- Hey, I'm John Kanell.
And today, on Preppy Kitchen,
we're making (bell dinging)
an old-fashioned chiffon cake.
So let's get started.
To make this melt-in-your-mouth cake,
you'll need eggs, vanilla, cream of tartar, a little water,
some baking powder, veggie oil, salt, sugar, and cake flour.
We're using cake flour today because it's gonna give us
a melt-in-your-mouth, soft-as-silk crumb.
First off, we're gonna sift our flour,
sugar, et cetera, into a large bowl.
Cake flour has a funny little tendency to clump up.
So it's actually a nice thing to sift it out.
I want 1 3/4 cups or 210 grams.
Start preheating your oven, 325.
And that rack should be in the lowest position.
Flour is done, time for some sugar.
I want 1 1/4 cups or 250 grams.
I also want one tablespoon of baking powder.
So this cake has baking powder in it.
However, it also has egg whites that are foamed up.
So it's gonna be giving us double lift.
It's gonna be so light and fluffy.
Let's sift this up.
See, that nonsense.
We're gonna give this a quick whisk.
Normally, when we start cakes,
they're gonna say like, butter and flour your pans
or use a parchment paper thing, but here,
like an angel food cake, this is perfectly clean.
You want your cake to climb up to the top.
It comes up so high.
And for that,
we want nice and sticky sides.
So no butter, no flour, no baking spray, nothing.
Grab that mixer.
We need to separate seven eggs,
and you're gonna make, basically, a meringue,
so you need to be careful and follow best practices.
The egg whites go into a small bowl one at a time.
You never know when a yolk is gonna break,
and you can't contaminate the rest of your egg whites
with a broken yolk.
Yolk, medium bowl, egg whites one at a time
into the clean bowl of your stand mixer
or a large bowl if you're using a hand mixer.
And repeat that process over and over
until all the eggs have been separated.
If you've never had a chiffon cake by the way,
oh my gosh, they're really good, and so versatile too.
I'm gonna show you this just really simply prepped
in a tube pan.
You could serve it with some berries,
and whipped cream, and powdered sugar, and it's delicious.
I'm adding 3/4 of a cup of water or 180 ml.
Ooh, I don't know why that spilled.
And 1/2 a cup of vegetable oil, or 120 ml.
In you go.
Lastly, we have two teaspoons of vanilla, that is 10 ml.
Whisk it up until it's totally nice and smooth,
(whisk splashing) light yellow color.
Once your egg yolk mixture is pale and frothy,
you're gonna add this into your cake batter
and mix it until it's just combined.
We're mixing it until it's just combined.
You don't wanna activate the gluten.
And you're left with this weird, thick batter,
like this is not correct, however,
we will be lightening this with egg whites
and cream of tartar, so set this aside right now.
Get that stand mixer out, clean whisk attachment.
So we're adding 1/2 teaspoon of cream of tartar.
We're gonna mix this up, (mixer whirring)
start low to break the egg whites up
'cause they're like little globules.
And now, we're gonna increase speed gradually to high,
and mix these for six minutes until stiff peaks form,
not soft peaks, pretty stiff.
I think that's good, actually.
It's been about six minutes, let's take a look.
That's a stiff peak, you can see,
it stands straight up, it's not flopping over.
And in here, like, that is nice.
One thing I have to tell you though,
this is not the time to take a break, you got to go,
these egg whites will lose their consistency
if they hang out too much.
Grab about a 1/4 of the egg whites,
you can eyeball it of course.
And we're going to fold that into the batter.
It would be great if you could maintain
all the millions and millions of air bubbles
and not pop any, but that's not gonna happen.
So the first bit that you always add in to a batter
is gonna be sacrificial.
It's getting mixed in,
but it's also lightening that batter.
'Cause sometimes it could be very heavy.
It's the same deal if you ever make
like a chocolate roll cake, aka a buche de Noel or Yule log,
this is folded in and I'm seeing almost no streaks.
Now, you're going to fold this in.
So scrape the bottom with your spatula,
and cut in, and bring it around.
It's like you're making little convection currents.
This batter has so much air in it.
And because we used the water and the oil,
it's just gonna stay pillowy soft.
It's a great make-ahead cake,
because unlike a lot of butter-based cakes
where you have to chill them and they get kind of hard,
this one stays really silky soft.
So you see these dark streaks and the light streaks?
We can't have that, it just has to be all homogenous.
So you're bringing up the unmixed batter and cutting it in.
It's like you're just continually scraping the bowl down,
except you cut into it after a scrape.
You're not smashing it down with the flat end
because that would pop a lot of air bubbles.
This is a special tube pan.
We're gonna spoon this batter in.
Now, carefully if you can, get that batter into the pan.
If possible, you don't wanna get it
onto the walls of the pan.
Get all that batter off of your spatula.
And even if you tried really hard, chances are,
there's some big air bubbles hanging on here.
You don't wanna tap the batter down, again,
because you do not wanna pop those air bubbles.
So get a small knife and just run it through the cake,
and do that a couple times.
And it will pop any of those big air bubbles
from when you poured the batter in.
You wanna try and keep the side,
the inside and outside of the pan clean
because this batter is gonna climb all the way to the top
and you want it to have a nice even look.
Any little bits hanging out here are gonna be burnt.
This goes into the oven, 325 Fahrenheit for about an hour,
or until a skewer comes out clean and it springs back.
My cake's out of the oven.
It rose up nice and high, but here's the deal.
These tube pans have feet for a reason,
because it needs to cool completely upside down.
That's how it will maintain its structure
like a delicious bat, and basically,
if you took it out right now, it would just collapse.
So it needs to completely cool upside down.
And then, I'm gonna show you how to take it out
without destroying it.
Once your cake is cooled completely,
and yes, you can leave this in overnight if you want,
It's really easy that way, flip it over.
See, it hasn't sunk at all.
This is the challenging part, so stick with me here.
You're gonna get this out of the pan.
Most of the pans have these feet
and they have rivets on the inside.
So you have to use a little palette knife
or a knife or a spatula, get that in there,
and scrape along the side.
Once you get to the rivets,
you're going to just get in there,
nudge it in, and continue scraping.
So that's the mistake I made.
I used a knife once and I just was going too fast,
and it wasn't the best choice.
Okay, now, I'm gonna use the larger one,
and it's mostly there, I'm just finishing up.
Take it out.
(bright music)
So now, you're gonna flip it over.
Actually, on its side would be better.
Use that spatula and just free it from the top.
This will get totally dusted
in powdered sugar most of the time.
And you can definitely frost these cakes too.
So don't worry if the top gets a little bit messed up.
That's okay, and also, the inside of the tube too.
(bright music)
This cake is pillowy soft, look at this.
It's like a big, marshmallow cake,
delicious situation happening.
Dust it with powdered sugar.
Give it a cut, you can serve it plain, with whipped cream,
berries, frosting, whatever you'd like.
(bright music)
Melt-in-your-mouth amazingness.
I really hope you get a chance to make this recipe.
And if you liked this video,
check out (bell dinging)
my easy cake playlist.