Icing on the Cake

It's too bad cupcakes got so fashionable/passe, because they are sometimes just the thing. I grew up with them being a (not fashionable) bake sale item- four kinds- gold or white with white frosting, or chocolate frosting, or chocolate with white frosting, or chocolate frosting. They were cake-mix cakes, and nothing to snub- perfect texture, and now something more beguiling still- nostalgia. I don't know anyone who grew up eating cake made from scratch and we were none the worse for it. This recipe is the closest I have come to cake mix /bake sale/ un-chic cake.

My friend Janet works at a tech start - up: Goodvidio,  and four of her colleagues were celebrating graduations today. A playful, light-hearted dessert that still also says "school" fit the the occasion. 

For the cake, we will need:

210 g /1 3/4 C flour

270 g / 1 1/3 C sugar (half brown sugar is nice!)

90 g / 1 C cocoa powder

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs 
180 ml / 3/4 C oil
360 ml / 1 1/2 C buttermilk or a mix of milk and yogurt
some vanilla (homemade here)

Sift the dry ingredients and add the oil, then eggs and milk. Beat very well, and fill cupcake wrappers 3/4 full. Bake a little over 20 minutes at 170 C/ 350 F, until a toothpick stuck in them comes out clean. This will make 15 or 16 generous cakes.

If you make your own vanilla extract, you will have fragrant liquor
 and beautiful black specks.

That expression "the icing on the cake" is nonsense, like it is of course something great but extra, not essential. 

The icing is the cake.

Especially with cupcakes, and especially my mother's icing- it had a twist- she didn't make the classic powdered sugar buttercream but instead an old-fashioned "seven minute" frosting, probably from the dark green 1920's cookbook inherited from my great grandmother. Basically it is a butterless billowing cooked meringue marshmallow cream. It is sticky and dense, not at all heavy, melt-proof in the heat, and - best of all - there is lots of it. Seven minute frosting uses a bain marie- you beat egg whites and sugar for seven minutes, and there it is! The advantage is that you do not need a candy thermometer. The disadvantage is that the sugar crystals don't have quite enough time to melt- it has a (pleasant!) crunch, but gets hard over time. This recipe- same ingredients- comes together differently. We will need a candy thermometer, but the sugar will have plenty of time to melt and the frosting will have great and more lasting body, and sheen.

We will need:
3 egg whites
120 ml/ 1/2 C water
300 g/ 1 1/2 C sugar
a pinch of cream of tartar if you have it (and a small
dash of vinegar if you don't)
a pinch of salt
3 Tablespoons golden syrup (or corn syrup, but golden syrup is delicious)
vanilla

Pour the sugar into the middle of a pan and pour the water around it (so the sugar doesn't touch the sides of the pan- it helps make a crystal-free syrup). Add the salt and the golden syrup. Put the candy thermometer into a tall glass of very hot tap water (to temper it so it doesn't get a shock, and so it takes a reading fast). Beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until fluffy:

And boil the syrup hard until it reaches 117 C/ 242 F (just over the soft ball stage). 

While the beater is running, pour the hot syrup in, not down the side of the bowl but not on the beaters either. Keep beating until cooler and stiff.  Add salt, and vanilla. Use at once. This is way too much frosting for this number of cupcakes, which is just fine. A  couple flakes of sparkling sea salt give beautiful balance and bite, but if you want a taste of 1973, leave them out.

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Hazelnut Dacquoise- An Impromptu Birthday Cake

Much later than I ought to have- I started out to make an impromptu birthday cake for a friend. Our baking pantry usually vacillates between 'comforting' and 'truly paranoid'- never fewer than a dozen packs of butter in the freezer, nor fewer than 3 kilos of dark chocolate, plus some milk and some white, 2 or 3 bags of every type of sugar (white, light brown, dark brown, and a coarse demarara), flours, oats, etc. and lots of nuts in glass jars in the freezer (the glass protects them from absorbing other aromas- they stay delicious and fresh tasting this way). In early January, it is a different story. I had powdered egg whites (for uncooked frostings), sugar, a carton of heavy cream lingering in the back of the refrigerator, and a chocolate bar from a Christmas stocking. Surprisingly, a jar of hazelnuts was in the freezer.

As it turned out, I couldn't have planned it better if I tried. This cake had everything going for it- light, rich, creamy, crisp, ethereal, substantial, rich with hazelnuts, and that mere 100 g of chocolate made the very most of itself- powdered in a blender and strewn on top, it filled the mouth first thing, a teasing hint of bitter.

Here is how it came together- 

We'll need:

4 egg whites (or reconstituted powdered whites to make the same amount)

200 g/ 1 1/2 C hazelnuts

200 g/ 1 C sugar

dash salt

dash vinegar

400 ml//scant 2 C heavy cream

a little vanilla or rum

30 ml/ 2 T brown sugar

100 g/ 3.5 oz dark chocolate, grated

First, to remove their skins and give them a rich taste, roast the hazelnuts in a 170 c/ 350 f oven, for about ten minutes. Be careful- hazelnuts darken from the inside out- you will need to open one and taste it to see if it is as toasted as you'd like. Put the hot nuts into a clean kitchen towel and give them a good rub- nearly all the skins will come off the is way, and the bit that remains will add welcome flecks of color to announce the hazelnuts' taste:

Just gather the nuts with your hands and leave the skins behind,
shaking them through your fingers.

Put the nuts in the food processor with half of the sugar:

The granulated sugar helps them grind up finer
with less processing than they would alone

and pulse them until they are as fine as you can get but- importantly- before they start to release their oils and turn into hazelnut butter. Oils will deflate the meringue they will be folded into.

Coarse is quite nice- their texture is very welcome.

Meanwhile, prepare the meringue by whipping the whites until foamy, adding the dash of salt and the dash of vinegar (helps stabilize the whites to reach their fullest volume), then beating until soft peaks form. From this point, add the remaining 100 g/ 1/2 C sugar, a spoonful at a time, beating all the while, until they are stiff and glossy:

Now stir in the ground hazelnuts and sugar:

Folding something dry into meringue is simple- it will not deflate as it does when combining it with a heavier batter.

If you are taking this somewhere, it's great to have a box- the meringues can be basically any size and shape you like. Using the cake cardboard as a stencil, I simply drew a circle directly onto the parchment. Meringue expands a little- so made a round well within the circle, then did the same with the remaining half of the meringue on another lined baking sheet. They went into the oven at just 120 c/ 240 f:

When the meringues are entirely dry on the outside and lift easily off the paper, remove them, and beat the cream:

400 ml/ scant 2 C heavy cream

2-3 spoons brown or white sugar

rum, whiskey, or vanilla to taste

Whip until it holds a soft peak.

Just heap half of the cream onto one of the meringues, top with the other, and top with the remaining cream. 

Grate a chocolate bar in the blender:

This makes the most of it- you get a big fluffy mound out of that 100 g bar.

Toss it over the top of the cake:

And voila!

This needs at least an hour to let the cream soften the meringue enough to cut into servings. An overnight in the refrigerator transforms it into a single unified airy creamy confection with just a whisper of its original crispness. Nice either way.

By all means use the recipe, but more gun is to note the flexible natures of meringues and nuts and cream, and experiment from there. You really can't go wrong,

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