Welcome to HowToCookThat, I'm Ann Reardon and today we're going to make a Raindrop Cake
but I'm going to show you how to make it look pretty using something a little bit scary.
A few years ago now I showed you how to make flowers and spiders in half spheres and I'll
link you to that video at the end of this one.
But today it's just a quick bonus video to show you how to make it in a sphere.
To make it you'll need water, citric acid for flavour, sugar, powdered or leaf gelatin
and more water and I'll put all the recipe quantities on my HowToCookThat.net website
and I'll link to that below.
Place the gelatin in the water.
Now as I said you can use powdered gelatin for this but leaf gelatin sets clearer and
it has no taste so it's a bit better in this sort of recipe.
You could also use Agar for the clear part but to me it has quite a strong flavour so
I prefer the gelatin but I'll put all the recipe quantities for the variations on the
website for you.
Leave those to soak and put the citric acid and sugar into a pan and heat that until the
sugar is dissolved.
And as I said the citric acid is just for flavour, if you want to use less sugar or
add some other essence to it you can as long as it's a clear one obviously, like peppermint
essence, whatever you want to add in there you can.
Once it boils remove it from the heat and by now the gelatin will be soft like this.
Squeeze out as much water from it as you can and add that into the hot mixture in the pan
and you'll see it will just dissolve almost instantly.
Pour the mixture into hemisphere moulds, and I'm using the lids of cupcake cases, so it
makes it easy to see what we are doing later.
For the flower part we need gelatin, water and sweetened condensed milk.
Pour the water over the gelatin and stir it well.
Now because this part is not clear you don't need to use the leaf gelatin for this.
After a couple of minutes the gelatin will be softened like this.
Heat it in the microwave to melt it and then stir through the sweetened condensed milk.
Now you can't use Agar for this part of the recipe because Agar sets at room temperature
so it will set in the needle, whereas gelatin sets when it's refrigerated.
Split it into small bowls and add some food colouring for the colours that you want your
flowers to be.
Take your set jelly and using a hot melon-baller scoop out half a circle of jelly, just very
carefully there, right in the middle.
Draw up some coloured mixture into the syringe and then twist the needle in to place.
Insert the needle into the jelly and squeeze a little of the mixture into it and pull the
needle back out.
Use your needle tip to slice across the jelly to make little petals and the coloured mixture
will fill the split that you make.
Continue to add more petals, going around, and then once you're happy with the number
of petals you have and what it looks like in the middle there, flip it over and place
it down and continue to add more petals around the outside to fill it up.
Just doing layers, doing one circle and then another circle just a little higher.
And you can repeat that process with different colours for different flowers.
If you want jagged edges to the petals just move the needle up and down as you go across.
And that makes it look a bit more like a carnation there.
And you can make all sorts of flowers by just changing the shape of your petals.
Now you can see with this one there are gaps at the base of the petals because they are
not quite close enough together.
If you get that you can fix that just by adding a lighter coloured jelly just in the hole
there so it fills the gaps.
And that looks much better.
Now use some green and add little leaves around the base of the flower, I think these have
a special name but I forget what it is, let me know in the comments if you know.
And then fill the middle with green.
Once that's set melt a little of the clear jelly in the microwave and add it to the top
then grab a clear half, take it out of it's mould and add that on top.
Take your green and inject a stem down the middle, then leave that in the fridge to set.
Once that is set place the base of the mould in hot water.
This is just going to melt the very outside layer of the gelatin.
Turn it over and give it a little squeeze to loosen it and there you have a water drop
with your flower in it.
These are so pretty.
Subscribe to HowToCookThat for more cakes, chocolates and desserts.
Click here for the Spider in jelly, it's not a real spider.
Here for the recipe and here for my channel.
And if you want a jelly-based dessert that tastes amazing you have to try these dessert
tubes, they're so much fun to eat.
Make it a great week and I'll see you on Friday.
And it also tastes like a cloud, floating in the sky with icecream on top of them, and
the cloud is made out of fairy floss.