Miss Trunchbull: "Her sweat, and blood went into this cake,"
"and you will not leave this platform until you have consumed the entire confection!" [smacks table with riding crop]
Cooky: "Entire confection!"
Cooky: "See ya at lunch." Miss Trunchbull: "Thank you, Cooky."
Hey, what's up guys? And welcome back to: "Binging with Babish",
where, this week, we're taking on the gigantic chocolate cake from "Matilda",
which involves some gigantic chocolate cake pans.
Or, regular cake pans. Or- just, big cake pans.
We're going to start by thoroughly buttering each pan,
in order to prevent stickage later in life.
I'm trying to go for size here,
so I'm using 10 inch cake pans,
but I recommend using 9 inch cake pans.
After you butter them,
tap some flour around the inside
until they are thoroughly coated.
Then drop down a layer of parchment paper,
before we start making our cake batter.
We're going to use 3 and a 1/4 cups of cake flour,
3 cups of sugar,
1 and a 1/2 cups unsweetened cocoa powder,
A tablespoon of baking powder,
2 teaspoons of baking soda,
and a teaspoon of salt.
Whisk until thoroughly combined,
before assembling our wet ingredients.
We're starting with a cup and a half of buttermilk,
four large eggs, and a half cup of vegetable oil.
Whisk very gently to combine (because you didn't get a large enough bowl to put them in),
and add to the dry ingredients.
Whisk together until no lumps remain,
and you have a nice, smooth cake batter.
Divide evenly amongst your three prepared pans,
and half-way through,
realise that you don't have enough batter to accommodate three cake pans,
So, it's time to prepare an additional half-batch of batter.
Which is convenient,
because I forgot to add two of the most important ingredients:
Blood and sweat.
So grab some of your sterile lancets,
press firmly against the fleshy part of your middle finger,
and squeeze out a few delicious drops.
Now, I got a little bit of blood in there,
but I want to really up the blood content of this.
So, I'm going to enlist the help of Dan Pashman from The Sporkful.
Dan, you ready?
Dan: "Ready Andrew. Let's bleed in this cake!"
Alright, so that's got blood covered, but what about sweat?
It was uncharacteristically cool out
the day that I shot this episode,
so I figured the only way to work up a sweat was to go and run a quick 5K.
31 minutes later, not a terrible time, but not great either.
And you can tell that I really went running because of the embarrassing sweat pattern.
And now, between this and the Adventure Time episode,
I can say that I've *literally* put my blood, sweat, and tears into this show.
Now that we've got our second batch of cake batter positively bristling with DNA;
Let's top up our cake tins,
and get these guys into a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven for about 30 to 35 minutes.
In the meantime, we're gonna make our frosting.
Starting by creaming together 8 oz. of cream cheese, with 12 oz. of butter.
Beat these together in the bowl of a stand mixer on medium-high speed until light and fluffy.
Before adding just shy of a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder.
Scrape down the sides of the bowl and beat these together.
Last, but not least: the powdered sugar.
We're going to add a pound and 1/2 of powdered sugar
1 or 2 cups at a time.
Stopping to scrape down the bowl and beat between each cup.
And before you know it you'll have the only part of the cake
worth eating: the frosting.
You can add a little bit of whole milk
to adjust to the thinness or thickness of your liking.
After you've given the cakes about 30 minutes to cool
outside of the oven,
It's time to invert them onto wire racks.
Remove the pans, and, of course, the parchment paper.
There's already enough objectionable things in this cake,
we don't need to add paper to the list.
If necessary, chop off the tops of the cakes
to even them out and make them a little less rounded
And it's time to frost.
Place a generous swath of frosting between each layer, and frost the outside to your liking.
And make sure to get a tiny bit on your apron,
so people know you've been baking.
Cut and serve with a large chef's knife, just like in the movie.
This is the first layer cake I've ever made,
so I'm as surprised as you are that it worked out.
Plate up some slices, grab a friend,
ditch the forks,
and it's time to dig into the cake Bogtrotter-style.
Now, Dan, I think we can both agree
that this was a delicious cake that was made better
when eaten by hand.
Dan: "Also, it was nice to not have an evil headmaster
forcing us to eat it."
Check out The Sporkful's Roald Dahl Special
wherever you get your podcasts.
Babish: "Ugh. Alright, well, that's it.
And then I got a f****n' giant chocolate cake
that I don't feel comfortable giving away."
Dan: "I mean, it's really fine." Babish: "I'm sure it's fine."
Dan: "I would feed it to my kids
if my wife wasn't gonna know that there was any blood and sweat in it."
Babish: "I would give it to my neighbors, but they watch my show!"
*Both laugh*