Chiffon Cake with Swiss Buttercream production day!

Hello, hello :)

Happy Tuesday to everyone and a very special Happy Birthday to my daddy! :)  As soon as I am done here I am off to bake him a cake! :)

As I mentioned yesterday, we made Chiffon cake with Swiss Butter cream as its topping.  We have already made this back in the beginning of our baking journey so I wont go into great detail today but give you more of a step by step. The original instructions are back in my February postings. 

If you recall, the Yellow Chiffon is a sponge cake.  It is a two-stage process cake where you take your sifted dry ingredients ( Flour, Salt, Sugar and Baking Powder) and incorporate the wet ingredients (Oil and Water)  into it in thirds.  You will mix it in your bowl with your spatula gently, making sure not to create too much gluten. Once you have all your wets in, you then add in your egg yolks and vanilla, mixing them in until you have a smooth batter.  Once this is done you set your creation aside and begin to work on the second stage. Don't stick your finger into this part of the batter just yet, I promise you it will not taste yummy :). Yes, you know who you are. ;) 

Grab yourself a small bowl.  ( This is the best part, making the mess) :)  Mix your sugar and cream of tartar together, breaking up any lumps. Place all your egg whites into your mixer and whip those babies on medium speed until you no longer see the clear eggs on the bottom.

** Quick tip for the day:  Use room temperature eggs as they result in more volume! The warmer they are the more relaxed the eggs are and you can get more stretch from them.

Ok, so at this point you want to put your mixer at a low speed and add in your sugar and tartar mix, doing so in thirds. You don't want to dump all of it in at once so lumps do not form and also, you don't want it all to sink to the bottom of the mixer!  Once it's all in, turn your mixer back up to medium speed and wait for the product to whip until you have a "captain hook" foam tip on your whip attachment when you pull it out to check.

You now have your two stages! Whew! We are almost done! Now you want to FOLD in your whipped egg white mixture into your previously created batter. Make sure not to mix or whip it, just fold it in so you create more volume. Do this until its nice and evenly distributed and you see no remnants of egg batter. You want to get these into the oven as soon as you can so the batter does not lose its volume while it sits there, because that's exactly what it will do! Sheesh, you think it would have a little more respect after all the hard work you are putting into it right?  But hey, you cant always get what you want. Its a temperamental little sucker.  You want your oven to be at 375 degrees and the likelihood is, it will be there growing and playing for 30 minutes. :)

As your babies bake and grow to awesome loveliness, go ahead and start your Swiss Butter cream!  Take your egg whites and sugar and put them over a double broiler and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved.  Once dissolved, put it into your CLEAN mixer :) :)  and whip it on high speed! Ahh this is the fun part, you get to see it become a thick white consistency.  Once the egg strands have stretched and it is nice and thick, take your mixer down to low speed and begin to incorporate your butter into the mix little by little until it is all gone. Add in  your flavoring agents, which are vanilla and lemon juice (optional).  Whip it on medium speed for a few seconds so all the liquid is consumed by the whipped cream and you are done!

Once your cakes are ready, cool them and then you can decorate them with the butter cream.

Tomorrow we will be putting this together as we did back in basics. We will cut our cakes in half, fill them in the center with the butter cream and maybe some type of jam and decorate them as well.

We will be making an ever so tasty chocolate genoise tomorrow too!  This will serve as the cake for our Black Forest Torte. Yes, we have already made this as well! I am  not sure what the purpose of this is, but I am going along with the program :).  Who am I to complain, I really dont even have the energy to do it! :(  But to tell you the truth, it's not like either cake tastes horrible, they are actually delicious, smooth and light!

This class is a bit hectic, we are also in groups of 4 for now. I did not get a chance to take the camera out for a second to try to capture the shots for you, but I will TRY my best for you tomorrow and will most definitely be giving you pictures of my finished product! You can always count on that!

Enjoy your evening... I will be baking up a storm downstairs!! I am going to make some Palimers for the pops as well as his birthday cake!

See you back here domani!! Thank you again so much for hanging with me!

Ta Ta for now...