- [John] Hey, I'm John Kanell
and today on Preppy Kitchen,
we're making an old fashioned butter cake.
So let's get started.
First off, set that oven to 325
and we're gonna prep our Bundt pan.
You can make this in a sheet cake pan, totally up to you,
but a Bundt is the classic form for this.
I'm brushing the entire surface really well
with melted butter and then we're gonna flour it up.
This cake has an amazing butter sauce we're gonna pour in,
but you really have to grease that pan up
so it does not stick.
(loud bleep)
Your pan's cold,
so the butter will set up really quickly.
It's not gonna pool all the way in the bottom.
Grab a couple tablespoons of flour
and we're just gonna kick this around
so we get it completely coated.
If you wanna save some time,
you could use baking spray,
but the trade off is you will not have
a beautiful golden finish to the cake.
Baking spray gives you a darker edge when it bakes up.
(upbeat music)
Okay.
My pan's all buttered up.
Some excess flour in here,
but we'll deal with that in a moment.
I'm gonna grab a scale, a big bowl.
We're gonna whisk those dry ingredients up.
Into my bowl I'm adding three cups or 360 grams,
starting with that excess flour.
Now for the rest of the 360 grams.
Adding too much flour is gonna give you a dense cake
that nobody's gonna fall in love with,
so make sure it's exactly correct.
A scale is the best way.
If you don't have one, fluff your flour and sprinkle it
into your measuring cup.
Three quarters of a cup,
three quarters of a teaspoon of baking powder,
half a teaspoon of baking soda
and one teaspoon of salt,
in you go.
And our scale's done.
Just give this a quick whisk.
So a butter cake is supposed to be so rich and buttery
and this one is even better
because we're making a butter sauce to soak
through the cake.
Oh my gosh, it's gonna be amazing.
Set this aside and now onto onto the butter.
Grab a bowl and your paddle attachment.
You could also make this in a regular bowl
with a stand mixer.
You could also make this in a big bowl with a hand mixer.
Some people say butter cake originated
when a baker accidentally flipped the script
and used inverted measurements for butter and flour,
so it was an extra buttery cake,
but there's also different types of butter cake as well.
There's a gooey butter cake,
which is a little bit different than this.
That's more like a butter pie in my opinion, not a cake.
I have one cup or 226 grams
of room temperature soft butter.
We're gonna cream this up for just a second.
(mixer whirring)
That texture looks really nice.
If your butter's a bit cold,
it's just not going to mix well.
So go ahead and pop it into the microwave,
50% power for like ten second bursts.
Make sure you rotate the butter,
otherwise you'll have a giant pool
of melted butter in the middle.
(loud bleep)
I'm gonna add two cups or 400 grams
of sugar right into my bowl.
First one, plop it in.
The second one I'll add as the mixer is running.
Think it'll help you get a better fluffier mixture.
In you go.
Mix that in.
I'm increasing the speed now.
I want this to be light and fluffy.
I'm gonna beat some air into this butter.
So go ahead and move to high.
And we're gonna mix it up for like three to four minutes.
While your butter's mixing up, we're gonna crack
four room temperature large eggs into a bowl.
Just have them ready.
Even though I do it sometimes,
you shouldn't just crack eggs into your bowl.
You don't want any shells.
Those are not delicious.
Move that mixer down to low.
And now we're gonna add four eggs in, one at a time,
and you will probably have to scrape your bowl down.
Maybe medium low, maybe medium.
If you ever have a cake
and it has tons of little pockmarks in it
or little craters,
it's because you had lumps of butter
that were not mixed in well.
And when your cake bakes up,
those lumps of butter just dissolve
and leave a void.
If you look at this mixture, really runny on the top.
The bottom is thick and compacted butter and sugar.
You wanna scrape the bowl down
so you have a nice homogenous mixture,
and it all comes together smoothly and beautifully
with a wonderful crumb.
See, hard butter, runny, very different.
Keep on mixing.
Next egg.
This is actually a recipe a friend of mine
from Los Angeles requested years ago,
and I finally got around to developing it
and making it just right.
She had a wonderful memory of this cake
that had this beautiful butter sauce soaking
throughout that just melted in your mouth
and was golden and amazing.
Took a while to get that right.
Okay, I've also measured out one cup or 240 mils
of whole milk set aside and ready to go.
I just wanna show you this mixture
because some people get concerned when they see this.
It breaks a little bit when the eggs go in,
so you have little granules of butter.
That's totally fine.
As long as it's even in texture throughout,
it's doing what you want.
Now, back to our flour mixture.
While mixing on low,
I'm gonna add my flour alternating with the milk
in three batches, starting and ending with the flour.
Let's get that in there.
Half of the milk, about another cup of the flour mixture,
more milk, or the rest of the milk.
