[Claire] What’s your favorite cereal for night cereal?
Whichever one is there. [laughs]
Oh, my god.
I love it.
Ooh, night cereal.
Without knowing that that was a thing,
I know that that’s a thing. [laughs]
[upbeat music]
So today is episode three, my favorite day
because we get to make frosting
which is my favorite part of the cake.
When you’re eating your slice of layer cake,
the first thing that hits your palette is the frosting,
so it’s a really important component
not only because you want it to be silky
and delicious and add flavor,
but it’s also insulating the cake
and preventing moisture loss.
Today we have three different kinds
of frosting for the three different cakes
that kind of go through a range of different techniques,
and I’m gonna walk through all of them.
The world of frosting is vast,
but all frostings kinda fall into a couple main categories.
I have some examples here.
First on my left I have American buttercream,
which is basically a mixture of powdered sugar and butter,
and sometimes with a little bit
of milk added to thin it out.
And this version has some cocoa powder,
so a chocolate version.
This style of frosting is usually very, very sweet
and it also has a property called crusting,
which means that basically that outer layer,
because of that powdered sugar, hardens.
You can see that I’m touching it with my finger
and I’m not really creating an indentation
and nothing’s sticking to my finger.
It’s very common on a lot of homemade layer cakes.
Mm, not bad.
I mean, butter and sugar.
In the center we have a Swiss meringue buttercream.
The general category is European-style buttercreams.
What all of these have in common is they’re meringue-based.
The meringue adds lightness and some other substance
that isn’t just butter, so it’s not overly rich.
It also tends to have a really beautiful sheen.
And unlike the American-style buttercream,
it doesn’t crust over.
So this has been sitting out for a little while,
and it’s still nice and soft.
Oh, I kinda just spit on it.
Sorry.
Did you see that? [laughs]
The last frosting I think everyone’s familiar with.
It’s a store bought frosting that comes in a tub.
This also crusts over.
So it’s been sitting out a little bit
and it did start to kind of dry out all around the surface.
It has a nice texture.
Smooth.
Just doesn’t taste natural.
I don’t know, I don’t wanna say anything good about it.
That’s not good.
It doesn’t taste good.
So I advocate for making frosting at home.
You can go kinda the easier route
with American style, slightly more advanced
with more technique with the European style,
but I think it’s worth it because ultimately
it’s gonna taste a lot better than this one.
I don’t know why we have this one out here. [laughs]
I kind of regret it now.
The frostings we’re using on our layer cake
fall into the first two categories,
and here’s what they are.
Our birthday cake is coated
in chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream.
I love Swiss meringue buttercream
because it’s really stable and it smooths
across the cake so nicely.
It’s really fun to work with.
And it tastes good.
For our coconut cake, instead of using a buttercream,
we’re using just Italian meringue.
Similar method of putting it together,
but without butter added, and we’re also able
to torch it for a really cool finish.
Our carrot cake is covered
in very classic cream cheese frosting,
which is really made in the style
of an American buttercream.
I love it not only because it’s easy to make,
but because it has such tangy creaminess.
If you’re gonna make carrot cake
and not cream cheese frosting,
then don’t even bother because they have to go together.
Here’s all the equipment that you’ll need
to build your frostings.
A large, flexible spatula, a pastry brush,
a large whisk, a candy thermometer,
a saucepan and a bowl to make a double boiler,
a medium saucepan, a stand mixer
with both whisk and [laughs] paddle attachments.
The first frosting that I’m gonna make
is the cream cheese frosting for the carrot cake.
It’s the simplest method and it’s also truly
one of my most favorite things.
I don’t want carrot cake
if there’s no cream cheese frosting.
End of story. [upbeat music]
Here’s everything you need to make cream cheese frosting.
Cream cheese, unsalted butter, vanilla extract,
kosher salt, and powdered sugar.
All my ingredients are room temperature.
It’s very, very important for this style of frosting.
I’m gonna start with my butter in the mixer,
and I’m gonna beat that until smooth.
Then while that’s heating, I’m gonna add
my also very room-temp cream cheese.
Cream cheese will whip similar to butter
but not quite as equally.
