Hello Everyone
Hands up who makes their own birthday cake? I know it seems a little sad to some people, that I make a cake for myself and don’t have someone making one for me. As a baker, you might imagine that making a cake for myself might be a little bit of a bus man's holiday but actually, the opposite is true. Baking is a constant in my life, but it’s almost entirely done for work reasons, I rarely actually bake simply for the hell of it, to relax and to make something simply to enjoy it. My birthday cake is that opportunity, one of those rare times I bake like I did when I first started out, with the music blasting and just enjoying the process.
This year's cake is based around a classic genoise, a whisked sponge that is incredibly light; flavoured with a lemon soak, filled with a rich and tangy lemon cream and finished with a black sesame Swiss meringue buttercream. Before we get to the recipe, can I tell you how much I hated the look of this cake? When I first made it I was feeling quite burnt out and totally uninspired (so much for enjoying the process). All of that showed on the final cake, it looked so bad, I hated it. I eventually scrapped it back and started over, keeping it simple with a quickly piped border and a few simple decorative elements. You can ask to see the original cake, I have the pictures, but I will never share them, it was really that bad, I was a little embarrassed by it.
Okay, let's talk genoise. Genoise is a member of the sponge family, cakes that rise because of eggs, not because of chemical leaveners. As the eggs are whisked, air is added and when the cake bakes these pockets of air expand making the cakes rise. This category of recipes includes cakes like chiffon and angel food cake.
Genoise Sponge - is a whisked sponge where whole eggs are whisked with sugar and is made with butter (or traditionally clarified butter)
Chiffon Cake - is made where the yolks are whisked with sugar and then the flour and oil to make a paste, with the egg whites whisked with sugar and folded into the batter.
Angel Food Cake - is made by whisking egg whites and sugar with flour folded into the meringue.
You can see these three cakes are all similar but made with slightly different methods and with slightly varying ingredients and varying ratios of those ingredients. In this recipe I follow the style and ratios you’d expect of a classic genoise but use olive oil instead of butter, to add a little floral note to the cake. This means this cake is technically a hybrid of genoise and chiffon but really, this is still a genoise at heart.
If you’ve never made a genoise before, they can seem daunting as it involves a very light batter and lots of gentle folding, but don’t be worried, I find them quite approachable and with some helpful tips you’ll be making perfect genoise in no-time at all.
Whisking
The base of the genoise is whisked eggs and sugar. Traditionally you add the two together in a large bowl and set the bowl over a pan of simmering water and whisk together until the mixture is between 50-60C. This process breaks down the proteins in the eggs which allows air to be incorporated into the eggs quicker and more effectively. You can skip this process but the whisking will take a little longer.
Once the egg mixture is at the correct temperature it is removed from the heat and, using an electric mixer (for the love of god don’t try to make this without at least a hand mixer, doing this with a balloon whisk would be hell), is whisked until the mixture has tripled in volume and reached the ribbon stage. The ribbon stage simply means, when the beaters are lifted from the batter the batter falls from the beaters and forms a ribbon which holds itself atop the surface of the batter for at least a few seconds, before sinking back into the bowl. Once you have achieved this texture, take a look in the bowl. What you’ll see is a very light foam with a lot of irregularly sized bubbles, some big and some small. This uneven texture, especially the larger holes, would make for an unevenly textured cake; To prevent this from happening you make one simple addition to your technique. Turn the mixer to low speed and mix for a few minutes until the batter is shiny and very creamy looking, with no obvious bubbles. I don’t know this for sure but I believe this technique, of slowly whisking the finished batter, originates in South Korea where genoise-based cakes are very popular. Wherever it comes from, it really helps with the final texture of the cake so is well worth doing. It is also worth noting that when you are whisking the eggs and sugar it is basically impossible to over-mix. Because the egg yolks act as emulsifiers, even using a high-powered mixer, you’d struggle to over-mix the foam.
Folding in the Flour
Once you have your egg foam, you need to incorporate the flour. I like to use a 70/30 mix of wheat flour and starch (in this cake cornflour/cornstarch) which leads to an especially light and tender cake. To incorporate the flour we need to carefully fold the flour into the egg foam. To do this I like to pour the foam into a large wide bowl. You want to sieve a third of the flour over the foam and very gently fold it together. Doing this in three additions, using a wide bowl, means the flour is incorporated easily and without forming pockets of flour that will cause the batter to collapse as you try and work it out through further folding.
Fat
After the flour has been added we then need to add our fat, in this case olive oil. The fat is much more dense than the batter itself and adding it straight to the batter can result in a loss of volume and a denser cake. To prevent this we use something known as a liaison or sacrificial batter. We add a small amount of the finished batter to the fat and whisk them together until they emulsify. This lightens the fat and makes it much easier to incorporate into the main batter, folding it in like you did the flour.
Baking
After all of this, you are left with a light genoise batter. To bake the cake, the batter is poured into a cake pan that has been lined on the base and sides with parchment paper. If you only greased the tin and added the batter the finished cake would be much shorter than it should be, the fat would prevent the cake from clinging to the sides as it rose, resulting in a short dense cake. Once the batter is added we have one last thing to do, something that might seem to be the antithesis of everything we have just done. We are going to drop the cake pan from a few inches in the air. This is our final step to even out the texture of the cake and removes any large air pockets trapped in the batter. Once the cake is baked we do this process again. Instead of popping air bubbles this time, this action actually helps to prevent the cake from shrinking as it cools.
Soaking Syrup
If you look at the recipe you might realise that this cake is very low in fat and sugar, compared with other cakes. The finished cake is basically a sponge that needs soaking. To create a cake that is delicious and not overly dry, a soaking syrup is used. At its core this is simply one part water and one part sugar, simmered together until the sugar has dissolved. But beyond that, the world is your oyster, you can flavour the syrup with all manner of ingredients. In this recipe, I replaced the water with lemon juice but you can use tea, coffee, spices and of course, a little alcohol works wonders in soaking syrup. If you read my earlier post on mango tarte tropezienne the mango pit syrup I shared would be wonderful used here as a soaking syrup.
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