Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and this is an episode of Cake Rescue
where we take cake fails from across the internet and show you how to rescue them,
let's see what we've got first ... I thought I'd make a cake ... it's Brickman!
For those of you who aren't in Australia, this is Brickman from Lego Masters he makes amazing,
amazing Lego structures for the show and normally as well so let's see what happens with his cake.
And nothing better than making a cake so I've gone for the banana caramilk deluxe on television
I'm known as Brickman I can tell you why I'm not called cake man are you ready for this.
Oh oh no. Look at that ganache and stuff better stick to my day job.
Okay so that ganache looked way way too runny with ganache the amount of cream you add to
chocolate changes the consistency of the ganache and obviously the temperature of it so you need
to let it cool down to let it thicken up so I'm going to try and find the banana caramilk cake
that sounded very specific we'll try and find that recipe and see what's going on. I found
the banana caramilk recipe and if we look at the picture they have two thick layers of cake and a
frosting over the top and it looks like a drizzle of ganache down the sides there if we have a look
at the recipe they've got a banana cake I don't like recipes where they make you whip the butter
and sugar and then they add a hot ingredient to it which is just gonna melt the butter that means
there was no point creaming the batter in the sugar you might as well have melted the butter.
I've got a different banana cake recipe that I know works so I'm gonna swap it for that one.
I'll put my banana cake recipe on the how to cook that website for you so you can make it too, then
if we scroll further down they've got the ganache and they've made it using 190 grams of Cadbury
Caramilk and then 200 grams of cream that's pretty much equal portions of cream to chocolate which
is going to make a very thin runny ganache, let me show you ... in this first bowl let's put an
equal amount of cream to Chocolate by weight then in the second bowl let's use a ratio of one part
chocolate to half the amount of cream and then in the final bowl let's put one part chocolate
to one third the amount of cream. Once they are all whisked together and they're still warm
they haven't had a chance to cool yet but you can already see this one has a third of the amount of
cream to chocolate and this one has a half of the amount of cream to chocolate and this is the one
that has equal amounts of cream to Chocolate like in the cake recipe and you can see that it's much
much thinner. The recipe does say to cool in the refrigerator stir occasionally and it will
gradually thicken over time it can take around two hours to get the desired texture. Well I've
left these overnight and the recipe one is still really runny it would make a great sauce but it's
not going to be a good filling for a cake it's just not thick enough and if you tried you'd end
up with something like Brickman did 😑. The one that had a half ratio is nice and thick look at
that and the one that is a third of the amount of cream to chocolate is of course even thicker the
directions did not say to whip it up but I like to whip ganache when I'm using it for frosting
and if you look at both of these thicker ones here they whip up nicely into a really smooth
spreadable frosting. In contrast to that if you try and whip up the thin one you end up with a
really soft whipped cream texture you couldn't pipe it or use it between layers it's not going
to hold its shape and if you keep whipping it trying to get it to thicken it doesn't get any
firmer what it does do is it splits into the liquid and the fat and you get this lumpy mess.
So a bad recipe was responsible for this cake fail if the recipe had the right amount of cream
to chocolate you would have had this nice thick spreadable ganache that you could use between
the layers and even to cover the whole cake if you wanted to. The only thing the thin ganache
is useful for is piping a drip around the edge of the cake and if you look at their original photo
it looks like they used it for that so I'm not sure why the recipe said it would become thick.
All right what's next ... this is sugar-free Cherry Coke and sugar-free ...
If if you're gonna film fake hack videos that are really dumb expect dumb things to
happen to you like getting covered in cake mix obviously don't try and mix it up in the box
using an electric mixer, what's next? There is a volunteer program it's a non-profit it is called
for goodness cakes ... for goodness cakes is an organization where they pair volunteers who
are willing to bake with families who have a kid who has a birthday but for whatever
reason they can't provide a cake for them. Um so I'll be baking a cake for a girl and
she requested Oreo. Putting the batter in the pans you know how I feel about shaped cake pans?
I don't love them not at all but let's see how these turn out. I also went ahead and
greased those pans and I put in a little bit of cocoa powder I dusted them with cocoa powder as
best as I could so it could be fingers crossed ... why would you dust them with cocoa powder?
Here comes the dumbest moment of my life ... she had rubber gloves on, she didn't have baking
gloves oh no she's just burnt her fingers ... oh she was doing such a kind thing too. If you
get a burn run it under cold water the burn does get worse over the next sort of five ten minutes
so if you don't run it under cold water and take the heat out of it you're going to end up with a
worse burn than if you just take the time out to sit there with your hand under the running water.
