We have two birthdays in the house this month. Last Sunday I realized that one had come and gone, the other was less than a week away and I had done nothing. Clearly it was time for a spontaneous, late Sunday afternoon birthday cake guilt attack. After all, with flour, butter, sugar, eggs and milk in the house, how hard could it be?
Apparently very hard.
Undaunted, I ploughed through countless promising Pinterest leads, discarding those calling for sour cream or buttermilk or cream cheese, until I finally came across a simple butter cake recipe. Honestly, there should have been angels singing on high and beams of heavenly light. Instead, the dryer beeped and I put my cake quest on hold to fold clothes. Oh, okay... to empty the dryer. Who are we kidding here? The guys should just be glad I don't keep all the money and Legos I find. Especially the Legos.
Best Butter Cake required no tampering except for the part where, at the last minute, I decided to make it a Best Butter Almond Cake by adding 1tsp of almond flavoring to my very generous interpretation of 2 tsp vanilla. REAL vanilla, please.
This recipe creates one of those amazing cloud-like batters that is so delicious you find yourself licking the bowl and muttering salmonella-shmalmonella! (This is where my lawyer husband has an anxiety attack and asks me to consider that last line.)
Moving on. Light. Fluffy. Lickable.
Since this is a birthday cake guilt attack, I decided on three layers.
About the time that I decided that the Best Butter Cake should be a Best Butter Almond Cake, I also decided that the buttercream frosting should be made with blackberry jam. Fruit and Nuts are one of my husband's favorite flavor combinations. Also describes our family pretty well.
I dug up a
classic buttercream frosting recipe and simply skipped the liquid and added about a third of a cup of home made blackberry jam instead.
Mmmm.... home made blackberry jam.
Then ... to assemble the cake. I used to be very intimidated by layer cakes and my outcomes didn't help much. They tended to slide, each layer in a different direction and I'd end up in a losing battle with the leaning tower of frosting. For years I solved this by simply not making layer cakes at all. But that didn't last forever. There's something about a culinary challenge getting the better of me that just couldn't be left alone.
So, I watched cake shows and read cake cookbooks and cake baker blogs and I learned a thing or two. Or more. Turns out, there's a lot to making a layer cake that is structurally sound, pretty AND yummy.
Now I'm going to make a comment that may come as a surprise, at least to people who know me. I like cake mixes. There's nothing wrong with making a cake from a cake mix. Unless you want to build a tall layer cake. Then the very thing I love - the tender, moist cake - is the first design flaw. To make a layer cake, you need a firmer cake, one that doesn't flop around when you try to build with it. The Better Butter (Almond) Cake worked very well.
Second, even if you're working with a firm cake, there's much to be said for freezing the cake layers and working with them cold. It keeps your butter cream from getting runny, for one thing.
Third, frosting should be spreadable but not warm. In fact, nothing should be at all warm. That was definitely one of the flaws of my earlier cake efforts. I would usually be in a rush, having scheduled insufficient time, and decide the cake was "cool enough." The cake can't be "cool enough." The cake needs to be cold.
Those are three rules I learned about the materials. Then came the whole business of actually getting your cake to look and taste as if it had distinct layers, even after it's assembled, frosted, cut and served. Once I graduated from sliding messes, I spent some time with cakes that were very pretty on the outside, and yummy to eat, but there was that moment of disappointment when I cut the first slice and it looked distinctly un-layer-y on the inside.
And I read more, and watched more, and talked to people who actually knew how to create structurally sound, pretty, yummy, layer-y cakes. And I practiced and practiced and today, I'm taking my cake building skills public.
Are you ready?
Yes?
Let's build a cake.
Step One: Starting with the first layer, use a highly flavored glaze, jam, or syrup to coat the top of the cake. This provides an extra punch of flavor and a barrier between cake and frosting that contributes to that desired layer-y-ness. In the case of this cake, I used ... of course ... home made blackberry jam.
Step Two: Add a layer of frosting. This is another place where I get all dorky about my tools. You really just can't do better than an off set spatula for spreading frosting. Something like
this.
Step Three: Repeat the cake jam frosting pattern until you run out of layers or courage. This is where things used to start going terribly wrong for me. Instead of a nice even tower of deliciousness, I would have three layers headed three different directions with all manner of skewers and what have you sticking out in a vain attempt to keep to impending collapse at bay. But working with cold cake, chilly buttercream and the right techniques - viola! - we have a thing of beauty and strength.
Step Four: Frost the entire cake with a thin layer to seal in cake crumbs. This doesn't have to be pretty so much as it has to be uniform.
Step Five: Finish frosting the cake with as much or as little frosting as you have and/or like. Make it as fancy or as plain as you want. I usually start by piling the remaining frosting on the top and then spreading it out, down and around. I'm not a cake decorator so my results are not visually fancy. Maybe that will be the next chapter in my cake journey.
And will you look at that? It's pretty, it's yummy, it didn't fall apart and it's ...
LAYER-Y!!
Happy Birthday, Cake!
