- Hey everyone.
You're watching "Preppy Kitchen"
where I, John Kanell, teach you
how to make delicious homemade dishes
to share with your family and friends.
And today it is the most
important sharing dish ever,
a birthday cake for my twin
boys Lachlan and George.
It's a white cake, fluffy,
moist, covered in creamy
Swiss merengue buttercream
and lots of sprinkles
because it's a birthday
cake for two-year-old boys.
Okay, let's get started.
First off, I'm adding a quarter
cup of Greek yogurt, plain,
into a medium sized bowl.
You don't have to use yogurt,
you could use sour cream
or you could just use milk
if you really feel like it.
This will add the slightest bit of tang,
but a lot of moisture.
I don't even taste the tang to be honest.
One half of a cup,
quarter cup for a total
of three quarters of a cup
of whole milk.
I'm also adding in one
teaspoon of white vinegar,
kind of odd but it's going to help
react leavening agents,
and that's basically,
you want to add the acid in
because it'll make your leavening agents
really go into overdrive
and you have a fluffier
but still moist cake.
That's the secret to red velvet cake.
Always has vinegar in it.
Okay, if you want to
see my red velvet cake,
click up here,
so delicious and hello
cream cheese frosting,
who could not love that?
My husband, that's who, he hates it.
All right, set it aside
and now it's time for the dry ingredients.
Have a big bowl with a sifter
over a scale just by the by.
Starting off with one and
two thirds cups of flour.
All-purpose please.
That's gonna be 200 grams.
Half a teaspoon of salt,
quarter teaspoon of baking soda,
and a full teaspoon of baking powder.
Those are our leavening agents
and they'll be a reacting with vinegar.
We can sift it up,
put that scale aside and whisk it up.
Alright, set this aside
while we cream our butter up.
I cannot believe the boys are two today.
That is so crazy,
I mean it seems like just yesterday
that we were in the
hospital picking them up
and they were like little
tiny incy-bincy baby nuggets.
That's three quarters of a cup
of unsalted room temperature
butter into the standing
mixer, stand mixer.
That's 170 grams-ish in
case you're wondering.
And then let's just
cream it up for a second.
(mixer roars)
Add the sugar, in one full cup, 200 grams.
Let it get nice and light and fluffy.
Okay, right now you can scrape
the bowl of your mixer down,
a little bit more mixing.
I'm gonna add in three egg whites.
This is a white cake,
so the whole thing is we're
not gonna use anything dark,
the butter is the darkest
thing in this cake.
Crack the white in there,
if the yolk broke,
it wouldn't be like the end of the world,
by the way because we're not
making a merengue or anything,
it's just about the color.
Carefully remove that dainty
yolk and set it aside.
You can make some delicious
French buttercream,
which you can click up here
for with those egg yolks,
it is like pipeable custard
and a dream come true.
(mixer roars)
Just scrape this down.
It looks a little messy.
(mixer roars)
And yolk, egg white number three, yolk.
Sound like a broken record but
scrape that bowl down again,
it makes a difference,
then before I turn it back on,
let's talk about flavorings.
Normally I would love a vanilla cake,
but real vanilla,
which is the only kind of vanilla I use,
has a very dark color,
so what are the alternates?
Well, since you asked,
you could use almond extract,
orange blossom water
or rose water,
any of those are wonderful and clear,
and today I'll be using rose water
because I love the smell
of roses on the cake.
Ah, this smells like heaven,
I made the mistake of
drinking this straight once,
just a little sip and don't do that.
Don't do it.
You only add in, one to two teaspoons,
that's one teaspoon,
and I'm gonna add like a half.
There we go.
One and a half teaspoons and a drop,
mix it up.
(mixer roars)
Smells so good.
Okay, normally I would just butter
and flour my little pans,
but today we are going to be
adding a parchment paper around
because I have a caprice.
Just trace around.
This is like quadrupled up
and you're gonna cut
out inside of the line
and these will fit in nicely.
Let the cake release.
Let's see if I have enough
of this to carry me through.
It's just baking spray,
which is oil mixed with
flour, a convenience.
Look at that.
Just enough.
That's nice.
Your parchment rounds.
(coughs)
Oh my gosh.
What was that?
Place your parchment rounds inside
and I'm just gonna take a little butter
and carefully spread it around.
I'll clean everything up later, I promise.
So if you've made cakes
before, you know the drill,
we're gonna add in our
dry and wet mixtures
in alternating batches,
while mixing on low.
Three batches.
Start with the dry, add half of the wet,
a little more dry, the rest of the wet.
Wow,
it's a party.
Let's scrape the bowl down
and add the rest of
the dry ingredients in.
There you go.
Just mix it up for like a minute.
And by minute I mean 30 seconds.
And we have a nice cohesive batter
that we can finish off
by hand with our spatula.
Do you think the boys are
gonna like their rose cake?
I wonder.
Let's see.
Alright, I'm gonna divide my batter
equally into my three
prepared six inch pans.
I feel like with the
pans it's 450 grams per
but I'm not sure.
Yeah it ends up being about 460 grams
per with my six inch fat Daddy-os
in case you're wondering.
Just give it a preliminary smooth,
not perfect, it'll self level on the oven,
but you wanna have a nice start.
