STRAWBERRIES AND CREAM MATCHA CHIFFON LAYER CAKE

strawberries and cream matcha chiffon layer cake

HAPPY SUMMER! 

There's nothing like fresh local strawberries in the summer!

I created this unique sky-high matcha cake recipe to celebrate my best friend's birthday as she's a matcha lover.  

I am entering this original recipe I developed for BCEgg (a non-profit organization that regulates BC's egg farms) because it uses a lot of eggs!  I chose a chiffon cake for this contest because quality eggs play a significant role in chiffon cakes.  I prefer chiffon to angel food cake because it uses the entire egg rather than just the whites and the crumb is tender and moist.   This recipe in particular uses 7 large free-range eggs.  There is no butter; instead vegetable oil is used to maintain a moist crumb.  I used avocado oil but any neutral vegetable oil will do.  Mechanical aeration of the egg whites helps to leaven the cake layers to achieve a light, fluffy sponge.  Ordinarily, a chiffon cake is baked in a tube pan but my recipe doesn't do this. 

VOTE FOR MY RECIPE BY CLICKING RIGHT HERE!

You have to be 18+ and living in BC, Canada to vote and you can vote once every day until the end of the contest on Sept 8, 2019.  There is no purchase necessary, but you have to fill out a form on THIS LINK and prove residency in BC. 

🦄UNICORN CUPCAKES

gf chocolate cupcakes with raspberry-blueberry-vanilla swirl buttercream

No worries people, no unicorns were harmed in the making of these cupcakes.

VEGAN MATCHA CACAO CAKE

Organic Vegan Matcha and Cacao Cake

Dabbling in the Dark Arts:  vegan baking! ;)

Drip Cake: Chocolate Quinoa Layer Cake with Vanilla Bean Buttercream (gluten free)

Made my own Birthday Cake. Yes I did😆

6 inch GF Chocolate Quinoa Cake layers and Vanilla Bean Buttercream

This is my favourite part of making a cake

Decorated with my fave goodies: matcha macaron, Lindt chocolate balls, dragées, a mini KitKat and mini Coffee Crisp and crushed macaron shells

The chocolate ganache was perfect. I threw dragées on the side of the cake too and they stuck🙌

It's late November and the only thing blooming in my garden are these little purple Daikon flowers.  I just let the daikon go to seed and never did harvest the daikon (so bitter!)  The flowers sure are pretty...and edible

Scroll down past the recipes to watch a video of me assembling the layers

HOW TO SWIRL BUTTERCREAM

Meet my friend, the 1M Wilton Tip.

So you want to learn how to swirl buttercream like a professional?

I created a couple of Vine looping videos for you with the help of my 6 year old.  She held the iPhone and tapped the screen to help me tape the videos.



On the first take, the buttercream farted.  I had air pockets in the piping bag and didn't burp the bag so thus the fart at the end.  Just do as I say (and not as I do) and burp your bag (getting all the air pockets out) and you won't the have a buttercream fart.  This entails simply squeezing a small amount of buttercream into a container while twisting from the top to get rid of the air pockets.



In the second video there are no buttercream farts.  I don't pile on the buttercream like they do in the bakeries because we simply don't like that much buttercream on the cupcakes.  But do as you please.  You can take your sweet time building a higher conical mound of buttercream if you're so inclined.

CAKE WALK: CHOCOLATE QUINOA CUPCAKES WITH LAVENDER BUTTERCREAM (GF)

Chocolate Quinoa Cupcakes with Lavender Buttercream

BEST EVER QUINOA CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES FOR VALENTINE'S DAY!

Best Ever Quinoa Chocolate Cupcakes...Gluten Free!

CANDY CORN HALLOWEEN CUPCAKES: FINAL POST BEFORE MY KITCHEN RENO!

White Velvet Cupcakes with Vanilla Bean Classic Buttercream and Candy Corn!

These are the last cupcakes I’ll ever make in my old kitchen!  Whee!

GF BABY BUNDT CARROT CAKES WITH CREAM CHEESE GLAZE

GF Baby Bundt Carrot Cakes with Cream Cheese Icing

These baby bundts go very well with a shot of espresso.  The bitterness of the coffee is a perfect accompaniment to the carrot cake’s sweet flavour profile.

