Claire Bakes Birthday Cake | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

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cake

is my favorite food. I should have a lot of things that are my favorite food, but cake is really available. Okay, I love this easy cake recipe. It is a very simple yellow cake with a very simple method. then a really wonderful chocolate and cream cheese frosting. I think it might become the only kick you want to do. It's so simple and the result is extremely cute. We're going to do it in a stand mixer and it's a method called reverse creaming. It doesn't start with that normal step where you take the butter and sugar and beat it until light, so we really eliminated a lot of steps.

Well, here I have a 9 by 13 pan, this is a metal pan, if you will. When baking in glass, you just want to turn the oven temperature down 25 degrees because it's going to brown a little bit more around the edges and the glass, just take, you know, maybe half a tablespoon or so, let it be at room temperature and just use my fingers to spread. I'm going to put it all over the bottom and the sides and then I'm going to flour it, so in this recipe we glaze it right in the pan and that's very convenient because if you're going to take it to a party or you just know you need it. to transport it you can take it directly into the mold in which it is baked and we flour it also because the flour helps the cake to loosen and so you can unmold it more easily, so this recipe uses all-purpose flour, so I go to use only a little bit more here on the side to dust the inside of the pan, so I'm just patting it around the flour to coat well, so everything is well coated.

I just take out the excess. I always start by repairing my pan because I've definitely had that thing happen where I mix up a recipe and I'm ready to bake it and then I have to pause and prep the pan because I forgot so I'm using a stand mixer for this recipe you can make it at home with a hand mixer, you're basically going to have to take a little bit more time right after you get to that end point so it has the paddle attachment and the first thing I want to do is mix I gather all my dry ingredients plus the mesh sugar , so again this method is known as reverse cremation, so we're not going to start with the butter and sugar first, we're actually going to start with all the dry ingredients, so here we have all-purpose flour.

Well, kosher salt, baking soda, baking powder. I found that the combination of powder and soda is really important when you have certain acidic ingredients and it needs to be used like buttermilk, so buttermilk is a great tenderizer. I think it really contributes to a really beautiful texture. that's our yeast okay so now it goes into the mixer bowl plus two cups just playing with granulated sugar. I'm going to put this on very low heat just to mix all of these ingredients together and make sure they're all mixed well, so now I'm going to mix my wet ingredients all together, so technically sugar and baking are wet ingredients, but I added it here first mainly to spread it all out, so now that I have five yolks of buttermilk, I can see a yellow cake, so there's a higher proportion of yolks that give that type. nice bright color, then two whole eggs, okay, now I'm adding oil, just vegetable oil or any other neutral oil, and even though it's a butter based cake, I always add a couple of tablespoons of oil to every cake recipe because it really holds the cake extremely. moist and pliable, sometimes shortbread cakes tend to dry out, especially if they've been sitting on the counter for a couple of days and then I take a tablespoon of vanilla extract and it'll all blend back together in the mixer with this as well.

Reverse Creaming Method: The first thing we want to do is incorporate the butter into the flour mixture. This butter is at room temperature. Now the idea here is that we are trying to coat the flour or most of the flour with fat to avoid gluten. formation, this is another reason why we don't have to use cake flour in this recipe, so the gluten is what makes the bread chewy and adds that it can add a sort of hard texture to the cake if you work the dough too much. flour in the presence of liquid, so The first thing we are doing is adding fat to cover the flour, so that when you start adding the liquid less gluten forms.

It is important that the butter is at room temperature, otherwise it will not incorporate very easily into the flour, but you can. just add it all in at once and hopefully avoid too much flour spilling into your mixer because the flutter is almost entirely fat, there's no risk of overworking it, there's no moisture here and no water to like. Activate the gluten and I want to continue until the butter is incorporated into the mixture and the mixture resembles coarse flour. It will also turn a little yellow for you. It's funny how we use coarse flour. as an indicator, it is as it is, again, if you're using a hand mixer for this step, we're going to take a little bit more time and see what it looks like right there, so we need some gluten formation, you don't.

I want no gluten to form otherwise there will be no structure to the cake so now I will add my liquid about half so at this stage I will just mix on low heat and try to hydrate all the flour and then I can. add the rest so this reverse creamy method is particularly useful for making layer cakes because it is known to produce a very flat top as it avoids that sort of dome so when you stack layers it is really useful and on a cake in leaves you get or like a very nice flat surface for the frosting and now I can add the rest of the liquid so this is a great method because you can measure everything right into the mixer as well as the liquid ingredients it really is a quicker method to mix a dough. and for me the result is as good, if not better, than the traditional method.

Now I said everything to soften and I'm also at this point. I want to put some air in it, so I'm going to increase the speed. a little bit so you can see that the dough that's already in that in about 15 seconds lights up and a little bit of this area and it also has a couple of shadows. This is working air and I also have to let it warm up for up to two. minutes because now I need to develop twenty so that the cake has some structure, so it looks great. You can see how soft and silky it looks better.

