Saturday, September 8, 2007

Wedding Cake (Part One.)

I volunteered to make a friend's wedding cake. I've had one too many grocery store wedding cakes, and I thought it'd be lovely to make something simple, elegant, and delicious. This will be the only wedding cake i've ever made though, so i'm a little nervous!

buttercream

buttercream1

We made all the frosting tonight. Frosting is a little scary when made in bulk. I six-tupled Flo Braker's recipe for classic buttercream. This took:
6 pounds of butter
6 cups of sugar
nearly a quart of liquid egg yolks.


I added some Nielsen-Massey bourbon vanilla extract too. Despite what you might think, the frosting doesn't just taste like butter. It's fluffy, light, and the vanilla flavor really shines. In the end, we made about a gallon and a half.

Flo Braker's The Simple Art of Perfect Baking is a must-have. It's been re-printed and updated several times. Her recipe for genoise is the only one i've ever had success with. The directions are extremely specific and i've had tons of success with them.

Instead of pouring the sugar syrup into the yolks while the mixer is running, this recipe suggests dumping it all into the middle of the bowl, whisk it a bit by hand, then re-attaching it to the mixer and continuing. This prevents sugar from splattering all over the sides of the mixing bowl. Another handy tip is holding ice cubes against the bowl to get the yolk/sugar mixture to cool to room temperature a little faster.

1 comment:

Abe said...

wow. that's awesome.

what constitutes genoise success versus other recipes? i've probably tried a half dozen and have ended up with tasty cake in most cases, but nothing completely fantastic.