Caramel Apple Birthday Cake

Why hello you gorgeous people!

So it would seem that all my assessments are over... for now. AND it would also seem that the weather is grey, wet and horrible, perfect for staying indoors. AND it would ALSO seem that it was my dad's birthday yesterday... so what can I say?

The stars aligned. I just had to bake a great big birthday cake.

This cake is a bit of an homage to the transition of the seasons (it was kind of autumn a couple of weeks ago, but now, it's, kind of winter.) I thought the flavour combination, and the rich earthy tones of the icing and caramel would...

Ah I'm just kidding, I just made this cake because my dad really likes apple cake! And I kind of like caramel. So I googled 'caramel apple cake', and there it was, from "baked" (I really like these guys, it's a shame I didn't know about them when I was in New York last year!)

I tweaked the recipe for the icing (I just used Heather from Sprinkle Bakes' salted caramel icing, and also the hard caramel decorations - from her new cookbook, which is amazing!)

This cake looks really impressive, but really, it's not that difficult. And the apple cake is so soft and light, and SO APPLE-Y!

You can also decorate the cake however you want, I had never made hard caramel before, so I just kind of improvised drizzling the stuff all over some baking paper, and stuck it all over the cake however I pleased! You don't even have to make the caramel or the icing if you don't want to, I think the apple cake would be really nice just made as a loaf cake.

But as a whole, the cake and icing and hard caramel are sooooo good. Did I mention it was good?

Folks, you will need to crumb coat this one. See above.

I just love the hard caramel on top of the cake. The organic shapes look really impressive, and they taste good too! Just like the toffees you used to get from the canteen and school fetes when you were young. I made some little caramel droplets too, which I decorated the base with.

Dad had a really good birthday. I love you Papa C!

Caramel Apple Birthday Cake

Makes a big birthday cake, serves 20

Ingredients:

For the apple sauce:

6 red apples, peeled, cored and chopped.

1 cup apple juice

3 tbsp butter

2 tbsp honey

1 tbsp brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

For the apple cake:

4 cups plain flour

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

1 tsp cinnamon

180g (1 1/2 cups) unsalted butter, softened

2 1/2 cups caster sugar

2 large eggs

4 cups home-made apple sauce

For the salted caramel buttercream:

3/4 cup caster sugar

6 tbsp water

3/4 cup lite thickened cream

3 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups unsalted butter

1 tsp salt

3 cups icing (confectioner's) sugar

For the hard caramel:

1 cup caster sugar

1 tbsp lemon juice

Method:

Apple Sauce:

In a medium saucepan, combine all ingredients, and stir to combine. Cook voer medium heat for 15 to 20 minutes, until apples are soft. Allow to cool, then mash with a fork or potato masher until all solids are removed. Cool till room temperature.

Apple Cake:

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius. Line 3 round cake tins of the same size with baking paper.

In a large mixing bowl, sift flour, soda, powder, salt and cinnamon. Set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy and combined.

Add eggs, and mix until combined.

Add the sugar mixture to the flour mixture, alternating additions with the apple sauce. Stir until combined, making sure no pockets of flour are left unnoticed!

Divide the batter between cake tins. Smooth tops, and bake for 40-45 minutes, or until an inserted skewer comes out clean. Transfer cakes to a wire rack and allow to cool completely.

Salted Caramel Buttercream:

In a saucepan, stir together sugar and water, bringing to the boil over a medium-high heat. Cook without stirring until the sugar has liquified and has turned a deep amber colour. Be careful of burning it though! You must watch carefully!

Remove from the heat and add in cream and vanilla, stirring to comnbine. Allow to cool until barely warm, yet still pourable.

With an electric mixer, beat sugar, salt and butter until light and fluffy. Reduce speed to low and add icing sugar. Add the caramel, and beat again until misture is light and airy (about 4 minutes). Frosting is now ready to use.

Hard Caramel decorations:

Fill your kitchen sink halfway with icy cold water. Line baking trays with baking paper.

Put sugar and lemon juice in a saucepan and heat over a medium-high heat. Cook without stirring, instead swirling the pan a little, until caramel is a nice amber colour. Remove from the heat and sit the saucepan in the iced water for about 3 seconds to stop further cooking. The pan will sizzle!

Working really quickly, use a spoon to gather caramel in the sauce and drizzle it over the baking paper, in whatever crazy shape you want. You could go for circles, waves or just "abstract" drizzles like I did. Leave to harden.

Assembly:

Place one of the cooled cake layers on a large plate and level off the top using a bread knife. Spread a little of the buttercream over the top so it fully and evenly covers the cake. Repeat with other layers, stacking one upon the other as you go. Put the last layer of cake bottom-side up, so it is nice and flat.

Crumb coat the cake: Using a spatula, spread a thin layer of buttercream over the whole cake. (See photo above). Place in fridge for 30 minutes until the cake is chilled (this will make it easier to ice later).

Once chilled, evenly spread the rest of the icing all over the cake. Now, with the hardened caramel, go crazy! Stick whatever shapes you have all over the cake. Have fun with it!

Congratulations! And also (if applicable), Happy Birthday!

Fading Chocolate Layer Cake For A Very Sweet Sixteenth

Happy January everybody!

