White Chocolate Chai Cake /  by Molly Brodak

There you are, wanting cake immediately, but knowing your damn butter is definitely not soft enough. You just aren't clever enough to have prepared a day in advance for this specific craving to hit, and now you are standing in the kitchen wondering if you can just microwave that butter a bit to soften it (nope) or cram a few sticks in the pockets of your sweatpants for a while (oh I do this all the time). Stop doing this. There is another way.

I'm a huge fan of Shirley Corriher's "melted sugar" method of cake baking which turns the traditional creaming method on its head. I still make the occasional creamed-butter cake, like with my Super Buttermilk cake (coming soon), but this little-known method has become my standard. The cake it produces is exceptionally tender and moist with a very fine and even crumb. Like velvet.

Instead of relying on a fickle network of puffed air in your sugar-butter-egg emulsion plus an extra tenderizer like buttermilk, this method uses a touch more baking powder than average and one of my all-time favorite ingredients--whipped cream. The other significant difference here is using a mix of oil and butter and a dense simple syrup added to the fats. Hence, you don't need to wait for your butter to soften.

Recently, while adding the water to the sugar for the simple syrup, I thought well this could be tasty instead of plain, this plain water I am adding here, and so the Chai Cake was born.

I absolutely love tea. I wanted to make sure the cake had the distinctive flavor of black tea unlike some chai cake recipes which are really just spice cakes. With a foundation of the milky flavor of the whipped cream and the extra-strong tea, this cake tastes exactly like chai.

I used The Republic of Tea's Republic Chai teabags for this, since their tea is both easy to find and high quality. Any brand of tea will work, but using a decent quality will ensure the tea flavor is rich and the spice blend is well designed.

delicious AND easy: the one and only white chocolate ganache

I iced the cake with a simple white chocolate ganache to keep the chai flavor in the forefront, although a basic vanilla buttercream would also be delicious.

I like to bake my cakes tall and small. Two 6" cake pans will give you a more moist cake than two 9" cake pans if you ask me. My favorite pans are Fat Daddio's in the 3" depth rather than the standard 2" so I can make more layers at once and save space in my oven. With the deeper pans, I've found that using a heating core/flower nail ensures the middle is never left undercooked. Here's my set up:

heating core, parchment round, 3" depth--just missing grease and flour

Did you see that killer cake stand in the top photo? I scour eBay for vintage cake stands/pedestals on a regular basis and although I knew I might not use such an intense cake stand very often, I had to have it. Slightly terrifying but mostly great. I thought a simple architectural fondant wrap would suit the overall snakeyness of the stand (which, I know, is really a pillar candle holder and not actually a cake stand at all).

fondant arcade with scalloped arches completely optional

And there's that whole matter of the edible wafer paper lotus I created for this cake. Gumpaste is my central medium for edible flowers, but I am branching off into wafer paper lately and will post about it soon. Because it curls so well on the edges, a flower with a deeply cupped petal like a lotus is the perfect match for wafer paper.

So between the flower and the ganache and the decoration and the cake itself, I would say this cake is an edible manifestation of one entire Sunday of my life. I'm not complaining. Baking is funny like that. It's very tiring in one way but also energizing and relaxing. Maybe it wouldn't be, though, if I didn't love it so much. And I don't know what I would do without music in the kitchen to keep me focused and happy. No matter what else I try, Inevitably I return to Chris's monthly mixes at Gorilla vs. Bear. They are free to download and, once mashed together, provide an epic non-stop playlist of interesting music without interruption. Thanks, Chris, for making these, they've become somewhat indispensable to my process.

