Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Vanilla Cake

mmmmmmm

When my mom's boyfriend said he wanted vanilla cake for his birthday I was initially a little disappointed, I'm ashamed to admit. I have been all into stuff like salted caramel, ganaches, molten chocolate, souffles, etc., and I wanted to do something really fancy. I realized quickly that I was being hard on vanilla. Why can't vanilla be fancy? Somehow the first thing I had pictured was some Betty Crocker vanilla box mix cake (I swear I have nothing against Betty, box mix is easy and delicious, that's why it exists) with can frosting and "Happy Birthday Dan" scrawled illegibly with some of that weird "gel" frosting that stains your mouth forever. But it didn't have to be this way, no it did not. It had to be my way, which was a 3-layer vanilla bean cake with a brown butter vanilla bean buttercream. And it was delicious.

I used this recipe from Sweetapolita altered a bit for the cake. It was pretty easy, and the copious amounts of egg whites ensure that it's quite fluffy. The frosting I sort of made up as I went along, and went something like this:

4 sticks butter
3-4 cups powdered sugar
3 tbsp milk (you can use more or less depending on what consistency you want)
1 vanilla bean, scraped
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup cream cheese (totally optional)

I first browned the butter, which took a while because it was a lot of butter. Once it was a nice nutty brown with those little flecks of deliciousness, I stuck the whole pan in the fridge to harden the butter back up some. One the butter was soft but no longer a liquid, I whipped it up with a mixer and added the rest of the ingredients. You don't need the cream cheese if you want to keep this a traditional buttercream, but I like my frostings a little more tart, so I added it in at the last minute.
Yum! Vanilla cake that was definitely not boring.

frosting in my great-grandmother's apron!