We are about a month into this self-imposed quarantine, and because I haven’t really had the chance to go out and try “the latest and greatest in fast-food innovation,” I was trying to figure out how to continue this blog. There are a few things that I have in the works, but In reality, I haven’t had too much motivation to write those pieces. So instead, I’m going to bake for this blog instead.
Now, I’ll go on the record and say that I am not a professional baker. I do love baking, and I think that I’m good at it, but none of the food that I will be making is going to be recipes that I have created by myself. If (on the off chance) I do “make” a recipe on my own, I will go into detail on how I made it at the end of the blog entry. I’ll provide links to all the official recipes, so if you’re as bored as I am, you can bake them yourself!
For my first bake, I decided to just go basic with a yellow cake and chocolate frosting. Nothing too fancy, but it’s perfect because I’m not that fancy anyways. I am using this recipe from Southern Living, so going into the bake, I have very little expectations. The frosting is something that I am going to attempt to make from scratch, but it could easily go wrong if I had the wrong proportions to the mixer. I guess we’ll see.
I started out with the frosting because I didn’t have eggs at the time of the initial bake. I knew the basic components of the buttercream that I was trying to make powdered sugar, butter, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, and some kind of cream. Now, I didn’t have any kind of heavy cream (which is what I would usually use), so I decided to make use of the milk that we had in our house. I didn’t want to use a whole stick of butter, so I went ahead and used only half the stick. I think that was eventually the downfall of the frosting.
The main issue with frosting that I make is that it becomes too runny… Usually when that happens, you can either add more dry ingredients or some more butter (which meant that I would have to readjust the proportions for the milk? At least, I think that is what it meant), but because I didn’t want to waste ingredients, I decided to put the frosting in the freezer so it could harden a little more.
After I got the eggs, I started working on the cake. I wanted to half the recipe because the original seemed too excessive for my four-person household. I don’t think we were going to eat as much cake as the recipe called for… After measuring out everything, I went ahead and creamed the butter, added the dry ingredients and mixed it. I went in to taste the batter to see if it was the desired taste, and I realized that something was off…
The batter tasted familiar, but not in the way that you would expect. I couldn’t quite place it until I remembered where we kept our flour. Because we don’t use it as often as we should, we placed the flour in our kimchi fridge. This means that most of the food in there has been tainted in some way by the kimchi itself. Usually it’s just in the smell, but I guess it sunk further into the flour than I originally thought…
But I wasn’t going to give up on it now! In the name of not wasting ingredients, I decided to just go with it and bake it anyways.
And it turns out, that was a good idea. The end result didn’t taste like kimchi at all despite the batter tasting as such. After the cake was cooled for around 30 minutes, I assembled the cake and frosting together to make the result down below.
Looks bad, but I swear it was okay.
My main issue with the cake was that it was too dense. I don’t typically like dense cakes, and I was hoping that it would be fluffier, but that was not the case. It came out like a brick of semi-sweet bread… Kind of like a pound cake. I’m wondering if my proportions were off? But I did do by the recipe, so maybe it was the recipe that was off?
However, the one thing that saved the cake was the combination of frosting and cake. I have got to say, no matter how bad you mess up a cake, if you add a frosting that complements that base, then you’ll have a winner. The sweetness of the frosting didn’t overpower the cake, and instead enhanced its flavor. A beautiful medley of chocolate and vanilla.
In the end, I would give this cake around an 8/10. It was a pretty good cake, but I think the frosting was the thing that really saved it in the end. I think that this “frosting” would actually be really good on pancakes… It might be something to try later.
Here is the recipe that I used for the chocolate frosting:
Mix all of these with a whisk.
3/8 cup of Cocoa Powder
3/4 cup of Powdered Sugar
4 tbsp of butter (half a stick) I didn’t melt the butter, but I think that the consistency would be better if you did, so I recommend that.
1 tbsp of vanilla extract
1/4 cup of milk
Author’s Note: For as long as we are in quarantine and under the stress of COVID-19, I will be doing these kinds of reviews. If you have a recipe that you would like me to try, please let me know through Instagram or email. Thanks!
Also, I forgot to take a lot of pictures of the baking process, so I will do better next time. Thanks for understanding!
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