-rising)
2 t baking powder
1.5 t baking soda
1 t salt
2 sticks (aka 1 C butter) softened (preferably unsalted)
2 C sugar
2 t vanilla extract (go for the good stuff)
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 C buttermilk (shake immediately before using

Preheat oven to 300°F. Thoroughly grease two 9-inch round cake pans and line with circles of parchment paper, then spray parchment with nonstick cooking spray. Don’t try and cheat here. Take my word for it, you really want to use the Crisco.

Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. In your electric mixer, beat the butter and the sugar at medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3-5 minutes. Then beat in the vanilla. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well and scraping down the bowl after each addition. At low speed, beat in the buttermilk until just combined (mixture will look curdled). If you have a splash guard, this is a good time to put it on. Add the flour mixture in three batches, mixing until each addition is just incorporated. Again, remember to scrape down the sides of your bowl between additions!

Pour the batter evenly into the cake pans, then tap down. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes. Cool in their pans on a wire cooling rack for about 10 minutes, then run a knife around edge of pan. Invert the cakes onto the rack and discard parchment. Cool completely, about 1 hour. If you have the room, stick them in the freezer for that hour, it will make life easier later.

Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting Recipe
Makes 5 cups of frosting, give or take. It was enough to frost and fill a two layer 9-inch cake plus some.

15 oz semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips
1.25 t instant coffee
2.25 C sour cream (room temperature)
.25 - .5 C corn syrup (or .25C corn syrup and .25C confectioners sugar, sifted)
.75 t vanilla extract

Combine the chocolate and instant coffee in the top of a double-boiler. Stir until the chocolate is melted. Lower the heat and let chocolate cool until tepid. In a medium bowl, whisk together the sour cream, the corn syrup, confectioners sugar if using, and vanilla extract until combined. Add the sour cream mixture to the tepid chocolate slowly and stir quickly until the mixture is uniform. Once tempered with about a cup of the sour cream mixture, add the chocolate to the sour cream bowl. Taste for sweetness and add if necessary add additional corn syrup until you reach your desired sweetness.

Let cool in the refrigerator until the frosting is a spreadable consistency. This should not take more than 30 minutes. Should the frosting become too thick or stiff (I most definitely did NOT have this problem, as you can see) just leave it out at room temperature until it softens.

When measuring cake flour, I like to use a flexi cutting mat to catch any spills. Always spoon the flour from the canister until your measuring cup is overfilled, then level with a straight edge.

Make sure you scrape down the sides of your bowl. Except in rare circumstances, if you see a “chef” not scraping their bowl, RUN AWAY and don’t look back.

My method for making a parchment round that fits my cake pan is to fold a square in half then sort of line it up with the widest part of the pan.

Then fold it in half a couple times making a nice point

When your point looks like this, snip the edge nice and even.

You might need to trim it back a couple of times until you get it just right. Especially with this recipe, make sure you grease the pan very well getting down into the corners. I’d go with good ‘ole Crisco. I used non-stick cooking spray and it didn’t work very well.

Make sure to “tap down” the batter aka give the loaded pan a few good, hard raps against the counter to get rid of any large air bubbles. Remember to rotate and turn the cakes every 15 minutes while baking!

Now, on to the frosting!

This frosting came out a bit too soft, even with leaving it in the fridge for a solid hour then the freezer for an additional half-hour. Next time I might sub out some of the corn syrup for some confectioners sugar to stiffen it up.

Deb @SmittenKitchen warns to use room temperature sour cream because the warm chocolate meeting the cold cream caused the chocolate to partially seize. My sour cream was most definitely room temperature, and this still happened. I got little chocolate bits that clogged the pastry bag and looked like speckles throughout. Next time, I’d use a double boiler and temper the chocolate with the sour cream mixture instead of nuking the chocolate and adding it to the sour cream.

To get 15oz of chocolate chips, I got out my trusty digital kitchen scale and zeroed it with a large measuring cup on it then filled the cup to 15oz.