How are you liking 2012 so far? I hope it's treating you well. Me? Oh, well I am currently loving this year because four days ago I SAW THE FLEET FOXES AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE! Oh, how glorious they were. They are my absolute favourite band, and they exceeded all my expectations entirely. It was like they were heavenly beings sent down to earth to sing for us wee human beings.

Here you can find a link to a video of one of my favourite songs of the night, Blue Ridge Mountains. This video was from 2008, so Robin Pecknold's hair was a lot shaggier than it was the other night, but the performance was just as beautiful as this one, and even better because of the amazing acoustics in the opera house.

So I'm still kind of on a high from that concert. It was just the best thing ever!

Ok Angela, stop and breathe. Whew.

Anyway, onto some of my other favourite things! Birthdays, cakes, baking, yay! Yesterday I had the privelige of baking a cake for my sister Lizzie's birthday party - she's turning sixteen! Gasp! She's going for her L's and gah she'll be able to drive and how did this happen? Ahh, they grow up so fast.

She had a really cute picnic thing up in the Hunter Valley, and I got to bake!

She loves chocolate (and hey, who doesn't?), so I decided to jump on this food blog fad of making "fading" layer cakes. People also do those ones where they make each layer a colour of the rainbow, so when you cut into the cake, a dazzling spectrum of colours peeps out at you! So instead of doing the colours using mountains of food colouring, I decided to attempt to make a cake where dark chocolate faded into creamy vanilla. The layers worked really well, and were really defined - they went down a treat at the party. I also used my brand new piping set that I got for Christmas to pipe on the vanilla bean buttercream on the outside.

This was my first attempt to make a full-on massive layer cake with smooth icing, so I am pretty damn proud of myself! It took the whole day and I was absolutely covered with sticky sugary substances, but it was so worth it! It's not perfect, but I love it!

Also, I had heard of crumb coating before, so I gave it a shot, and found that it was totally necessary to catch any naughty crumbs that wanted to be stuck in the outside layer of icing! I still got some stuck in there, the little fiends, but my buttercream was vanilla bean, so the crumbs just look like little vanilla seeds! Yay, I'm so sneaky!

{Here's the recipe - inspired by the Purple Sprinkles Ombre Cake that Steph from Raspberri Cupcakes made, except with chocolate! Initial chocolate cake recipe adapted from 'Chocolate Magic' by Kate Shirazi, basic buttercream from Raspberri Cupcakes.}

Fading Chocolate Layer Cake with Vanilla Bean Buttercream

Makes one hell of a birthday cake - 5 layers, serves about 20.

Ingredients:

For the cakes:

450g unsalted butter, softened

900g caster sugar

3 tsp vanilla essence

6 large eggs

450ml milk

10 tbsp sour cream

400g self-raising flour

6.5 tbsp cocoa powder

250g dark chocolate

100g unsalted butter, extra

For the icing:

900g icing sugar

450g unsalted butter

2 tsp vanilla essence

2 tsp vanilla bean paste, or the seeds from 2 vanilla bean pods

[Optional:]

Milk/Dark chocolate freckles

Royal icing - 1 large egg white, 1 cup icing sugar, food colouring

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Grease and line however many uniform cake tins you possess (20cm  diameter would be ideal).

In a large moxing bowl, beat butter, sugar and vanilla together until thick, pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat well after each addition. Add the milk and sour cream and beat well (it may look curdled, but don't worry, that's what it's meant to do). Sift both flours over the mixture , and fold until combined.

Divide the mixture into 5 separate bowls. In one bowl, sift in 3 tbsp of the cocoa, in the next, 2 tbsp, in the next, 1 tbsp, in the next, 1/2 tbsp, and leave one plain vanilla. Now, in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of boiling water, melt the butter and chocolate until smooth and glossy. To the darkest cake batter, add about 1/2 of the melted chocolate, and to the second darkest, 2/3 of the chocolate that remains in your bowl. To the third darkest, add the remaining chocolate. The mixtures should have a defined gradient of shading. Bake 2 (or however many cake tins you have) of the mixtures in the oven for 45 min, or until a skewer comes out clean. Cover the rest of the mixtures with cling wrap. Once the first batch is cooked and transfered to a wire rack to cool completely, repeat with the other batters until all are baked and COMPLETELY cooled. With a breadknife, trim the tops of the cakes so they are flat and level.

To make the buttercream, sift the icing sugar into a large mixing bowl, and add the softened butter. Mix with an electric whisk until fluffy and light. Add both the vanilla substances and mix well.

Stack the cakes on top of each other, darkest first, and in between each layer, spread a thin layer of buttercream, spreading almost to the edges.

Once all the cakes are stacked, crumb coat the cake - using a spatula, thinly coat the whole outside of the cake so you can still see the crumbs. See how they get caught in the icing? Refrigerate for 15 min.

Once refrigerated, spread a thicker layer of buttercream evenly over the cake. I used a spatula which I intermittently dipped in warm water, and ran vertically up the cake. Place freckles around the base of the cake.

To make the royal icing - whisk eggwhite until slightly frothy, then sift in enough icing sugar to make a stiff, yet pliable paste. Colour as desired, and, using a piping bag, pipe whatever the hell you want onto your cake!