And before I add that last bit in,
I'm just scraping the bottom of the bowl.
(bell ring)
Plop the rest of the flour right in there.
And we're gonna mix this until it's almost combined.
I'll still see streaks of flour in there.
And this recipe is a pure butter cake.
So what we're gonna enjoy is the flavor of the butter
and the sugar coming together with the milk.
It's gonna be beautiful, simple, and just clear.
If you want, you can add other flavors to it too.
You could add vanilla.
Anything else will work well on this cake.
Wash those hands, always important.
Now, come take a look at the bowl.
What we're gonna do is finish it off
but this is the important part.
I have said this before.
I will say it again.
If you overmix your cake batter, good things don't happen.
So you can see there's streaks of flour,
but I stopped the mixer,
and I'm just gonna fold them in.
I'm folding it because at the bottom,
there's some streaks of butter of a butter mixture.
And I just wanna even things out,
get it all mixed up and homogenous
while not overactivating anything
like the gluten in my flour.
This looks great.
It smells amazing.
We can plop this into our prepared pan now.
If you see any parts that are a little bit naked,
you can add some more butter
and just patch them right up.
This cake is amazing, but I'll tell you,
you don't want it to stick.
Because what happens is,
we're gonna make this crazy delicious butter sauce
and pour that right into our hot pan,
which is the best move ever.
But sometimes great things can be a little bit risky.
This is gonna go into our pan right now,
and just plop it in carefully.
We wanna have like no big air gaps
because I wanna see that beautiful shape come through
when it comes out of the oven.
Ribbons of batter coming out of our bowl into the pan,
just as things should be.
Just use your spatula to work this batter
into an even layer so it bakes up nice and even.
We're gonna pop this into the oven,
325 for about an hour,
or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
Then we make that amazing butter sauce.
(clock ticking)
It's been one hour.
My cake looks golden and amazing,
but a skewer will tell me for sure if it's ready.
Ooh, nice and clean.
So it is ready.
I'm gonna make this amazing butter syrup now
and pour that all over the cake.
It's gonna sit in a bath of it
and soak it all up.
It'll be amazing.
But there is a chance your cake can stick.
So what we're gonna do is grab a plate or a cake stand.
Ooh, hot, hot.
Gonna give you a little sneak peek preview
and it'll see if it came up fine.
That looks fine.
Back upside down.
Seems kind of complicated,
but I just wanted to like make sure it released
before I had the syrup in.
Now I'm setting it aside,
and we can make our butter syrup.
For my butter sauce,
I need about five tablespoons or 70 grams
of unsalted butter.
This is gonna go right into a pan
along with a quarter cup of water,
three quarters of a cup of sugar,
and that's right,
my book is available for ordering.
Lots of delicious cake recipes
that I'm so excited for you to try
along with breakfast, brunch, and dinner.
150 grams, three quarters of a cup.
In you go.
I'm placing this on medium heat.
I'm gonna stir constantly until it's all melted.
This comes together in about two minutes.
So it's really quick.
And you can break the butter up a bit
if it's ice cold, like mine is.
I would categorize this cake
as like a delicious Southern style butter cake.
If you want a gooey butter cake,
which is a different thing,
you can let me know in the comments.
They're both delicious.
This one's great though because I love having
a beautiful Bundt on a cake stand
and people just come and take a slice
throughout the day,
have it with your coffee,
little pick me up, disappears right away.
There we go.
This is looking great.
And I have one and a half teaspoons of vanilla in reserve.
That's optional, but it's gonna give you a nice finish.
We add it at the end, though.
So we're looking for this to become opaque.
I'm not gonna have any of these clear moments.
And it'll be slightly thickened.
You don't want to overcook this, though,
because then it's too thick and your cake will stick.
That's opaque.
That's taking it off heat.
Gonna add in my one and a half teaspoons of vanilla.
Smell that, that's amazing.
This is gonna go right onto my cake
for the most delicious bath ever.
Pour that on, and you can move it around.
All the cake should get an equal soak.
So you're gonna see butter gooeyness
all around the edge right here.
It'll get soaked in and we're gonna let this set
in this pan for 15 minutes.
I'll show you what happens next,
but do not let it sit too long
because if it cools down,
it'll get sticky and it might stick.
After about 10 minutes, I jumped the gun a bit,
gonna invert this back onto my cake plate,
which I know will go flawlessly, no problems.
(loud thud)
Did you hear that?
It came out.
Ooh, look at this.
That is very nice.
This cake has the most intense melt
in your mouth crumb with a gorgeous butter flavor.
Hmm, that is a decadent, delicious, amazing cake.
I really hope you get a chance to make this recipe.
And if you like my videos, check out my easy cake playlist.