You’re not able to get quite as much air
into cream cheese as you are butter.
Don’t ask me what cream cheese is.
It’s a very high fat, fresh cheese.
I don’t know what kind of cheese
it is really, but I love it.
It’s delicious.
So the idea of this initial mix
is to get the fats very well combined.
So now I’m gonna beat in kosher salt and vanilla.
I’m gonna add a generous portion of my powdered sugar.
Now to avoid a huge powdered sugar plume,
I’m gonna just pulse this.
So when I was younger, one time I was taking
a shower or some shit like that.
I had the towel around my waist and my–
I love this story already.
My sister, she was standing there
with one of those bottles of baby powder.
And she thought it was closed
and she felt [grunts] in my face.
And it went right in my eyeballs,
and my insides of my eyes are caked with baby powder
plumes, and I couldn’t see.
I had to wash my eyes out for like a half an hour.
They were all swollen.
Wait, why is the part relevant
about how you were in the shower
and had a towel around you?
Well, that’s how it happened.
How did she at all try to defend this?
It was an accident.
She said it was closed.
Bullshit, she’s lying.
If it was closed, why would she have tried to–
Guilty.
You’re going to jail, lady.
Save it for the judge. [Claire laughs]
But it burned my eyes.
That reminded me of it.
Okay, rest of the sugar.
When you look along the top of the paddle,
you can see comparatively how the colors changed.
The frosting where it didn’t get mixed in,
that’s much yellower.
Okay, that’s it.
You can see it was really easy.
Everything came together in just minutes.
There’s a lightness to it,
but overall it’s dense, creamy.
It’s sweet but the sweetness is balanced.
Mm.
It’s not surprising that a mixture of butter,
powdered sugar, and cream cheese
tastes amazing, but it really does.
Our cream cheese frosting starts
with room temperature cream cheese and butter
in a ratio of two to one.
Combine those in a stand mixer.
Fit is with the paddle and beat until smooth.
Then I beat in vanilla extract and kosher salt,
followed by followed sugar in three additions,
pulsing to combine, then whip for a couple
minutes until light and fluffy.
Cream cheese frosting is a great starter frosting
because it’s basically everything in the bowl and mix.
And now I’m gonna move on to a slightly
more advanced frosting, two different styles of meringue.
The first one is Swiss meringue
that’s gonna turn into a Swiss meringue buttercream
and the second one is Italian meringue.
And we’re gonna go over what those differences mean.
[upbeat music]
Here’s what you’ll need to make
chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream.
Egg whites, granulated sugar,
cream of tartar is a thing,
kosher salt, unsalted butter,
vanilla extract, and semisweet chocolate.
Can you define meringue? No, Claire.
Have we learned nothing?
You know what it is. Meringue.
Oh, okay.
I’ll give it a shot.
The definition? Just real general.
So egg whites and sugar beaten until stiff peaks.
There you go!
You got it.
That’s it.
I thought we were going more technical,
like the suspension. No.
You don’t have to give me the Harold McGee definition.
Okay, good. But you’re good.
All right, so I’m one for one today.
A-plus.
One for one? Yeah.
You asked me to define something earlier.
We’re making ganache. Oh, excellent.
[Claire] Do you know the definition of ganache?
Ganache?
Uh, no.
So you’re really one for two.
I’m one and one is my record is what I meant.
[laughs] One right, one wrong. Okay.
50%. Yeah.
If this was baseball I’d be great.
Unfortunately that’s a failing grade.
The first thing I wanna do before I assemble
my other ingredients and get started is melt chocolate.
I want the chocolate to be melted but cooled
before I add it to the buttercream and the egg.
So the double boiler is shallow, simmering water
in a saucepan with a heatproof bowl set on top.
So this creates steam and the idea is
that whatever is in the bowl is being gently heated.
Still some very small pieces of chocolate
that aren’t fully melted,
but there’s enough heat in the mixture
that if I take it off and let it rest,
the chocolate will finish melting
as the whole mixture comes up to room temp.
In the bowl of the stand mixer,
I’m gonna combine egg whites, sugar, kosher salt.
