Is this not the most beautiful cake you’ve ever seen? This is the cake I produced in my cake decorating class. The recipe claimed to be yellow cake, but it tasted more like a white cake and angel food cake hybrid. “What makes a yellow cake yellow?” you ask. Egg yolks!
With this cake recipe came a lesson on different methods for mixing cake. This cake was prepared using what’s called a high yield or two stage method. The method was popularized, I was told, by Rose Levy Beranbaum, who wrote The Cake Bible. The method is also popular in bakeries where cake batter is made in high volume. The reason is it’s much easier to mix cake batter in stages for fixed times rather than mixing according to how the mix looks.
The alternative to a high yield cake is a creamed butter cake, in which the sugar and butter are creamed together at the beginning of the recipe. My cake decorating instructor said Rose Levy Beranbaum argued creaming butter and sugar together at the beginning of a recipe is chemically incorrect. I wish I knew enough about food chemistry to be able to confidently nod my head in agreement. Maybe some day.
The frosting recipe for this cake claimed to be mocha Swiss meringue buttercream, but last I checked, mocha means chocolate and coffee flavors. There was no chocolate in the frosting, so it’s more accurate to call it espresso amaretto Swiss meringue buttercream (what a mouthful!). All the recipes used to create this cake are copyrighted and they’re not mine. So if you’re dying for them, please email me and I will send them to you.
I snapped some great photos of the process I took to create this cake, but I unfortunately took them on my phone and my phone has been a real a-hole lately. Hence, no photos of the process. Which leaves me with no choice but to reenact everything soon. Very soon!
Look at these roses, delicately brushed with edible gold petal dust.
And that bow! And look at the piping!
I gave this cake a good 48 hours to sit pretty before I gobbled it up.
It was positively delicious. I’m sorry I didn’t save you a piece. Could you blame me?
Looks like your Yellow Esspresso Amaretto cake is the exception to the rule that beautiful cakes never taste as good as they look.
Your roses, the piping and the bow are all exquisite! What a masterful job! Congratulations!
[…] and also make for a great, stable frosting for a crumb coat. I used this method to assemble my Yellow Espresso Amaretto Cake in cake class. It […]