All right here we go she's tipping out the cakes...
let's see it's completely stuck in a pan! Come on...
Come out ah oh no no.
That cake pan has so many little indents and details you can't line it with baking
paper and it's got so many places it could get stuck I am not surprised. Cakes just
have that ability to take you from happy to just so devastated you want to cry.
I'm now going back to back to door I'm going to get another cake mix
and then we're gonna try again. Legend spraying the pants really well,
a good option it's what I would do but the cocoa powder I don't understand the cocoa
powder cocoa powder when you cook it doesn't Go Firm it's not like when you add flour,
flour and the butter is going to go firm so it helps release it.
Here we go...
Oh oh it came out of the pan.
Um well, not great. I was up cleaning this kitchen to 2 in the morning this
cake nothing has gone right this was the best I could do. It's looks pretty good 👍🏻
I am physically and emotionally drained. She's done amazingly she's rescued it there herself
it didn't look like a cookie to the level she wanted it to so she's just covered the whole
thing put Oreos on top and sprinkles around the outside I think she's done a fantastic job and
that just shows you how what you think is going to be a simple process, you can be tripped up like
Brickman was tripped up by the recipe being wrong, I think she's been tripped up by the cake pan. I
am going to try and track down that exact cake pan and see if I can buy one and we'll do some
experiments and check and see whether there was user error there or if this pan is just gonna trip
everybody up. I managed to get one on eBay and it says our proprietary gold touch non-stick coating
guarantees foolproof release and easy cleanup hmm well let's see if that's true. Their instructions
on the back say to grease the pan and then coat it with cocoa powder so now I know why Cooper
was doing that every time. I'm only going to put cocoa powder on one of the pans because I suspect
that is what's causing the issue. I'm using the same box cake mix that Cooper used and while
they're baking I want to thank today's sponsor Two Dots. Two dots is a really fun relaxing game when
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week which are a bit like a Where's Wally but everything jiggles and wobbles around as you're
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I'm obviously not the only one who's enjoying it because it's already been downloaded 115 million
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I'll put a link below where you can download it. Now we better go back and check on our cakes this
is the one that had the cocoa powder I can see the cocoa powder around the edge and as I always tell
you give it a bit of a shake first to check if it's loose before you tip it over. This one is
well and truly stuck I'll try and give it a bit of a loosen around the edges here just trying to
push it away from the edge and try again ... still nothing so much for guaranteed foolproof release.
Let's try the other one oh that one's loose all right let's flip that one hmm so that's
the one without the cocoa powder, it hasn't stuck to the pan but the word 'cookie' is not
really readable and I'm not loving it. Back to this one the instructions telling you to
put cocoa powder over the tin has made the cake stick to the tin and eventually when I
did get it out this is what it looked like ... and the cocoa powder also made the tin really,
really hard to clean compared to the one that just had the spray oil. So after much scrubbing and
cleaning to get it back to the beginning I want to try the recipe that they actually gave on the
back of the box instead of a cake mix. It makes a runnier batter so it should hopefully get into all
of those little areas and have less air bubbles on the design than the other one did but there's
not as much batter as the box cake mix had so I'm concerned that it's not going to fill the tins.
Once it's baked the tins as expected are not quite full enough I didn't use cocoa powder
so it's not stuck to the tin which is great and it does look better than last time but I still
don't love the look of this. It's not thick enough in the middle because it wasn't full
so I'm going to have to add ganache and chopped Oreos to bulk up that middle section. Cover that
in vanilla buttercream and I'm going to add a few more Oreos and then the other cake on top.
So once again the recipe is at fault here the recipe they gave didn't have enough cake to
fill the tins and the bad instructions set you up for failure telling you to put cocoa powder
on the tins. All right let's watch the next one ... we decided to make the Roblox face cake...
They've cut the details out so they've made themselves a template filled the
sponge with custard added cream looks good so far...
hang on a minute they've covered the cream cake with fondant you can't put
fondant over cream it's got too much water in the cream you need like a
buttercream or a ganache underneath it not ... anyway let's see what happens.
