This past week and a half, I have been very into watching cake making/decorating videos on YouTube. I recently discovered a channel called Man About Cake and it has become one of my new favorite channels to watch. It is hosted by Joshua John Russel who is a professional baker and cake decorator who works for Bluprint/Craftsy and has appeared on a multitude of cooking shows, including Netflix's 'Nailed It.' Every week Joshua creates a new cake and teaches you how to do the different baking/decorating techniques he uses. In addition to this, all of his recipes are free to get and that is exactly what I did.
Since we just had Labor day, and school was canceled for the day, I chose to take the time to try my hand and bake a cake from scratch and decorate it and everything. Since I had been watching 'Man About Cake' I took my inspiration and the techniques I had learned and put them to use. Now, this did require purchasing ingredients and some baking tools that I didn't have already, but even without these, you can still bake like a professional with everything you probably already have in your kitchen.
The cake I chose to make was a vanilla cake with Nutella buttercream frosting covered in fondant and decorated with leftover buttercream. Now looking at this recipe I got from Joshua it seemed a little daunting at first, but it turned out to be easier than I thought it was going to be. The vanilla cake was pretty easy I just had to mix together the ingredients in the right order and quantity and bake which it came out quite well. Especially for trying a brand new recipe.
Now the buttercream is where it got a little tricky. The recipe stated that I needed to use a double boiler to heat the egg whites and sugar, but as a broke college student, I definitely do not own a double boiler, so thanks to the magic of YouTube, a small pot and a ceramic bowl, I was able to makeshift a double boiler that successfully worked. If you don't know what a double boiler is, it basically allows you to heat or melt something without it being in direct contact with the heat. So in my instance, the egg whites and sugar were heated and combined by the water in the pot heating up the bowl and this allowed for the eggs to not be scrambled.
Other things like a frosting scraper and a stand mixer can be replaced by a cutting board and a hand mixer in order for the frosting to be finished and applied to the cake. When it came to the fondant, its basically like edible playdough that needed to be kneaded before it could be rolled out and placed over the cake.
In the end, it was a little rough, but the cake tasted wonderful and looked pretty good for my first try at making everything homemade (excluding the fondant). So if you want to bake a cake do it because you never know what spark it might start in you and then at the end of the day, you will have a nice treat to eat after your day of baking! Even a broke college student can be a professional baker for a day!
