(upbeat jazz music)
- Hey, I'm Ben, one of the chefs at SORTEDfood.
And today, I'm gonna show you two ways to make cake.
Both versions, super, super simple.
(upbeat jazz music)
♪ Ba boom ♪
- What it actually is, is one basic recipe
that I'll show you two awesome variations of.
It is my absolute go-to
because it doesn't even need much of a recipe.
It's so easy to remember as a ratio,
plus super versatile.
So you can bake it with all different types
of flavours and styles.
It's been my full-proof recipe since I was eight years old.
Step one, preheat the oven to the magic temperature,
180 degrees Celsius.
Step two, you do need to weigh the ingredients out,
but it's easy to remember.
For every egg you use, you also need 50 grammes of butter,
50 grammes of caster sugar,
and 50 grammes of self-raising flour.
So it's 50, 50, 50 to every egg.
Believe it or not, that's it.
But I'm gonna show you a few other tips and tricks
as we go along to make them perfect.
To start off with cream together
the butter and the caster sugar.
The butter should be at room temperature.
And then in a bowl with plenty of space,
beat it together or cream it together.
You want something that is light, fluffy, and pale in colour,
more pale than the yellow butter you just added.
Now you're gonna beat loads of air into it.
You see already much paler, more volume,
super light, and creamy.
This is one of the two raising agents
that gives you a wonderful light sponge.
The raising agent is mechanical.
It's beating air into the mix.
And the second one is in our flour, self-raising flour.
Now that's quite a British thing I think.
However, you can make your own.
For every a hundred grammes of flour,
add a teaspoon of baking powder.
It's basically got a chemical raising agent in there.
When it gets wet,
it activates and gives you lift and rise in your cake.
So I told you the ratio.
For this first style of cake, I'm gonna double it.
So a hundred grammes of each and 2 eggs.
With every egg you beat in,
add 1 teaspoon of your flour.
It just stops the mix from curdling,
but you're still at this stage putting in air.
- [Mike] Is there a reason you're using a spatula
and not a whisk?
- I use a spatula because I use the same thing throughout.
You could use a whisk to put air in at first,
but then you're gonna want to change it
to a flat thing to fold the flour in later.
And then you're gonna need a spatula
to scrape all of it out of the bowl so you waste none.
So for me, I just use the same utensil for the whole thing.
Easy. (mixing loudly)
Lovely.
Another tip would be to make sure
that all your ingredients are the same temperature.
So room temperature butter,
but also room temperature eggs.
It just helps.
(egg cracks loudly)
Little bit more flour.
Now, I think personally, even if you're flavouring your cake,
you should still put in a little bit of vanilla.
Vanilla helps to bring out all the other flavours.
Although in this instance,
we're just gonna do vanilla and blueberry.
So at this stage, a splash of vanilla extract as my flavour.
Quality vanilla paste, just a little bit like that.
And lastly, you're gonna fold in the rest of your flour
and I like to sieve it into the bowl.
The reason being it will get rid of any lumps.
But secondly, adding in more air.
Then you wanna fold that in nice and gently
to keep all of that air in.
Figures of eight till it's combined.
The first recipe today I'm gonna make
is one of the first cakes I ever baked, aged eight.
And it is Butterfly Cakes, Blueberry Butterfly Cakes.
You might otherwise know them as Fairy Cakes,
or even a version of cupcake without all of the frosting.
I've deliberately started with this recipe
because it is the same ratio you can go 101 ways with.
It's the same for a Victoria Sponge.
However, today I'm gonna put them into these cupcake cases.
Now you want about 3/4 fill them.
And I'm gonna do that with a piping bag for ease,
but you could just plop it in.
You can bake these off as they are,
or you can add something.
Now I'm gonna add in fresh blueberries
and I'm gonna push four or five into each cake
so that as the cake rises around them,
they'll kind of envelop.
But you could do the same with chocolate chips if you like.
Into the oven.
They'll need about 15 minutes,
but keep an eye on them
basically until they're risen, golden.
And when you push it,
it kind of springs back.
With the cakes cooled, you can enjoy them just as they are.
A dusting of icing sugar to make them look wonderful.
But this little thing will take me back down memory lane
and it'll also give me a chance to show you
just how beautiful these are on the inside.
Slice off the very top of each cake,
gonna cut the top in half.
Do the same with a few more.
(mellow jazz music)
With some double cream whipped to soft peaks
and then sweetened with icing sugar,
I'm just gonna pipe little roses.
And then you put the wings of the butterfly back in,
and a trio fresh of fresh blub.
So old-school, literally like I was eight years old again.
Blueberry Butterfly Cakes, 1 egg, 50 grammes of all the rest.
(mellow dance music)
Our second cake is going to be
a Lemon, Ginger, and Hibiscus Drizzle Cake.
- [Mike] Loud groan.
- Yeah, it's (laughs).
I wasn't expecting the inhale of breath.
It is so delicious, but just as easy.
We're gonna cook this one in a loaf tin.