I don't know why but Nov 14 is my favorite one

I don't know why but Nov 14 is my favorite one

White Chocolate Chai Cake

1/2 c. (118 ml) heavy whipping cream

1 3/4 c. (201 g) cake flour (do not sub AP flour)

1 1/4 teaspoon (8 g) baking powder (aluminum-free is best)

1 tsp (2.5 g) cinnamon

1/2 tsp (1 g) cardamom

pinch of ground cloves

1 1/2 c. (298 g) sugar 

1/3 c. (80 ml) strong brewed black chai tea

3 Tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into cubes

1/3 c. + 2 Tablespoons (107 ml) canola oil 

1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract

1/2 (3 g) teaspoon salt

3 large egg yolks, room temperature

2 large eggs, room temperature

For the ganache: 21 oz (600 g) of chopped white chocolate or good quality white chocolate chips and 6.75 fl oz (200 ml) heavy whipping cream

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Remove butter from fridge and cut into pieces, place eggs in bowl of warm water to bring to correct temperature if cold. Grease and flour cake pans, line bottom of pans with parchment paper. Whip the cream in a small bowl to stiff peaks, cover, and place in fridge.

To make the tea, steep 4 chai teabags in 1 cup of boiled water for five minutes. Do not over-steep or the tea will become bitter. Add sugar to a small saucepan and then add 1/3 c. of the strong tea. Heat sugar mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly, until sugar is mostly dissolved into a thick syrup. The sugar will not completely dissolve because the mixture is oversaturated. Scrape syrup out of saucepan into large bowl and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Add the butter, oil, vanilla and salt to the sugar syrup and beat until smooth. Sprinkle in 1/3 of the flour mixture and mix until just combined, then add the rest of the dry ingredients gradually until incorporated.  With a whisk, mix in the yolks by hand, then the eggs. Careful to not over mix. Fold in whipped cream gently, then divide batter into prepared pans and drop pans a few times onto your counter to knock any large air bubbles up and out of the batter.

Bake for 18-25 minutes, depending on your pan size. Cakes are done when the center springs back when pressed. The cakes should just begin pulling away from the sides as you take them out of the oven.

To make the ganache, heat heavy cream in a saucepan or microwave until it bubbles around the edges. Pour over the chopped white chocolate and let rest for 1 minute. Mix until smooth. Allow to set up for at least 30 minutes before using. If it becomes too hard after resting, microwave briefly until soft enough to work with.

Cool, level and split cakes, then fill and frost with ganache.

tastes like happiness



Salty Malty Cookies /  by Molly Brodak

Over in the Buy a Recipe section of Kookie House I sell a very good and special recipe that I typically have spent months/years developing. These recipes will change in inconsistent amounts of time since time is arbitrary here at Kookie House. Each recipe is available for a limited time only and I can't sell you the old ones, so be sure to save or print your downloads as soon as you purchase them, and check back regularly for new ones.

To start things off I wanted to offer my all-time favorite cut-out cookie, since cookies make up the floors and the ceiling and the around-and-around of Kookie House. No matter how many cakes and eclairs and fancy gumpaste flowers I make, cookies remain the still point of my spinning world.

The flavor of these cookies is incomparable. You have never had a cut-out cookie so good. I have never truly enjoyed eating sugar cookies, especially those iced with royal icing. They are typically too sweet and bland. These were designed to taste delicious with royal icing or fondant icing, but are incredibly addictive on their own. The malt flavoring not only adds a delectable richness to the buttery flavor of the dough but also encourages browning, gilding the edges of your cookies with that crucial Maillard gold.  

You do need to get yourself some dry malt extract. Malted milk powder will not work as a substitute. You need the pure stuff, and the darker the better. I highly recommend Briess Traditional Dark, which you can buy here or at your local home brewer's supply shop. If you like malt flavor, or just delicious things in general, you will find all kinds of other uses for powdered malt around your kitchen, from malted milkshakes to malted waffles to a more fantastic fried chicken batter. (Be sure to store the rest of your malt powder in a tightly sealed container away from humidity (not in the fridge), as it is hydrophilic and will turn into a sticky/crusty mess if moistened.)

These were designed to hold their shape yet remain soft in the middle, with a balance of granulated sugar and powdered sugar that I have spent a long time perfecting. They become just slightly larger after baking so that they will fit fondant cut-outs with a tiny border (a post on this soon). The edges aren't the sharpest cookie edges around, but what kind of maniac expects unnaturally razor-sharp edges on their cookies anyway. 