Cream of tartar is an acid
and it’s a stabilizer for egg whites.
So that goes in.
By hand, I’m using a whisk.
Now I’m gonna bring it over to my same double boiler.
The main goal here is just to warm the egg whites
to the point where the sugar is dissolved.
I really am just gonna use my sense of touch.
I can still feel that there’s a little grit from the sugar,
so it’s not fully dissolved and I wanna keep going.
As these egg whites are warming,
they become a lot more fluid.
And the color has gone from kind
of yellow translucent to white and opaque.
Now I wanna whip this into meringue.
So sort of the central idea behind these styles
of buttercream is that I’m emulsifying butter into meringue.
If I were to start to add my butter before
the eggs have had a chance to cool,
I would melt the butter and I would not get buttercream.
So I wanna beat these until the eggs
have fully come to room temperature.
[upbeat music]
So it’s only been a couple of minutes.
You can see I already have a very stiff,
really beautiful, super, super nice meringue.
Look at that.
I like this meringue for the follow reasons.
One, it looks very dense.
I don’t see big air bubbles in it,
so I haven’t over-whipped it.
Two, nice, firm peak.
Three, very glossy and smooth.
So now I’m gonna start to add my butter.
Again, very room temp.
And I’m just waiting for each piece
to incorporate before I add the next.
Again, a little bit of heat left
in the eggs will melt the butter.
But if that happens to you, do not despair.
I promise there is a fix.
When you’re mixing your buttercream,
there’s two main problems that can go wrong.
The first is if your ingredients are too warm.
So I’m gonna show you what that looks like.
The butter is a big over-softened.
So you can see because the butter was a little bit warm,
it totally melted and instead of something fluffy,
I have kind of this soupy mess.
I’m gonna show you a quick fix
to get it back to the texture it needs to be.
We want to drop the temperature of the buttercream
so that the butter reaches
room temp and is able to whip.
So I’m gonna use ice cubes to rub around
the sides of the bowl with the mixer on.
This feels like a really simple trick,
but it works extremely well
if you can stand the feeling of ice cubes
in your hands for a long time.
Okay, here is the mixture that’s now been cooled down.
It’s room temperature and it’s become
really light and airy, so it’s kinda holding soft peaks.
I now have to put in the rest of the butter,
and we’re gonna see what happens
when you add butter that’s too cold.
So this bowl has butter that is slightly softened,
but it’s still very cold.
It’s not yet room temperature.
So now we have a very different set of problems.
I’ll show you what the texture
of the buttercream looks like.
It has almost a slightly curdled appearance,
and that is because the butter
is so cold that it’s not incorporating into the meringue.
So whereas the fix for too-warm butter
was to cool down the bowl,
we wanna heat this up ’cause the butter was too cold.
And I have a tool for that.
This is a Bernzomatic torch.
So I’m gonna use this to warm the bowl as I’m mixing.
I wanna switch to the paddle now,
because the paddle is really good
for smoothing out mixtures.
Okay.
Everything has come back together,
so I have now this smooth, fluffy mixture.
Really sort of classic frosting consistency.
So the thesis here is nine times out of 10,
you might think you ruined your buttercream,
but all of those problems can be fixed
by just continuing to mix and letting the temperatures
between the butters and the meringue equalize.
So don’t get discouraged if you either
make soup of a curdled mess.
Be patient.
You’ll probably have a beautiful, glossy buttercream.
You can already see that I have the beginning
of a really beautiful, smooth, light, creamy buttercream.
Scrape all the chocolate in.
It’s important at this stage that the chocolate isn’t warm,
because I just did all this work
to make this really fluffy, beautiful, smooth buttercream.
And if I add hot chocolate to it,
it melt the butter and then I have liquid again.
We’re flavoring it with chocolate,
but there’s endless was you can flavor buttercreams
depending on what kind of cake you’re making.
So I have some examples here.
First I wanna show you a raspberry version,
and it’s a simple process of just mixing in
any flavoring that you like.
You could do any jam.
Seedless is best.
Super delicious.
I kinda think it would be good
with something like summertime berries.
Lemon cake with be really good.
