Making Chocolate Cake

Randi Goldman: Hi! I am Randi; today we are showing you how to make a Chocolate cake. The first thing I am going to do, I have my butter measure, four ounces of butter I am going to put into my mixing bowl with a pedal attachment. And we are going to add the sugar, a cup of sugar, turn on our machine. We want to cream the butter and the sugar, creaming will make it light and fluffy. In this bowl I am going to put four egg whites, these are large sized eggs. I am going to wait a few minutes until the sugar and butter have been creamed. In the meantime we have our cake flour, thats already been sifted, cocoa power, Dutch processed cocoa. Of course this is my absolute favorite, thats already been sifted. We are adding this together, our baking soda, and we have in another container the water for the chocolate cake and the vanilla, they both can be combined. There is 11 ounces of water and two teaspoons of pure vanilla extract. We have a little bit of cream of tartar that I will be using for the meringue. This is a two part process.

The chocolate base and the meringue is separate. I like to do them both at the same time just so I am not waiting, I am sure most people dont have two mixers at home, thats fine, we have to do one part first, the chocolate mixer and then the egg whites would be done separate. You dont do the egg whites first because they actually can fall and lose their volume. With the egg whites you want to make sure to use the whip attachment. This is where the volume comes in, now we will also periodically straight this bowl with the sugar and the butter. That was one cup of sugar and four ounces of butter. The meringue, we have four egg whites and three-fourths a cup of sugar.

We are going to turn this on, would be medium high to high speed. Again this is how we incorporate air with the whip. So next thing we are going to do is add a small amount of flour and with our butter and sugar. Let that blend and of course we are going to keep an eye on our egg white, when they look frothy like the ocean we add our cream of tartar. It helps to stabilize the white, give them strength. When you can see the marks from the whip in the egg white we are going to add a little bit of sugar at a time. Let that incorporate, always make sure you scrape the bowl down. This helps to make sure the cake is mixed thoroughly and you dont have any lumps. See how nice this is whipping up.

Now we are going to alternate the flour and the water. This way we are gradually adding the ingredients. Again I am going to scrape it down in between each mix. Help the flour to be completely dissolved thats why we want to mix at a high speed. I am continuing to add a tablespoon or two at a time of the sugar to the meringue base. You do want to make sure to turn this down to a slow speed so the water doesnt spouter at you. The same thing with the flour, if its too fast, it will fly out into your face. The meringue is almost done, see how nice and stiff that is and watch. Okay, that is nice and smooth; we are going to take this off, of course you always to clean the paddle.

And now I am going to pour the chocolate in the meringue, put a little bit at a time. Fill this in, make sure its well incorporated and then we are going to pour the rest in. put it into two 8 inch round pans. Now we have our 8 inch pans, I am actually going to show putting equal amounts of batter in both pans and then we assemble our cake, we will cut both cakes in half to make layers and put the ganache inside. This also actually helps to make the cakes bake faster if it was all in one pan, it would take a lot longer. We have our two pans ready to go; we have to make sure that before we mixed our cakes, the oven is preset to 325 degrees. We want to leave the oven on for about 30 minutes before to make sure it has equalized the temperature, if you are not sure if your oven is working correctly. You can always buy an oven thermometer; make sure its been calibrated right.

We are going to then show you how to make a simple syrup and ganache. The simple syrup helps to add moisture and flavor into your cake and the ganache is we can use as a filling or an icing or both. Ganache is the soft wonderful part inside of a truffle.