You really gain a lot of volume with this method in the end, so it really is so-so. The first time I tried this method I was surprised at how fluffy and light the cake is, so I'm just folding it a couple of times with the spatula before putting it into our prepared pan because there may still be some areas that haven't been mixed quite enough. now on our baking sheet and now I love to use just a little bit of offset to smooth out the dough and work it into the corners trying to get a pretty even layer so you'll often find that the direction let's say preheat the oven to 350, this It

bakes

at 325 which helps make a very even flat surface again, so it's another good trick if you're layering and the round pans lower the temperature by 25 degrees if you're trying to get something that's less domed AG, this will last the better part of an hour ok so it baked for about 55 minutes.

As you can see, it has a beautiful uniform golden brown color. When I took it out, I

test

ed it by just lightly tapping the surface. it feels firm to the touch and springs back and you can also do a cake

test

er right in the center so you will notice that as the cake

bakes

it will start to look matte around the edges and then if the center is still shiny and jiggly you have You have to let it sit longer so wait until it's a uniform golden brown color, you can do a kind of touch test and this cake is completely cooled so there's no heat on the bottom because if the cake is even a A little hot will melt the glaze, so try to be patient when it comes to letting it cool and now I'm going to mix the glaze.

I don't love American buttercream, which is a fancy way of saying as a frosting made from just butter and Kamiya powdered sugar tends to be too sweet, but the advantage of an American buttercream is that it's very easy to make. It really just combines the ingredients, so I wanted to have something with the same ease but maybe a little better balance, so I'm adding cream cheese. I have six ounces here and a stick and a half of butter. The cream cheese adds a little Tang. Which you think balances everything out really well, so the important thing here is that the cream cheese is really good. room temperature and the butter is very room temperature because if any of them are colder or if they're different temperatures, they're not going to mix together very easily, so sometimes you'll find like little white bits in the butter and that's cream cheese.

They're still cold, so these go in the mixer and I have the paddle still like this because they were room temperature and blended very easily. I just scrape the sides of the bowl and then increase the speed a little to get some air in. The mixture starts to beat a little, okay, it's possible to overbeat it, so I'll stop after a couple of minutes. The mixture is light and fluffy. Now I have a couple cups of confectioners' sugar and powdered sugar and I'm adding everything. of this in one go, if I add it with the mixer running, it would turn into a big cloud of powder and then my cocoa powder, so this is a chocolate glaze.

I'm adding cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate for a couple of reasons so there's no added sugar or fat here there's a lot of sugar and fat that I'm adding and I need that sugar and fat in the bowl to give it texture so really I don't want to add extra sugar in the form of chocolate, this is simply cocoa powder and you can use it as raw cocoa powder or dutch process, but at one point you prefer something good quality and kosher salt. Kosher salt is very important in buttercream because it really helps balance the intense sweetness and buttery flavor, and I'm going to start very low so I don't like to create a big cloud of cocoa and powdered sugar.

You can tap this just to embed it. Now everything is incorporated. I'm going to turn the mixture up a little higher. and this one I'm going to beat, everything will be mixed together now there are no dry spots, but I just want to scrape the sides to make sure everything is incorporated evenly and then I'm going to beat it a little more. I'll notice that the color will really change once we get some air into it and I'm going to add my vanilla. I've set this aside, what are all the dry ingredients to work on first so you can see it already has a lighter texture and color? quite a bit and I want to keep going until it's a nice fluffy frosting consistency and then no more because it's possible to over-beat it, so I'm just going to put the frosting directly on the surface of the cake, okay?

It's time to re-ice the cake is completely cold, if it was even a little warm it would start to melt the butter and the frosting would start to slide so I'm just using a small offset spatula you could use the back of a spoon or even a butter knife and I would say this makes a pretty generous layer of frosting but the cake itself is a couple of inches tall so I think it's actually a good cake to frosting ratio and I'm just working on it. first in the corners once it's all over once you have full coverage and do some nice like little flicks and swirls.

I like when you see the texture of the frosting. I don't want a totally smooth surface, you know, but I don't want to like a wedding cake, so I like that you have this fluffy frosting and I like that you can see what the texture is. This is a great celebration cake because it feeds a lot of people and you don't have to deal with things like stacking and filling. of the layers and then the crumb coat and everything, it's really just two simple operations: mixing the cake and then the frosting, some sprinkles here to decorate and now I can go in with my little spatula and give the frosting a nice texture. and now here you have the sprinkles that you want or not, the further you want them to spread, the higher up you can sprinkle them if you want them to be a little more concentrated in one area, just place your hand a little bit closer to the cake.

So that's it, I really think it's the easiest possible cake with frosting that you can make without it coming out of a box and you know you know it's a lot more effort than it actually is. Perfect celebration cake, ideal for children's

birthday

parties, adult

birthday

s. parties or just because they feel like baking so usually you need a reason, the first piece is always a little difficult to take out so to make it easier and that's also what blooms at the bottom to make it easier you can cut two slices actually. It'll make it a little easier to get the first one out, so I'll give it a try.

It's great to have a chocolate frosting that isn't too sweet. Nice balance, not that you know that cream cheese in there, but it's aKind of a little better balance than the classic American chocolate buttercream and the cake is really wonderful, beautiful, light texture, nice crumb, as they say in the cake world, well, the time I made him a birthday cake He hated my nephew. Chris's first birthday was like the most for me