Somehow it’s always the simplest recipes that manage to throw me for a loop.

Remember this line from my recent post on the photo shoot where I first made these supposedly simple matcha bars?..

“The bars were based on a similar recipe that I’ve made countless times, so I knew they’d turn out. The only thing I was really trying to figure out with this test was how much matcha to use and how long to bake them.”

Yeah, well, I ended up needing to make these 4 times to get them right. It cannot be said that I don’t care about you guys. I guess tasting 4 different versions of matcha bars wasn’t too bad though. 😉

When I made them for Jimi at the photo shoot, they really did taste incredible. But it was clear that I’d over-baked them and I wondered if maybe omitting the almond meal would help the green tea flavor to stand out more. On my second attempt I replaced the almond meal with more flour and was pretty pleased with how the dough looked before baking. But then…I over-baked them again.

No matter! I’ll try again! And so I did with the same all-flour recipe and this time I managed to bake them correctly. Hooray!

But wait…this all-flour version is so dry. And the crumbles are the texture of sand, and the whole thing crumbles into a sandy mess when you try to take a forkful of it. On top of that, I hated the photos I had taken of it. The bars looked brown and drab, not bright and green and springy.

And here we are, come round full circle to the original recipe, just not over-baked. Finally. I swear they really are easy to make, I totally made it hard on myself for no reason.

I hope you try them. The subtle grassy tea note is mellowed perfectly by the sweet jam. I love to eat them warm while the jam is still all molten and melty. They would be excellent as an Easter dessert or brunch pastry.

I’ve had a hard time finding matcha in regular grocery stores that isn’t either of terrible quality or terribly expensive. I saw a single ounce being sold at Whole foods for $28. I don’t care how organic or artisan or made of magic it was, that’s a sucker price. I’ve been buying the 4oz. bag of this matcha from Amazon(full disclosure: this is an affiliate link) for less than $10 and have been really pleased with it. It may not be high quality enough for drinking, but it’s plenty nice for baking. I store it in the freezer between uses to keep it fresh and it’s been just as good as the day I bought it for several months now.

Mmmmm….jammy.

Have you ever baked with matcha (green tea powder) before?

March 27, 2013 Alayna Discussion, Recipes 12 comments

Thank you to everyone for having such nice things to say about the wedding cake I made. I’m definitely still learning and each time I come away with more knowledge on how I could have done it better.

This time, I kept a running spreadsheet as I was working so I could get a feel for what the actual costs and quantities were.

Here’s what I used:

• 26 eggs
• 6 lbs. powdered sugar
• nearly a gallon of milk
• 36 oz. shortening
• 18 sticks of butter
• 26 tsp. vanilla
• 11 cups granulated sugar
• 16 and 1/2 cups flour
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. salt
• approx. 5 lbs. fondant
• 3 oz. navy blue gel dye
• and a cup or two of cornstarch

Crazy, right? Even crazier is that I bought more than I used of pretty much everything. I’ve got 3 boxes of butter chilling out in my fridge that I didn’t need, and an entire tub of shortening. Keeping a spreadsheet like this will help me to not over-buy in the future as I become more familiar with exactly how much stuff I need.

So, what does it cost to make a 3 tier wedding cake? This one was about $108. Nearly half of that is the price of fondant. I could have gotten the cost down if I’d payed attention to the price of some items and was more aware of exactly how much of each item I really needed. I think I could recreate the exact same cake for $80 if I had it to do over again.

That’s just the cost of the ingredients though. I spent around 40 hours on that cake, so if I were to charge someone $200 for it, that would have me making about $2.30 an hour after subtracting the ingredient costs. Not exactly lucrative. I’ll need to figure out how to get my costs down, and more importantly my time expenditure down, before I can even think about trying to use this skill as a source of income. I’m more than happy to do it for family and absorb all the costs myself, but I’m not interested in working that hard for spare change for people I barely know.

I’m making another cake in September for some friends of ours and I will be charging them the material costs this time, but still no labor costs. I’m still really happy to do this though because I see it as a gift we can give our friends, and it’s another trial run to see if I can lower my costs and time expended. I’m pretty excited to use this cake as my little “guinea pig” to show me if this is a viable business venture for me.

One great thing about making wedding cakes…leftover jam.

I canned the rest of the strawberry vanilla jam and I’ve been putting it on everything. I can’t believe I’ve almost finished this jar! I’ve already bought some figs I intend to turn into jam too. I’m hooked!

July 10, 2012 Alayna Discussion 17 comments

If you’d like to follow along with the whole process: Check out how I made the strawberry jam filling, watch me work with fondant, add the finishing touches, and see the finished cake!