Lemon and raspberry go well together.
Salted caramel.
Often you can find recipes that tell you
just how much you wanna add to a batch of buttercream,
but I like to just kinda do it by sight and taste.
This would be delicious on yellow cake.
It’d be really good with our coconut cake.
There’s nothing that salted caramel
buttercream would not be good on.
Lemon curd.
You could also enhance the lemon flavor
with a drop or two of lemon oil.
Mm.
I think anything with acid goes really well
with buttercream, to kinda cut through that richness.
This is the orange extract?
[sniffs] It’s what I keep smelling.
This is very, very concentrated,
so I’m only gonna add a few drops.
Orange is a flavor where a little goes a long way.
It’s really more of a perfume.
It’d be really good on olive oil cake,
anywhere that you would use lemon buttercream,
so any kind of citrus cake.
Espresso powder.
If you wanna make a coffee-flavored buttercream,
it’s best not to add brewed coffee
because coffee is water,
and you don’t wanna add liquid like that
because it can cause that buttercream to break.
So just stirring in some powdered espresso
is a really good way to add that flavor.
I like how the bitterness offsets
the sweetness in the buttercream.
This would be really good on chocolate cake.
Even something with mascarpone,
kinda get a tiramisu thing going on.
Nutella.
Nutella already sorta has the consistency of buttercream,
so it incorporates really beautifully.
The only thing is Nutella is also pretty sweet,
so you don’t wanna add so much
because you’re adding considerable sweetness
to something that’s already pretty sweet.
Kind of unexpected, I think, with buttercream.
Really good on chocolate cake.
It’d be good on, really, any flavored cake.
So once you’ve made that smooth buttercream base,
there’s really endless ways to then flavor it.
So here you can see it.
It can only be spread at room temperature.
Once it’s cold, the butter firms up,
the chocolate firms up, and it’s very hard,
which means if you wanna make it ahead,
chill it and let it sit at room
temperature for a very long time.
There you have it.
So here’s what we did to make
our chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream.
I start it by melting the chocolate
over a double boiler till smooth.
Then I set it aside to cool.
Then I combine my sugar, egg whites,
cream of tartar and salt in the bowl of the stand mixer.
I beat that with a whisk over the same double boiler
until the sugar was dissolved and the egg whites were warm.
Then I whipped it with the whisk attachment
in the stand mixer until the meringue was thick and glossy.
I added my butter one piece at a time
until the mixture was smooth and light,
and the buttercream came together,
and then I scraped in my cold chocolate.
Beat that together one more time, I have my buttercream.
The base for this buttercream was Swiss meringue,
hence the name Swiss meringue buttercream.
The next thing I’m gonna show you is an Italian meringue.
A little more technical.
Definitely kinda the most advanced of the three,
and that’s our third frosting for the coconut cake.
[upbeat music]
So here’s everything you need to make Italian meringue.
Egg whites, cream of tartar, kosher salt,
granulated sugar, water, and vanilla extract.
Italian meringue is different from Swiss meringue
because we actually have a cooked sugar syrup
that we stream into the egg whites,
which are already in the bowl.
Now the reason this is technical
is because it’s a little bit of a dance.
I’m gonna put my egg whites in here.
A pinch of salt and cream of tartar.
I’m gonna put this in my mixer.
I’m gonna come back to this.
And now I have my small saucepan
for cooking my sugar syrup.
I like to pour the water on the sides
because that kind of prevents crystallization.
I’m gonna bring this up over medium,
stirring with a heatproof spatula
only until the sugar is dissolved.
I have a candy thermometer right next to me,
which I’m going to use.
My goal is to cook this to 238,
which is just below softball.
So I have about 20 degrees to go.
I can’t really walk away from that for too long,
but I wanna get my mixer going
so that I can get my eggs whipping to about soft peaks
by the time my sugar syrup is at temp.
Okay, we’re there.
We’re at 238.
This is where you can’t really take a break.
My eggs look good.
These are at the stage I want them.
Now as I pour in the sugar syrup,
I’m gonna pour down the side of the bowl
avoiding the whisk itself,
because I don’t want flying sugar
stuck to the sides of the bowl.