GLUTEN FREE TASTY TEENY TINY CHOCOLATE LAYER CAKE

Yeehah!  Gluten Free Cake Ecstasy!

Lookit me ma, I CAN bake a really good Gluten Free cake that doesn’t even taste Gluten Free!

EASTER MINI CHICK CAKEBALL DECORATIONS

                                                                               Peep! 

So cute, eh?

I was contemplating making white chocolate chicks, but felt that my chocolate plastic tutorial posts that people have been visiting like crazy since I posted them a while back were done to death around the foodie world.

I needed inspiration.  I hate the taste of fondant and royal icing isn’t any better.  I love buttercream but making buttercream roses are so Safeway!   I’ve seen the craze peak with the famous Cakeballs and Cakepops that have been popularized by Bakerella.  The other day, on a stroll past a Starbucks, I saw Cakepops displayed along with Gargantuan Cupcakes in the glass display in front of the baristas.   You know food trends have peaked when they hit Starbucks and now that I’ve seen macarons at Costco,  you know they are so passé!

But I do wish I could start a trend.  hee hee!

Last night, while brainstorming ideas to bake before Easter weekend, I had an epiphany of sorts.  Of all the trends, I thought about  how yummy cakeballs really are.  They’re moist and they’re quite sturdy with the chocolate coating.  They are easy to decorate.  They’re cute!   How could I go wrong with that?  I was going to bake a batch of cupcakes and mash them with buttercream to produce a whole flock of chick cake balls like I did last Easter.   But I’ve done that already.   I was waffling between baking cupcakes and making cakeballs.

So I decided to sculpt tiny cakeballs into teeny chicks that would perch on the cupcakes.  The little balls of cake were so tiny I only had to break down 3 cupcakes to make enough to make these decorations.  Decorating the chick faces was not the easiest.  You need a steady hand and tweezers.  But I had so much fun making these tiny cakeball sculptures!

And there you are…my personal contribution to the food blogging world:  Mini Cakeball Sculptures--THE NEW WAVE for cake decorating!    They are deliciously edible, very sturdy and you can make them ahead of time.  You are only limited by your imagination, your patience and possibly,  fine motor skills!

Yes, cakeballs are not new and neither are chick cakeballs, but the fact that they are sculpted into incredibly tiny forms for cake decorating is!    What a concept! decorating a cake with more cake! yah!

Here’s a close-up of the mini chick cakeball sculptures before I dunked them in the candy coating.

I added yellow food colouring to white candy melts to get this shade for my chicks.  Notice how un-chicklike they are right now?  Not so pretty.

In fact, as they are drying on the parchment here, you can see how much of a mess I made with the dipping.  I must admit this is my least favourite part of the whole cakeball- making process.  The mini sculptures have definitely got bird-like features though. 

Precious!

Once dry, I used a Food Writing Pen to make eyes and I crushed a few orange flower sprinkles for the beaks.  

From the batch of 24 cupcakes, 3 were used to make the mini cakeball sculptures and the rest were decorated as usual with Swiss Meringue Buttercream swirls.  I perched the finished chicks on the cupcakes and voila!

The little chicks were so popular with my daughters and I imagine they would be at any Easter kiddie party.   Have a good Easter Holiday everyone!

VALENTINE’S DAY CUPCAKES

Chocolate Cupcake decorated with Pink Vanilla Buttercream and a Marshmallow Heart

There’s nothing like my daughter’s class Valentine’s day party to get me inspired to bake cupcakes again.  Yes, it’s been a long time.  I’ve made so many other things other than cupcakes.   This isn’t to say cake hasn’t been on my brain!  Let’s get real now!

BAKED MINI DOUGHNUTS

I have lost my food blogging mojo.

CAKEBRAIN’S BEST MINI CHOCOLATE MOUSSE LAYER CAKE

‘Tis the season to overindulge.

However, I have your waistlines in mind dear readers, with this fabulously decadent Chocolate Mousse Layer Cake recipe.  You can have your cake and eat it too as you’ll see.  It's all about portion control.  Instead of relying on sheer will power for portion control, the recipe has been downsized to a Mini version so that there isn't any more cake to eat even if you want it.  That is, unless you don't share like you're supposed to and end up eating the whole darned cake.