It was just about 2.25C for those of you anti kitchen scale nuts.

Once tempered, whisk the chocolate mixture into the sour cream mixture. Pop it in the fridge until your cake is done baking, cooled and ready to be frosted.

Houston, we have a problem. Either my 9” cake pans aren’t exactly 9” or this batter made slightly more than anticipated. Either way, it was nothing that can’t be fixed with a little trimming and some good, thick frosting.

I trimmed it to even it up as much as possible. The small cracks should *crosses fingers* hold up once the frosting is on. As you can see, the non-stick cooking spray did a thoroughly inadequate job of preventing the edges from sticking. At this point I popped it in the freezer for 20 minutes or so to firm it up.

Always crumb coat, people! I popped it back in the freezer for another 30 minutes to firm it up even more.

I like using a disposable pastry bag (my grandfather would be rolling in his grave!) to pipe the edge of the bottom layer. This way, you just plop down some frosting in the middle and it will squish out to the piping.

This is about when I realized that something was starting to go terribly wrong with the frosting. It was waaaaayyy too soft and not holding up to room temperature, even after only a few minutes.

Assembly complete. Hopefully with this running frosting it won’t flop or sag. I popped it back in the fridge for an hour at this point, trying to stiffen the frosting.

Saggy frosting? Check. Flopping cake? Check. Does it still taste as delicious as a cake with stiff, fluffy icing? You betcher ass it does.

Oops. Entirely My Fault.

Turns out, yesterday’s post about the exploratory interview was all my fault — the cause of the interview at least.  Seems I had a bit of miscommunication with my manager, so she’s just trying to look out for my career… No real harm can come from entertaining the man and attending the interview, so this is actually kind of exciting now.  I’ll go talk to the gentleman, hear what he has to say, and if I think it’s really interesting, maybe I have a career new path I can take…

Exploratorium

Apparently, I’ve been set up with an exploratory interview for Friday morning.  My manager wants me to have career growth opportunities and my current area has a lot of tenured employees that make it harder for me to advance.  I guess this is just to find out if I’d even be interested in changing positions… they don’t even know that I’m fully qualified for the position they’re trying to fill.

I’m a little hesitant — probably because I’ve carved out a very comfortable niche in my current work area.  I like my coworkers and I believe I have their respect — I don’t like the idea of stepping into something completely different and knowing nobody.  Not without a good reason for motivation.  It was different when I was looking at moving across the country.  It was different when I felt that I wasn’t appreciated for the work I did in my current job role.  But things have been pretty good these last couple years and I don’t know that I want to jeopardize my current stable roll for the chance to further my career.  The cost may be too great as far as I’m concerned.

But I have no qualms about doing this “exploratory” interview if it doesn’t obligate me to move forward.  So we’ll see how it goes.  Keep your eyes peeled for

Contractor Is Not Amused

Thanks to the contractor’s limitations and the inability to use the 30” vanity I’ve already purcahsed, we were forced to look for a new vanity, and generally redesign the bathroom for the upcoming renovation.  I wonder how the contractor will deal with the fact that I think there will be less tile work, as now it seems that only the actual shower/tub area and floor will be tiled… In theory, it should speed up the job and drop the price… at least I can hope it will.

Renovation Tips #684 and #685

Don’t buy ANYTHING until your friendly neighborhood contractor approves it.  And whatever you do, don’t go changing the design plan without notifying the man.  They don’t like that.  Not one bit.

Preparing for Renovations

Whatever you do, don’t decide to have both bathrooms worked on concurrently.  Also, you’d be surprised at how much work goes into clearing out rooms that are going to be worked on.  Lastly, if you have a second project that might somehow be related to what the contractor you’ve hired is doing, talk to them about adding it into the project — it’s likely to be cheaper since they are already going to be “on site”.

Benefit of a Home Office #463

Take a 15 minute break and shave your head. :D