It's been a great winter break for me, for the most part. A little bit unfortunate, but overall pretty good. Sadly my lab work has not been going well at all; cells not growing, torn asunder and whatnot. Because of this I sought out other avenues to be awesome. One was making my recent videos, the second cooking. In particular, for Christmas this year I got the incredible gift of a large capacity KitchenAid stand mixer:
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| So shiny it is!!! |
So the other day, after a particularly unpleasant day in the lab and bad news, I thought to myself "I should use that fancy mixer of mine". So I thought to myself "OMG CAKE!!!!" So I made cake. With science!!! And the mixer. But mostly SCIENCE!!! And lemons. Soooo many lemons.
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| These will make cake. Because yum. |
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| Dry ingredients for cake, after sifting through a metal sifter. |
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| Initial "batter", just butter and sugar, simply a base for everything to be added to. |
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| Proteins from the eggs smooth everything out, giving a nice consistency. Dry mixture adds all the happy volume and needed chemicals for baking while the buttermilk keeps the batter liquid-esque. Also lemon juice and peel because how can you have lemon cake with no lemon? |
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| See? It's like magic. We go from a bunch of random stuff on the counter to ready to bake cakes!! Also on the counter. But still!! |
Since this is an awesome fancy layer cake, we need two other things. Or rather want two other things. First is a filling for between the layers and the other a frosting for outside.
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| Filling is a lemon curd. Very simple. Sugar, corn starch (to thicken, similar to a gravy or soup), water, lemon juice and peel. Heat and stir stir stir. Water evaporates, allowing starch and everything else to thicken up the curd. |
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| Egg yolks for the curd. Proteins always help stickiness and thickness. Add half curd to this, while back to pan. |
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| Back to the pan with you!!!!!! |
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| Keep up heat and stirring, nice and thickened. |
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| Yes. Butter. Because butter makes everything more delicious. |
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| After adding butter, still nice and thickened, but now needs to cool. To the refrigor-migator!!! |
As I mentioned, cake needs an outer coating, aka frosting. Because frosting delicious. And proper for layered cakes especially. In this case, we've got lemon cream cheese frosting. Very awesome sort of thing.
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| Just toss it all in!!! Cheese, butter, lemon juice and peel |
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| Mix-a-licious! |
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| Adding powdered sugar (aka confectioner's sugar) has a similar effect to adding starch, thickens and, or a sort, strengthens. We're at 'hard peak' when strands stand straight on their own, perfect for spreading. |
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| No wire racks for cooling :( . Assembly takes place on table of awesome! |
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| OMG FROSTING! |
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| 2 Stacked with curd in between. |
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| Ready for curd! |
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| Second layer of curd, ready for top layer now. |
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| Mmmmmm.... frosting time! |
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| Not too bad. I can say with confidence this cake is frosted. |
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| Told you! |
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| OMG CAKE!!!! It has LAYERS!!! Like and ogre!!! Or a parfait!! Or an onion!! Either way OMG! |
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| Bit crumbly, but by no means bad. |
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| This piece is gone now. I don't know where. |
Baking is certainly an interesting cooking technique, and there's so much science behind it that my mind tends to boggle a bit. The now humble cake is a surprising achievment brought by knowledge of primarily chemistry and, most likely, the simple idea of "I want something NOMS!" If you're interested, please let me know if you'd like the specific recipes for everything, definitely not very tough to make at all. Thank you all for reading and I'll see you next time!
