2 posts tagged “cakes”
A few weeks ago, a friend asked me to make a cake for a mutual friend's baby shower. The hostess hadn't selected a theme, so I acted on a tip from Anna and headed over to the photo galleries at Cake Central for inspiration. After reviewing hundreds of member photos, I decided to go with a rubber ducky theme.
Not happy with just trying a new design, I also wanted to experiment with using a new type of icing. I had a previous good experience with Italian meringue (it turns out that's what I iced Mr. Guycita's birthday cake with, although the recipe called it Swiss meringue), so I was very happy to find a recipe for Italian meringue buttercream that sounded just as good but much more stable and easy to work with. It was simple to make (no powdered sugar all over my kitchen!) and I loved the consistency. Most importantly, the taste was a million times better than the ultra-sweet type used by your run-of-the-mill bakery.
Under all the icing were three layers of Baking Illustrated's sour cream fudge cake (which was moist and deliciously chocolatey). I had to use three layers because the cakes were so dense that a mere two layers would not have created a very impressive cake.
The back story to the making of this cake is that, in a moment of distraction and with only a couple of hours left to decorate and deliver the cake, I added the blue tint before reserving some white icing for the bubbles. This misstep would have spelled tragedy but for the heroic efforts of Mr. Guycita, who ran to the store to buy more butter so that I could whip up another batch of tint-free icing. I really do have the best husband in the world.
Every year, I ask Mr. Guycita what type of birthday cake he wants me to make for him, and then I scour my cookbooks and the Internet to find the best from-scratch recipe possible.
This year, he told me that he really didn't know what he wanted. In the mood to try something new, I suggested a tres leches cake. My mom occasionally serves it when we visit Texas, and Mr. Guycita always loves it.
Of course, I didn't want to make just any tres leches cake. So after considerable research, I decided to try my hand at a cuatro leches cake. This variation, in addition to being soaked in the traditional mixture of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream, is topped with dulce de leche (a caramel-type spread that I grew up eating all the time in Uruguay). To put my own twist on the recipe, I decided that, rather than diluting the dulce de leche with milk to pour over the top of the finished cake, I would fill the cake with Conaprole brand dulce de leche straight out of the jar.
Another thing that I thought made this recipe special is that it calls for Swiss meringue icing, rather than the traditional whipped cream. The meringue was super-easy to make, but I had never iced a cake with it before. I quickly learned that, being inexperienced with this medium, I was going to have to be happy with a freeform type of icing job:
I wanted to give the icing a lot of texture, and I thought it turned out pretty good for a first try! Now the recipe directed me to caramelize the icing (to give the cake a hint of roasted marshmallow flavor—yum!). Unfortunately, my little blowtorch refused to cooperate. Out of sheer desperation, I tried putting the cake under the broiler. This method meant that, while the top of the cake would become nice and golden, the sides of the cake would remain unbrowned:
Although the end result was nowhere near what I had envisioned at the start of the process, the cake tasted great. The crumb of the mantecada cake was delicate while still being sturdy enough to hold 3 cups of the leches mixture (the leftover milk can—and should!—be poured over the plated cake wedges). And filling the cake with dulce de leche made this component much more prominent than it would have been if drizzled over the top as directed. I served the cake with coffee and strawberries, both of which were just right to cut the sweetness of the cake. As you can see, we dug in:
Mr. Guycita was happy, and that made me happy. But before I make this cake again, I'll make sure that my little blowtorch is in working order!
