- Hey guys, today we're making
a white chocolate raspberry cake.
It's gonna be delicious and pretty.
Let's get started.
First thing,
we're gonna whisk all the wet ingredients together.
So that's one half cup of milk,
one half cup of sour cream,
three quarters of a cup of unsalted butter
at room temperature, it has to be super soft,
it's not gonna make a completely homogenous mixture,
you will have some little butter clumps,
but don't panic, it'll be okay.
One tablespoon of vanilla,
it's a lot but it's worth it.
Time for three egg whites.
The only reason we're not using the yolk is
because the yolk is so yellow,
and we wanna have a nice white cake
with little red flecks in it from the raspberries.
If you care about it, or if you like yellow,
go ahead and include the yolks.
Save this yolk for later,
you can use them to make a curd, like a lemon curd,
or a raspberry curd,
just make sure you cover them in the fridge.
Now let's get the good whisk
and just remember that you will have clumps in here.
So if you see these butter clumps,
that's totally fine, don't worry.
So for the dry ingredients, we have,
one and two thirds cups of flour, all purpose,
quarter teaspoon of baking soda,
one teaspoon of baking powder,
a good healthy pinch of kosher salt,
and one cup of white granulated sugar.
And we're gonna sift it together,
and then whisk it together,
and we're on our way.
Just make sure everything's incorporated together,
and add our wet ingredients in.
Scrape the bowl down to make that nothing gets left behind,
there's no need to waste.
I was never allowed to waste food as a child.
In fact,
and I told my mom this story several times as an adult,
I wanted to do papier mache once, 'cause I saw it on TV,
and I asked my mom for some flour, and she's like,
"Wasting flour and not eating it?
"Never."
She grew up in Mexico and that just didn't happen,
so my papier mache artistic ambitions were thwarted.
So I'm just giving this a nice mix.
You could use a whisk if you wanted to.
This could also be done with
a paddle attachment and a standing mixer.
But basically you're just making sure
there aren't any pockets of flour left over
that are unmixed and dry.
I'm feeling a little sassy,
so before I add in my dried raspberries,
I'm gonna zest most of a lemon.
For this recipe we're using freeze-dried raspberries,
because they are not going to create
a puddle of undercooked cake batter
in the center of the pan.
So here I have about a cup of freeze dried raspberries.
And we're just gonna fold that in.
Gorgeous.
You want to make sure it's evenly distributed in the batter,
so no one gets a piece of cake
that's totally blank with no raspberries in it.
Set that aside, and now for our pans.
This recipe is using six-inch pans.
If you wanted to use three eight-inch pans,
I would go ahead and double the recipe.
After you butter your pans,
just add in about a tablespoon of flour and kick it around,
just so that you get a nice coating.
There's nothing as tragic,
well, there are many things as tragic,
but there's something very upsetting for a baker
if their cake doesn't release properly,
or if it cracks.
So give it a good tap to get all the excess flour out.
You want just enough to cling to the butter.
Before I add the batter into the pans,
I'm gonna wrap them in cake strips.
Cake strips are literally just
strips of fabric that you wet.
You can make your own,
you can use tinfoil or paper towels to make them too,
but they're very cost effective
and they give you flat layers,
they insulate the outside and cool it down during baking
so that the entire cake layer bakes at an even temperature
and you get a nice flat top,
which is perfect for stacking and decorating.
Just soak in water before you get started
and then wring them out right before you put them on.
Let's distribute our batter evenly into our three pans.
The cake's gonna go into the oven
at 340 for about half an hour.
Just check in on it,
rotate the pans so you don't get any hot spots in your oven,
and test it with a skewer in the center at the very end,
then you'll know you're totally done.
So the inside of the cake is gonna have
a white chocolate and white chocolate raspberry filling.
We have one cup of white chocolate chips,
a pot of boiling water,
and you're gonna plop this just over.
You don't want the water to touch the bowl,
it's basically just steaming,
and that'll be the perfect temperature
to melt the white chocolate.
Into our standing mixer we're adding
a cup and a half of unsalted butter at room temperature.
Use the paddle attachment so that
you won't get a lot of air bubbles
whipped into the buttercream.
And then we're gonna mix it on low.
Four and a half cups of confectioner's sugar,
gonna add a pinch of salt in
and give it a mix on low.
But first,
I'm gonna cover this with a tea towel
so I don't have a toxic sugar cloud enveloping everything.
Much better.
Checking back in on our double boiler,
we can see that we have nice, melted white chocolate.
And I'm gonna turn it off now
and just let it cool a bit.
That's perfect.
Now I'm gonna add in my one cup of
melted and cooled white chocolate.
Adding chocolate to buttercream
just gives this silky consistency
that is nearly indescribable,
it really ups the flavor profile,
so I highly recommend it whenever possible.
Now let's give that a mix.
I don't know if you can tell,
but the texture on this is just so silky and amazing.
So the other half of the batter is gonna get dyed
and flavored with fresh raspberry juice.
If you don't have fresh raspberries,
go get some frozen ones and defrost them,
and the juice is perfect.
I've got a quarter of a cup here,
and I'm just gonna squeeze them through a sieve,
so I don't get any seeds.
Fresh raspberry juice has such a zing to it,
it's really lovely.
Now we're just gonna give this a mix
and see what the color's like and if we want to add
some more raspberries into it.
All right, so I mixed in about half a cup of raspberry
and I added in an extra cup of confectioner's sugar
because you're adding a liquid in,
the buttercream becomes more soupy,
the sugar will tighten it back up.
So this is the end result,
we get a nice blush color which I enjoy,
and it has the zing of raspberries.
The piping melted white candy melt onto parchment paper
using a piping bag,
I have the stencil downloadable on the blog.
Now it's time for the white chocolate buttercream filling.
I piped using a large round tip,
but to get the two tone effect
I have my raspberry buttercream in one bag,
my plain white chocolate buttercream in another,
and both of those are in a third bag
fitted with a large round tip.
You can see the nice round layers I get
from the cake strips,
they really, really make a difference.
Now I'm crumb coating the cake
with the remaining white chocolate buttercream,
and you only need a paper thin layer of this
for the crumb coat,
so scrape off as much as needed.
Give it a nice flat top by using an offset spatula
to pull the edges in while you turn,
and then you're gonna pop it into the fridge
to chill for maybe 15 minutes.
All right, so my cake is crumb coated
and chilling in the fridge,
and now I'm gonna whip up a batch of Italian buttercream,
which I love because it is so creamy and not too sweet,
it really lets the other flavors stand out,
but the mouthfeel is amazing.
You can click at the top of the screen
for my how to video,
and make that recipe in full.
When I come back, we will be decorating the cake.
To get the ombre effect,
I divide the buttercream into five batches
and then had one plain, one really pink
and worked my way through the middle to get a gradient.
Do the piping with a piping bag
that you snip the tip off of.
The key is gonna be when you smooth,
to clean your scraper off after each smoothing.
That way you'll maintain the gradient.
The final step is to add your hearts.
You can add as many or as few as you like,
I had the small ones on the bottom
and the larger ones on top.
I also piped some with arrows
because it's for Valentine's Day.
Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to subscribe.