- Hey bakers, today I'm gonna show you
how to make the perfect vanilla cake, so much vanilla,
so much butter, so much deliciousness, let's get started.
Starting off with 213 grams
or about 1 2/3 cups of all-purpose flour.
You could also use cake flour if you wanted to.
That was so close to perfect.
213, there we go.
A little bit less than a teaspoon of salt,
it's kind of up to you.
1/4 teaspoon of baking soda,
and one teaspoon of baking powder.
(glasses clinks)
One cup of white granulated sugar, that's 200 grams.
Sift it, whisk it up.
We're gonna set it aside
and work on the very wet ingredients.
Into a bowl I'm adding 3/4 of a cup
or 170, 176 grams of butter, not melted, not solid.
You could use room temperature butter,
you could use melted butter.
I've come to enjoy this texture, 1/2 a cup of whole milk,
1/2 a cup of sour cream, three egg whites.
This recipe uses egg whites
because I like my vanilla cakes to be a little paler,
The yolks make it a beautiful yellow cake.
I'll often color these and make the cake like pink
or you know, even light blue sometimes.
So a lighter cake will also hold its color better.
If you wanna use the whole egg, totally fine,
just remove a 1/4 cup of the sour cream.
(laughing)
I'll clean that up later.
Three egg yolks later.
This can be set aside and make a delicious lemon curd
or raspberry curd, so many wonderful things.
One tablespoon, 15 milliliters of vanilla extract.
Now I'm gonna whisk this up.
If you see a little clumps of butter hanging around,
don't worry about it one little bit,
it'll all even out when you add it to the dry and bake it,
it will be fine.
But right now let's just give it a whisk.
That's whisked up.
We're gonna pour the wet into the dry
and just mix to combine plus a little extra.
All right, now let's whisk gently, not messily.
You could also use a paddle attachment and a stand mixer,
or you could use an electric mixer
with little hand beaters if you want.
So I just gave it a whisk for like 30 seconds.
You can see now it's a nice smooth, cohesive batter
and this is the right consistency.
You could use a baking spray if you want.
I've been doing that lately because I am often
cutting it really close on time
but my preferred way to prep a pan is by just
rubbing some cold butter, with cold you use less,
onto the pan and then flowering it.
So, move that batter around,
take a tablespoon of flour and then just kick it around,
get the sides and then tap it onto the next pan.
(pans clashes)
Perfect.
And just repeat the process.
(pan taps)
Little blessing of extra flour.
That cake mix.
Now I'm going to use a scale to get the exact
same amount of cake into each pan.
I like to have really even layers,
but if you can't or don't have access to a scale,
just like use a toothpick, like an oil gauge kind of,
and you can see how much batter's in each pan, so,
(upbeat music)
280, this recipe does not make any extra batter,
so even though it tastes delicious right now, don't eat it.
I'm using some cake strips.
These are really beat-up and ratty, I make a lot of cakes,
but they're just wet fabric strips.
These are from Wilton.
There are many brands you can make your own out of fabric,
you can make them out of tinfoil and paper towels,
you can click up here to see how they work
and how to make your own.
They give you perfect flat cake layers,
that are really nice and tender on the sides.
There's no trimming needed
and they come out just perfect for stacking,
I love using them.
I highly encourage you to start as well
if you do cake decorating and multi-layer cakes.
These are gonna go into the oven at 350
for about half an hour.
You will see the center gets springy when you touch it
and the edge will pull away from the pan.
That's how you know when they're done.
If you under bake your cakes, the bottom might not release
and things will get a little sad,
so just make sure they're perfectly done,
keep an eye on them.
While this cake layers are baking up,
I'm gonna whip up a quick and easy batch
of American vanilla butter cream.
It's such a classic, so easy, so sweet.
But a whole other group of people think that it's too sweet.
So for them we could make a Swiss meringue buttercream
also very easy, it takes a couple more minutes,
I'm not gonna lie,
but it gives you the creamiest, siliceous frost
you can imagine, not too sweet, very versatile,
and it is perfect for piping, you can do anything with it,
it's kind of amazing.
But back to our American buttercream,
this is gonna be so much faster than that.
Here I have three sticks, which is
1 1/2 cups of unsalted butter at room temperature,
and I'm gonna gracefully drop it in there.
Gold metal for John.
Cream it up just for a few seconds.
(cream mixer roaring)
Okay, and now we're gonna add in some confectioner's sugar.
Normally I would sift all of this up.
This is a brand new bag, it's probably fine,
but if I was piping buttercream roses
or something with a fine piping tip,
I don't want anything to clog it up.
Today, I'm not doing any of that.
It's gonna be a nice and quick beautiful, easy cake,
so just dump the sugar in in several batches
and then mix on low.
You might wanna cover it with a tea towel if needed.
(cream mixer roaring)
I'm gonna add my vanilla
and now a little bit of moisture helps get things started.
(cream mixer roaring)
Okay, it's getting smooth.
I'm gonna add in a little bit more sugar,
(upbeat music)
a little bit more sugar into the bowl.
That's more than half a pound leftover.
Just keep mixing.
(cream mixer roaring)
No.
(upbeat music)
Back to the tea towel.
(cream mixer roaring)
There you go.
My mixer needed a babushka.
(upbeat music)
Final batch of sugar in there.
Just a little bit of a modesty towel.