I don't actually think that looks too bad they think it's a fail I mean obviously it's not
perfect it's not what they had in mind of what they wanted it to look like at the end but it's
not too bad I can see there that the black fondant is cracked and it looks like it's got icing sugar
in it and you could see earlier they were mixing their own black fondant. Black fondant is really
hard to make because you need to add so much black to make that white look black and not
grey and then it gets very sticky so then you can tell they've added icing sugar to try and make it
less sticky and that's now made it too dry. If you have black fondant that's too dry you can just add
some spray cooking oil or a little bit of cooking oil into it and massage it in until it is nice and
pliable again before you roll it out and use it but with this one I actually I would completely
change how they've done it I understand if you want a nice yummy sponge cake and you want to have
custard and maybe some strawberries and some cream and all of that tastes delicious so I can totally
understand if that's the type of cake you want but then you don't want to cover it in fondant. The
great thing about fondant is you can use it ahead of time like up to a month ahead so that takes
the stress of decorating away from the day of the party or the day before the party if you're doing
it then. So you could make a face to go on top of a cake a whole month before the party and then
just put it on when you're ready. Let me show you how to do that ... roll out your white fondant and
cut a circle you can use a plate as the template for that circle then put a piece of baking paper
over the top and then put the print out of the face you want on top of that. Then draw where the
details go and you're just trying to press hard enough to indent the fondant and that will make it
easier to get the positions of everything correct you don't have to guess you can just put it right
where it goes. Rather than cutting out a template and trying to cut around these thin black lines
it's much easier to roll fondant into a snake when you need a line, then you just put that over your
template and cut it to length. Then using a little bit of water add it into place. Continue to do
that with all of the lines adding a little bit of water underneath each piece to make it stick. Then
you can just leave that to dry out as I said you can make it a month ahead and then just before the
party peel off the baking paper and add it to the top of your cake. Easy and stress free. Let's move
on to the next cake fail, oh she looks sad 😕 So sometimes it does happen that something flops ...
and this is what happens when you overmix a carrot cake.
This is called over mixing it flops still tastes nice though you can see I've tasted it. Over
mixing a cake doesn't usually cause it to flop in the middle like that if you've been watching
cake rescue for a while you will know that that is caused by taking the cake out of the oven before
it is cooked all the way through you need to put a knife into the center and then pull it out and
check that it is totally dry if there's any of the gooey cake mixture still on it leave it in to bake
for longer because ovens are all different so the temperature time given on your recipe may not be
exactly the same for your oven as it was for the oven of the person who wrote the recipe just leave
it in until it is done. If it's getting a bit overcooked on the top just add some foil on top,
leave it in there. This is not from over mixing over mixing is not good for cakes either I'm gonna
do an experiment for you and show you the difference rather than just telling you the
difference if you over mix a cake you're going to develop the gluten in the flour which is what
you're doing when you're kneading bread great in bread not good in cakes. I have two bowls with the
exact same ingredients in them here and for the first one I'm going to mix together the eggs with
some of the sugar and the carrots just to break up those egg yolks and whites and then fold the
whole mixture together mixing only until you can't see any more flour. Tip that into a lined greased
cake tin and it's ready to go. Now for the other bowl I'm going to mix it on medium speed for five
minutes and this is way too long for a cake it's really going to develop the gluten in the flour
now we're going to tip that into an identical lined tin and then we're going to bake them side
by side so the cooking conditions are identical. This is the hand folded cake and this one was
beaten for the five minutes, it has not sunk over mixing does not make cakes sink in the middle but
if we look inside this one is soft and it has a nice crumb whereas this one is stodgy looking,
it's rubbery it's chewy it's just not the right texture for a cake it's it's not soft it's solid.
The hand-folded one is airy and light and if you try and pick it up it is soft and it is beautiful.
That carrot cake recipe was of course from my cookbook so make sure you don't over mix it
because you want nice fluffy soft cake all these recipes have been tested and will work you're not
going to have the issue that Brickman had with a recipe that's not tested and doesn't work,
these are my tried and tested recipes and this week the cookbook actually comes out in paperback
as well so you can choose whether you want the hardcover or the paperback version. You can get
this one on Amazon in the US and the UK and this one everywhere worldwide. If you've already got
it if you've already bought one please make sure you leave a review on Amazon because that helps me
and it also helps others who are trying to decide what to get. This makes a beautiful
Christmas gift for anyone if you like me and you like to do your Christmas shopping early,
cross someone off your list and get a copy of the book with thanks to my amazing patrons
for all of your support and all of your beautiful comments over on Patreon it is
a lovely community so if you'd like to join them head over to patreon.com/h2ct to check
that out. Make it a great week by being kind to others and I will see you on Friday ❤️