Included in your recipe will be some tips on rolling techniques, like why you should freeze your dough in sheets rather than chill it in a lump after mixing (it never made any sense to me that most recipes ask you to chill a disk of dough THEN attempt to roll it out once chilled into a crumbling, difficult mess), and why you should bake off your scraps into one giant Malformed Monstercookie instead of rerolling scraps more than twice.

freeze your dough like THIS before cutting out shapes

Buy it here for just two dollars then make yourself a pair of Yeezy Boost 350 to eat.

NFS

Glazed Orange Cinnamon Madeleines /  by Molly Brodak

Madeleines seem like a good place to start. Both a cake and a cookie, they satisfy on all counts. And these delicate Orange Cinnamon beauties are the most tender, melt-in-your mouth madeleines you will ever taste.

Yes bring me this tray

 

And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory...

writes Proust in that famous bit of In Search of Lost Time reflecting on the power sensory objects have to flood us with vivid memories. While I have no specific Sunday mornings at Combray to relive, I certainly can relate to the part about the vicissitudes of life becoming indifferent to me when I bite into a perfect madeleine.

Made with cake flour instead of all-purpose, these skirt the debate between the no-baking-powder-purists and those who prioritize the authentic underside bump via some very non-authentic baking powder altogether by adding a different ingredient for lift: whipped cream. The whipped cream also adds a rich, milky tenderness that is simply transcendent.

(For my treatise on whipped cream--one of my favorite things in the world--see this post over at Real Pants.)

There are a million varieties of madeleines, but for my money the warmth of cinnamon underneath fragrant fresh orange in both the cookie and the glaze cannot be beat. You can omit the glaze if you prefer your madeleines slightly less good.

Side note: Alain de Botton? Are you listening? I love you. Your Proust book is too great. Readers, if Proust is really all too much for you, at least read this by de Botton.

Ok. Onto it then. By the way, you don't really need a madeleine pan here, you can make these in muffin tin bottoms if you want to. But if you are going to buy a madeleine pan, buy two, since cleaning then re-buttering and re-flouring your pan after the first batch is a pain in the...underside bump.

Orange Cinnamon Madeleines

makes about 24

3 large eggs, room temperature

2/3 c. (130 g.) sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

1 1/2 c. (170 g.) cake flour (I use White Lily)

1 Tablespoon cinnamon

9 Tablespoons butter, melted and cooled to room temperature

zest of one large orange

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/3 c. (2.7 fl. oz.) heavy whipping cream

for the glaze: 3/4 c. (150 g.) powdered sugar + 3 Tablespoons of strained juice from orange

Grease and flour madeleine pans thoroughly and place them in the freezer. Melt butter in the microwave or on the stovetop and set aside to cool. Whip cream in a small bowl with a hand mixer or with a whisk to stiff peaks, cover, and place in fridge (whipping such a small amount of heavy cream can be awkward, just tilt the bowl and scrape with a spatula occasionally to maintain consistency). Sift flour and cinnamon together into a small bowl. 

In a large bowl with a hand mixer or in a stand mixer, beat eggs, sugar and salt until thick and frothy, about 6 minutes. Gradually add the flour mixture, gently folding with a spatula as you add it. Add the orange zest and vanilla to the butter and dribble in the butter mixture gradually, folding carefully until it is incorporated. Fold in the whipped cream until no streaks remain. Resist the urge to mix it; be patient with your folding and remember you are trying to preserve the delicate air bubbles in the whipped cream. Cover batter and let rest in the refrigerator for at least one hour (can rest for up to 24 hours). 

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Mix together glaze ingredients and set aside. Fill the molds with batter to about 3/4 full; do not spread or press the batter into the pan. A 1" ice cream scoop works well for this. Bake for 8-9 minutes, or until the centers are set. Loosen from molds by gently shaking pan. Allow to rest on a wire rack for a few minutes until just cool enough to handle, then dip each side of each madeleine in the glaze.

Glazed madeleines are best eaten the same day, but can be stored uncovered for several days. Unglazed madeleines can be stored sealed in an airtight container for two weeks, or frozen for up to three months. 

I accept your offer