I have a small family of four and it’s a painful waste when I make a delicious regular-sized cake (9 or 10 inches) because there are always a few slices left over which become stale.  We get a tad sick of eating so much of the same cake.   I’ve been working hard to develop a recipe for a Mini Chocolate Mousse Layer cake that is simple to make, relatively quick and super chocolatey.  It also looks fancy enough to bring as a gift to a small dinner party (for 4 people...6 if they're not big eaters).

I think this recipe meets my needs and is my best so far.  Its sponge layers are moist but not too tender.  You need some structure (like a genoise) so that it can hold up the mousse filling and not dissolve into a soggy mess.   The cake layers do not need the finicky genoise technique and just require a stand mixer.   This cake is chocolatey but not overly rich or cloyingly sweet.  It employs quality dark chocolate and tastes somewhat like a soft truffle.   It doesn’t need frosting and comes out looking pretty smooth if you remember to use a spatula to smooth the top before allowing it to set in the refrigerator.  If you don’t do this, you can always cover the cake with chocolate shavings.  You can save a not-so-smooth cake by heating a metal spatula in really hot water, wiping it bone-dry and pressing it across the finished cake to smooth the surface a bit.  It works.  I did it.  Big gouges this technique won’t fix, but some little divots and bumps it will.

What is the most important thing to me about this cake is its size.  It’s Mini.   I used two 6-inch round pans to bake the cake layers.  Then I used a ring mold that is adjustable for the mousse component of the cake.  I adjusted the ring mold to about 7 inches…just enough to accommodate the cake layers with about a centimetre all around it for the mousse filling  (that’s a little less than a half inch to my American friends).  When the whole sponge cake recipe is made, it yields two 6-inch layers.  However, I chose to only use one of the layers…split in two…to make this particular cake.  I saved the other layer for a Chestnut Cream Cake using the same mousse technique.  That’ll be a later post.  That explains how you can have your cake…and eat it too.

If you wish, you could make one really tall chocolate mousse cake (love the height!), but I was afraid that my adjustable ring mold would not be high enough to accommodate 4 layers of cake and the alternating filling.  So.  Do just use one of the layers, split, and save the other layer for another recipe.  Or double the mousse recipe and make two mini chocolate mousse cakes.    The extra cake layer can be split, wrapped in plastic wrap and foil and then frozen for later use.
Click the jump to read the full recipe.

PURPLE CUPCAKE BALLS

I have rediscovered the joys of cakeballs.

Since Daylight Saving time, it’s been such a drag what with such little sunshine during waking hours.  My little ones are constantly asking if it’s time for bed yet because it’s dark so early. 

I have little inclination to bake (as you can see from my lack of posts) because I’m so tired from just the daily grind of work and household management.  What I have found time for is cakeballs.  If you're not a baker, or you're too lazy to make a cake and frosting from scratch,  turn to my trusty pal, Betty Crocker (or Duncan Hines).  Horrors!  Yes, it's perfectly fine for cakeballs.  In fact, it's preferable because you'll be expending most of your energy on cakeball decorating--the fun part.

PUMPKIN CAKEPOPS

I found using the cakepop sticks easier and cleaner than trying to make the more environmentally conscious pumpkin cakeballs.  For some reason, the balls didn’t want to form smooth surfaces and I ended up with this drizzly mess all over the place as you can see below.  Even though the cakeballs were cold, bits of  chocolate cake crumbs started falling off into the bowl of orange candy melts.  It was not a pretty sight. 

Pumpkin cakepops for Thanksgiving.  Happy Thanksgiving, Canada! 

See that pumpkin shaped pop?  I made balls with my chocolate/frosting mixture.  Then I flattened both of the poles slightly.  I used a wooden skewer to make about 6 indentations longitudinally to the poles.  I put the formed balls into the freezer to set.

So I have a rather messy looking patch of pumpkin cakeballs, but they’re tasty nonetheless.  I know cakepops (on the stick) look better and they’re fun and cute, but there’s something simple and not-so-fussy about cakeballs.   I melted some green candy melts and piped little stems on the pumpkins.  I wasn’t going to attempt pumpkin leaves as I was already covered in orange and green candy melts.  The melts aren’t so easy to pipe.