But if it's a loaf tin or sandwich tins
to make like a Victoria Sponge,
then I feel like 4 eggs is a good volume.
So same ratio.
4 eggs then becomes 200 grammes of butter,
200 grammes of sugar, and 200 grammes of self-raising flour.
Same ratio. (mellow dance music)
Look at the colour now,
and then again in a minute.
(mixer whirs loudly)
And just as before, 1 egg at a time
with a teaspoon of flour each time.
This isn't vanilla flavoured cake,
but still vanilla
because it just helps everything else.
Having beaten a lot of air into it,
we now need to fold in the flour just as before.
But this time not only the vanilla,
I'm going to add another flavour.
And that is the zest of lemon.
Obviously, you can use grapefruit, orange, lime.
There you go. Four different cakes, but the same method.
I'm also gonna add in a little drop of ginger extract.
Sounds fancy, but it's been in our cupboard for a while.
So why not use it?
You use whatever flavours you've got.
You can put spice in here,
like ground cinnamon or mixed spice.
You can put peppermint, lemon, orange,
orange blossom, any flavourings into here
at this stage before you fold in the flour.
I should say though, it's lemon zest
and they're powerful extracts, not juice.
You don't want to offset the ratio you've just done.
Don't add lemon juice in, just the lemon zest.
(mellow dance music)
Then sift in the flour.
This will all look very similar.
There's a reason being,
it's the same method every single time,
whether you're making individual cakes, loaf tin cakes,
sandwich cakes, I even made a wedding cake on this basis.
Yes, it's self-raising flour,
but you also wanna keep all that air in there.
You want both forms of raising agent.
So you're folding relatively gently.
Make sure you dig down to the bottom
and you're cutting through in that figure of eight.
Once it's all combined,
carefully scoop it into your loaf tin
lined with baking paper
to make it easier later on.
Guess what? Same temperature, 180 degrees Celsius.
Obviously, it's gonna need longer than 15 minutes,
I'd say probably 40.
But the way to check?
It will be risen, it'll be golden,
and it will spring back when poked.
(pan clangs loudly)
It took 40 minutes and it's come out of the oven.
It's risen. It's golden.
It springs back if you press it.
And if you listen to it, no sound.
And that sounds bizarre,
but if it's still got fats that are moving,
it's still liquid in the middle,
then it will kind of hiss and sizzle.
At this point, take a skewer and just stab it loads of time.
This is the drizzle part.
You've probably heard of Lemon Drizzle Cake.
You basically make a lemon syrup
and you pour it into the sponge whilst it's hot,
and it absorbs and makes the whole thing so unctuous.
It doesn't need to be lemon syrup.
It can be any syrup you like.
Passion fruit syrup, blood orange syrup, lime syrup.
We're gonna do lemon and hibiscus syrup.
So I keep having hibiscus
in loads of gin cocktails in places that I go.
It's such a delicious flavour.
And this is a syrup that's been made
with the hibiscus flower,
which gives you this wonderful colour.
And to it, I'm going to add a little bit of lemon juice.
Because you don't want the syrup you pour over it
to be too sweet.
You hope that it's just gonna drizzle into that cake.
It'll fall down to the bottom of the loaf tin,
but that's why you do it while it's still in the tin.
It will soak in.
It will soak back up,
and it will give that wonderful pink tinge
and that herbal floral flavour
that hibiscus is so good at.
Then let it completely cool.
That syrup will absorb into the sponge.
Before taking out of the tin,
we're gonna ice it and slice it.
To finish it, this is just icing sugar
let down with enough water so that it dribbles.
And then we'll garnish it
with those candied hibiscus flowers and lemon zest.
If you've got consistency of the icing right,
it should just very slowly run and set.
Just let it dribble over the edges in different places.
It's not meant to be perfect, he said.
(mellow dance music)
Three is the magic number.
Those candied hibiscus flowers
and the zesting of lemon.
(grater scrapes loudly)
There we go.
Lemon, Ginger, and Hibiscus Drizzle Cake.
Exactly the same ratio.
For every 1 egg, 50 grammes of butter,
sugar, and self-raising flour.
(mellow dance music)
There we go. Two versions that I absolutely love.
I can't wait to see what you guys get up to.
So comment down below with the flavours,
the styles, the shapes that you would love to do
with the same cake batter ratio.
Plus, if you like this idea of learning one component
that you can then mix and match,
then you'll love our meal packs app.
Essentially, it's the same thing for midweek cooking.
A bunch of skills that empower you
to boss your mid-week meals every single week, hassle-free.
And even less hassle on your wallet this month.
It's free, free for a whole month.
Go and try out.
And all that plugging made me hungry.
Mike, which one should I try first?
- [Mike] Both. - Yes. We should go.
Actually, I'll tell you what.
I wanna open this.
I wanna show you
why this is my favourite
simple cake batter.
'Cause you just get this wonderful sponge.
Get Involved... (Ben murmurs with full mouth)
I use exactly the same method for tiers of a wedding cake
with passion fruit syrup.
It's so good. Wow.
Wow. That is stunning.