(upbeat music)
I'm adding in a very healthy teaspoon of salt right now.
(cream mixer roaring)
I mean pinch, but it's about a teaspoon.
(cream mixer roaring) (upbeat music)
I wanted to show you that as you whip the buttercream up,
it becomes fluffier and lighter in color.
Now it's much paler and it's good.
I'm gonna add a little bit more vanilla in though.
Two shots of vodka later and,
(cream mixer roaring)
there we go.
So this is done.
I am gonna add in just a drop of soft pink food coloring
because I feel like the cake
would look like a sad wedding cake
if it was just like a white cake,
with white frosting on top.
We're gonna make it pop a little bit with some pink,
one drop, there we go, let's see.
(cream mixer roaring)
That's nice, gonna add another drop in.
Okay, two drops of coloring in.
(cream mixer roaring) (upbeat music)
Scrape the bowl down
even though I'm using a scraping paddle attachment.
(cream mixer roaring)
Can I gracefully add in one tablespoon of cream
just to thin it out a tiny bit?
(cream mixer roaring) (upbeat music)
Good, that's nice.
Cake layers are just out of the oven.
The nice thing about those cake strips,
in addition to the flat layers is
it lets you handle the cake quickly
because the pan's real hot.
Dumping up.
(pan clatters)
Very nice, a little bit darker than I would have wanted.
That's totally fine.
Very soft, you see how pillowy that is?
And it smells delicious.
You can see the cake has pulled away from the pan,
and if you're ever wondering like, oh,
how do I know if it's ready or not?
You can shake it around a little bit
and if it kind of shakes around in the pan,
it's ready to come out,
if it's stuck, it might need another minute.
(pan clatters)
Perfect, all right.
This is the one that needed another minute.
Let's see if it worked.
(pan clatters)
Yeah, just baked.
It's like a Goldilocks situation.
(laughing)
John, that's brilliant.
(laughs)
(beeps)
Luckily I had a swap out ready
since I didn't wanna waste time, so there's one right here,
all cooled and done.
(laughs)
That's never happened before.
My poor cake.
It can be cake pops or secret eating cake, I don't know.
Anyways, so that, just carefully look so nicely,
flatly baked.
Gonna set these aside.
Once your cake layers are nice and cool,
it's time to add on your buttercream.
I like to pipe it on just because it's a fast
and neat for me and it doesn't tug at the cake.
A lot of times with a really tender cake,
if you're tugging at it, trying to spread buttercream,
it will break or tear the cake layers,
which is not where you wanna be.
This is much easier and it's kinder to your cake layers.
And you can see how fast it is too.
It's like, in an instant you're done.
Next layer on.
Now we're gonna add the outer buttercream on.
I'll have like a nice kind of thick layer on top.
Check the sides out, make sure everything is nicely aligned,
nothing is leaning, and you have a couple of options.
You could either do a naked cake,
kind of like this, semi-naked which I like,
where you just have a very thin layer of frosting,
on the outside or you could completely encase it.
So, we'll see how I feel.
(upbeat music)
All right, I'm using a bench scraper
to scrape the side of the cake,
(upbeat music)
clean off the excess every couple of turns,
and I'm gonna go for semi-naked and see how I like it.
Okay, now for the top, so use an offset spatula,
if you have one and just smooth it out.
(upbeat music)
Back to the bench scraper.
Once you're some how satisfied with the top,
there's like a lot of excess to remove.
Now take your offset spatula and pull in while you turn.
(upbeat music)
To clean the edge of the cake stand,
I'm just gonna use a paper towel
and remove as much as I can in a couple of swipes.
Fold it over and then just do the same thing.
You can switch to a damp paper towel,
and that'll get rid of the rest.
Once you're satisfied, you can just give it one final swipe
to clean anything on the bottom that happened.
That's pretty good.
Now we have a nice basic cake
ready for a couple of more decorations,
maybe some spires or dollops,
maybe like a little seashell pattern,
can have some confetti sprinkles.
Let's see what we wanna do.
I thought about my plain little cake for a few minutes,
went to the market, got some flowers,
and here's what's gonna happen.
Just gonna arrange some roses on top, like a little crown.
I thought about my cake and these little flowers
and I actually don't like all of the green parts here.
I think it's distracting,
so I'm just going to clean the flowers off,
so it's just petals and I think that'll look nicer.
More too tone.
I didn't wanna bring a third strong color in like that.
Just by the by, you could do whatever you'd like.
There we go, just a little bit of gardening later.
Your pretty pink vanilla cake is ready.
I'm gonna cut this and photograph it
and I'll be right back.
I don't know about you, but I'm ready for a taste.
Let's see how this turned out.
My first time eating my own vanilla cake recipe.
Dainty bite.
(soft piano music)
Oh my God!
I mean it is just like so delicate, tender.
If you over bake the cake,
or any cake, is gonna be hard and crusty and dry out.
So really using those cake strips makes a big difference.
I can't encourage you enough to check that video out.
You've got to watch the video.
If you use cake strips already, let me know in the comments.
I love hearing from you.
And if you want my current favorite cake recipe,
go ahead and check out my German chocolate cake.
It is delicious, and just like, oh, it's so amazing.
Check it out.
Thanks so much for watching.
If you like my videos,
hit that like button and subscribe, bon appetit.