I'd give my pans a little tap
in case there's any air bubbles,
whatever, hiding out
and now my cake strips.
Click up here, if you don't
know about cake strips,
they are amazing.
It'll give you really
nice flat cake layers,
there's no trimming needed
and they're really great for stacking.
All right they're gonna
bake for about half an hour
in your oven, set to 350F, 177 Celsius,
and just make sure you
move the pans around
in case your oven has any
hotspots like mine does.
While those cake layers are in the oven,
I'm gonna quickly whip up a batch
of my favorite Swiss meringue buttercream,
so light and dreamy,
you can click up here for
that full how to video,
but we'll take you through it real quick.
Five egg whites.
I'm using three bowls
for safety in case a yolk breaks
because this time it does matter.
I don't want any yolk in my egg whites.
Into my bowl and move it along.
It's a little assembly line.
Yes, it means more dishes,
but it also means less heartache.
In you go.
And the fifth egg.
Okay, five egg whites in there
and one and a half cups
of sugar, in you go.
Give this a quick whip.
Whoa, whoa, whoa,
give it a quick and careful whip,
and now this will go
over a pot of simmering,
not boiling, simmering water
where the water does not touch
the bowl and have a steam bath
to heat it up gently
as we whisk continually
until it reaches 160 degrees
Celsius, no Fahrenheit.
I wiped my bowl down with
a little bit of vinegar
just to make sure there's
no fat left in there
and now we're gonna pour in
our 160 degree egg whites sugar mixture.
I added a pinch of salt
while I was whisking it,
I don't know if you caught that,
but right now we're gonna lock it,.
(mixer roars)
Start mixing it and
I'm actually gonna pack
the bowl with a bit of ice
just or frozen peas.
This needs to be room temperature
before we add the butter in.
So mix it up.
(mixer roars)
There you go.
Still a bit warm,
but I'm gonna add the butter in, anyways
and pop it into the fridge,
If it's soupy,
it's always a solution.
One full pound of butter
or two cups into the mixer,
a dollop at a time.
(mixer roars)
That was on purpose
because the best practice
is actually to not use the,
don't use this.
You can, but it will whip
a little bit more air in
and you want it to be on the creamy side,
not on the bubbly side.
Okay.
(mixer roars)
There we go.
Mixer is a bit warm,
so I will pop the whole
thing into the fridge
for about five minutes,
just to learn a lesson
and cool down a bit.
So you can see the cake layers are done,
they just started
pulling away from the pan
and we can pop them out.
And I should be able
to take that paper off,
although it's very hot.
That is what I call a white cake,
and if you see how fluffy this is?
Fluff, fluff, fluff, fluff, fluff.
You can always move the
cakes around the pans a bit
to tell if they're done too.
Pretty nice.
Remember that vanilla cake?
I learned my lesson.
But anyways perfect flat cake layers,
really fluffy and we'll let them cool
carefully over there.
I actually put the bowl in the freezer
because the fridge is
chocked full right now
and hung out there for like five minutes,
really cool down nicely.
A little bit of a whip,
and you can see this is what
it's supposed to look like.
Really nice and creamy,
holding it's shape.
I'm gonna add in like
a teaspoon of vanilla,
a little spulch for flavor.
Okay.
(mixer roars)
That's it.
We're ready to assemble as
soon as those cake layers
are nice and cool.
Now it's time for the
fun part, the assembly.
Go ahead and cover that
first layer in buttercream.
I like to pipe it on,
but you can just give it a nice smear.
Add the second layer,
cover it in more buttercream,
then add the third layer
and give it a nice coat.
You actually don't have
to crumb coat this cake,
but you can.
Crumb coating helps keep the crumbs off
and it makes it really stable
because you'll add a thin
layer of buttercream on,
chill it and then add the
final layer of buttercream on.
Use an offset spatula
to give the top a smooth
and then a bench scraper
to give the side a smooth.
Smooth, smooth, smooth
and then when you're ready,
use that offset spatula to
clean the top of the cake off,
pull in while you're turning,
a turntable really helps for this.
You can chill your cake for a few minutes
or go on to the next step,
which is those confetti.
I love these confetti sprinkles,
they are a little bit hard to find,
but you can buy them online.
So cheerful though.
Use your hands to push
gently onto the side
and then just toss a few
on to create a gradient.
Use a large closed
or open star tip to pipe
little dollops onto the edge
and then sprinkle some more
confetti sprinkles onto the top,
I actually ended up taking off
a couple of the ones in the center,
it was too much.
Okay, so this is the piece,
but I am not a monster,
I will not be eating my
child's birthday cake
before they get to blow the candles out,
I will be pushing it back together,
smoothing it out,
using all of my baking magics,
they never knew it happened
in their two year old world.
This, by the way, is so fluffy
and I'm totally attributing
it to the vinegar,
really made a big difference,
but you're not gonna taste it.
Need to taste a bit more.
If you like this recipe,
check out my cake playlist.
I have all my top hits,
German chocolate, perfect chocolate,
vanilla, funfetti, you'll love them all
and they are delicious.
If you like my recipes
hit that like button and subscribe
and I'll see you in the next video.