[upbeat music]
I’m gonna add my vanilla extract now and just beat that in.
This is particularly susceptible to over-beating.
And in fact, it’s maybe a tiny bit over.
It looks a little bit dry.
That’s a good indicator when you’ve gone a little too far,
that it’ll go from glossy to a little dry looking.
If I were to now beat in room temperature butter,
I would have Italian meringue buttercream.
Just like we made a Swiss meringue and added butter
to add a Swiss meringue buttercream, same idea.
But this in and of itself can be used as a frosting,
and that’s what we’re going to do.
This is so useful as a frosting for cake
because it’s incredibly light and it’s a wonderful way
to add contrast to a cake like our coconut cake
that has a lot of kind of intense textures.
So to make our Italian meringue,
I started with my egg whites in the clean bowl along
with cream of tartar and a little bit of kosher salt.
Then on the stove, I combined my sugar and water,
brought it to a boil, and stirred it
until the sugar was dissolved,
until it reached 238 Fahrenheit.
While that mixture was coming up,
I started beating my eggs and I got it to soft peaks.
At that time, the sugar syrup was ready to go.
I streamed that into the bowl on high
and whipped it until the meringue was stiff
and glossy and then I beat in my vanilla extract.
Have some evening cake.
It’s cocktail cake.
It’s 5:45. Yeah.
Wait, you guys haven’t seen any of this right?
I mean, I can’t say I haven’t seen it.
I mean, you’ve seen it.
We haven’t talked about it. No.
Okay. There’s been no discussion.
I’ve eaten some cake that I’ve found.
[all laugh]
[Claire] So this is chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream.
Mm, I love the amount of detail
that you got in the swooshing,
where you kinda can’t stop doing it.
[laughs] Yeah.
You just go forever.
But that made me think of a good point,
which is that this is not a crusting frosting,
so sometimes when you let– Ew, crusting?
[all laugh]
It doesn’t crust.
I don’t know if that’s a real term.
No, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
It, like, hardens when it’s exposed to air.
This you can kinda keep forever and ever,
which is good for people who want
to practice their frosting technique.
Or if it’s therapy.
Okay, so the second one, the frosting is Italian meringue.
I over-whipped this one a little bit.
I’m just curious.
How can you tell?
To me, that’s tasty.
It’s a little bumpy. Yeah.
See how it looks a tiny bit curdled?
It’s a little grainy. It’s a little matte.
I went past the shiny phase,
so it looks a little dry. It kinda looks shiny.
It’s not crazy over-whipped,
but it doesn’t peak that easily.
It should peak really easily.
And it’s crumbling a little bit.
Yeah, it’s kind of [laughs].
Wait, does this have butter in it?
No. This is the only one
that does not have a fat? Correct.
I mean, the cake and the filling are not
fat free or gluten free, but that’s all right.
This seems sweeter than that one, right?
Definitely.
Okay, moving on.
Third cake, carrot with cream cheese frosting.
Butter, cream cheese, powered sugar.
That’s really it.
Is there a magical ratio between
butter and cream cheese? Yes.
Is there a proportion?
Well, I like two to one, cream cheese to butter.
What would happen if you used all cream cheese?
In terms of the texture?
Yeah, I think you wouldn’t get the same lightness.
It doesn’t whip as well as butter.
And then what if you use fresh
cream cheese instead of Philly?
It has to be Philadelphia.
Well, this is fun. [laughs] It’s perfect.
Just got you guys to eat a lot
of cake at six o’clock on a Friday night.
Perfect.
Do you guys have dinner plans?
Yes. [all laugh]
Okay, well you pre-gamed it.
Do you want a little road frosting?
A roadie?
Yeah, for your commute or something?
For my workout? Yeah.
[all laugh]
[sighs] I feel much better
after having made all these frostings.
Okay.
So it only took us three episodes to get here,
but we finally have all of our components ready to go.
All of our layers baked, all of our fillings
and soaks ready to go, and now all of our frostings.
So stay tuned for the next episode
where we put everything together.
[upbeat music]
Dining and Cooking