So that was the jam, but I also used Monday to whip up 6+ pounds of buttercream frosting. Sounds like a lot, but it’s actually really quick and easy to make, only I had to do it in 3 batches because it wouldn’t all fit in the mixer at one time.

For a 2 lb. batch of vanilla buttercream which can be multiplied easily…

Now, I normally wouldn’t touch shortening with a ten foot pole for my baking projects, but it is absolutely invaluable for frosting cakes that may be exposed to hot, humid weather for long periods of time. This is; of course, a major concern in Georgia, and sure enough Caitlin’s cake ended up sitting out in the 80+ degree weather for a few hours before it was cut into. The fondant on the outside of the cake suffered a bit, but the buttercream inside refused to melt. Shortening may be unhealthy, greasy, and take away some of the rich butter flavor of an all-butter frosting; but while it may start to get glossy in the heat, it just won’t melt. And you know, the finished frosting tastes really good too, so I’m not going to complain.

Anyway, the next day I got to baking the cake layers so I’d have somewhere to put all that frosting and jam. For the next few days, I only got pictures of baking the biggest tier, and frosting the smallest tier; so though the pictures below happened on different days they’ll still give you the idea of the flow of things.

I used the same vanilla cake recipe as last time because it’s really simple to prepare, it makes a sturdy and durable cake, and it has a rich buttery flavor. It’s a little denser than a typical wedding cake, but I personally enjoy the texture. It just tastes and feels more homemade.

Here’s the recipe I use that will fill two 9-inch pans…

My Favorite Vanilla Cake

Ingredients

• 2 sticks room temp. unsalted butter
• 2 cups white sugar
• 4 large room temp. eggs
• 4 tsp. vanilla extract
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 and 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 cup room temp. milk

Cooking Directions

1. Butter and flour two 9-inch baking pans and set aside.
2. Cream together butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.
3. Add vanilla, then eggs one at a time, mixing between each addition.
4. Sift together flour and baking powder and add to batter in 3 additions, mixing between each.
5. Slowly pour in milk while batter mixes on lowest speed, then beat on medium-high for several seconds to fully incorporate.
6. Pour into baking pans and spread evenly with a spatula. Bang bottom of pans on a hard suface a few times to bring any air bubbles to the top of the batter.
7. Bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 40 minutes.
8. Allow to cool in baking pans until pans cool enough to handle, then turn out onto cooling racks and allow to come to room temperature before use.

This recipe can also be halved, which comes in handy for the smaller tiers of cake which use one and a half batches to fill two 6-inch pans.

So after the cakes are completely cool, they get a haircut. The puffy muffin tops get sliced off and the brown crust is removed from the undersides of any layers that face the center of the cake.

My favorite way to do this is to use a small pairing knife first to make an incision all the way around the cake, then I take a longer knife and sweep towards the middle from all sides until the muffin top slides right off. At this point you should break off a slice of muffin top and slather it with frosting so you can “test it for deliciousness.”

As you can see above, the bottom layer is on a round of cardboard for ease of moving it around and for added stability.

For the smallest tier of cake, I was able to just bake two really tall layers and slice them each in half for 4 total. I wouldn’t try this trick with the bigger layers though, they’d be too heavy and flimsy and just break apart. It’s hard enough to move them around without breaking as it is.

Time to frost! I decided to get all fancy and purchase a cake decorating turntable this time around. Best $20 I could have spent. It made frosting so much easier and I’ll definitely still get use out of it for other baking projects throughout the year.

Layering with more frosting, a big dollop of jam, and piled high with yet more frosting to start the crumb coat…

The crumb coat is a thin layer of frosting that helps to seal in the moisture and crumbs. It keeps your cake fresh and spotless. You basically just glob on frosting all over, then use either an offset spatula or scraper tool to scrape it all back off. This is also when you want to pay attention to how your cake layers are lined up; once you put it into the fridge for the buttercream to crust up, there’s really no more moving them around.

After about about an hour in the fridge for the buttercream to crust (become slightly hard and crispy) I took it back out to frost. It’s the same technique as the crumb coat, only you apply less pressure when removing the excess frosting to leave more behind. At this stage you want to work to get the frosting as smooth as possible. Here mine is crusting up in the fridge. It’ll get one more polish with the scraper once it hardens to remove the last of the imperfections.

I also went ahead and made some bases for each layer to sit on out of some foam board from a shipping container and covered them in foil. Right now, this is the best solution I have for transporting my cakes undamaged. We have some plastic angled bracket things that velcro to the fabric material in the back of my car and we use those to corral the cake bases in place. They’re secured to the bases by a bit of double-sided tape. That makes it easy for me to pry them up, but hard for them to slide around.

So that’s it for the frosting. Next time we talk about my mortal enemy – fondant. My eyes are rolling back in my head just thinking about it.

June 22, 2012 Alayna Discussion 90 comments