World's Best Cake

What do you bake for your mother on her birthday? Out of all the recipes in your multiple recipe books, favourite blogs, magazines, and Pinterest board... which is the one that is good enough for the woman who brought you into this world? I thought long and hard about this, and finally decided to try Sweet Paul's "World's Best Cake", as it seemed like nothing less could possibly be worthy of the world's best woman. I'm sure most people out there would say the same of their mother, but in this world, in mine, Dayang Norjanah is the holder of that title.

So let's get to this World's Best Cake... An excerpt from Sweet Paul's website:

"This cake was awarded the title of Norway’s National Cake a few years back. It’s called verdens beste in Norwegian, and I agree that it just might be the world’s best. You may be skeptical of its superiority, since it isn’t iced as are many American cakes."

In fact, the reason I decided to go with this recipe is because it's not iced, or frosted, or whatever you like to call the action of putting rich sugary butter/cream cheese based beautifiers over a cake. My mum's not a fan of frosting, and while I find it terribly frustrating that she scrapes the stuff off whatever cake I make, I have to say that personally... I find it a little too much as well. So a cake that has a crispy pavlova-like meringue to act as a frosting seemed like just the way to go!

The first time I tried the recipe, I followed the instructions to a T and was not quite fond of the outcome. The cake was a bit too dense, and it lacked a certain something to just cut across the meringue layer. Not to say it wasn't wonderful, but just in our house, we like it slightly different. So I hope I'm not committing a sacrilegious act by changing the recipe and sequence a wee bit, but the instructions in this post are the ones I use at home. For those who would like to try the original, you may find it here.

World's Best Cake - the lemony version
Adapted from Sweet Paul Eat & Make

• 150g unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
• 1 2/3 cups caster sugar
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 4 egg yolks + 1 full egg
• 1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/3 cup milk
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1/4 cup sliced almonds
• 5 egg whites
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste

1. Preheat the oven to 175°C, grease and line 2 6" round springform pans
2. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest until light and fluffy, then add in the 4 egg yolks and 1 egg and beat until fully incorporated
3. Combine the flour and baking powder, then add half to the butter mixture. Add all the milk and lemon juice, beat until combined, then beat in the rest of the flour mixture
4. Divide the batter between the two pans 
5. Whisk the egg whites and caster sugar until soft peaks form, then fold in 1 tbsp of lemon juice. Spread the whites over each layer of the cake and bake for 35 minutes 
6. Allow the cakes to cool in the pans for 10 minutes before removing onto a wire rack to cool completely. Whisk the cream and vanilla bean paste until stiff peaks form, then dump the whole thing onto one layer of the cake and top with the second layer. Chill in the fridge for up to an hour before serving 

Vanilla & Passionfruit Cake

One of my closest and dearest friends celebrated his 25th birthday last week, and I was asked to bake a seaside themed cake for him. He's a diver and loves the beach, so why not? The thing is, this turned out looking like a baby shower cake! Considering he's one of my babies, I don't see anything wrong with that. 

Dearest Leslie, hope you had a great birthday week surrounded by family and best friends. It's been a while since our last holiday together, so lets go diving in May! Or rather, you go diving with E and I'll go sit on the beach with a cheesy historical romance novel with the rest of the FFs. 

This blog post & recipe is dedicated to one of the sweetest, kindest, and most protective friends I have. I'm so glad to have you in my life. 

Vanilla Bean cake with Passionfruit filling, covered in Passionfruit Cream Cheese frosting

• 440g all purpose flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 240g butter, softened to room temperature
• 400g caster sugar
• 4 large eggs
• Seeds from 2 vanilla bean pods
• 1 cup milk

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C, line 2 8" round baking tins with butter and parchment paper
2. Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and set aside
3. In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar until combined, then add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Dump in the seeds from the vanilla bean pods and stir to get it mixed
4. Add half the flour mixture and beat until combined, then pour in all the milk and stir until it's incorporated in the batter, then add in the rest of the flour. Don't overmix, just ensure all the ingredients are evenly coated, be sure to scrape the sides of the bowl
5. Divide the batter between the two baking tins and bake for 35-40 minutes, or until a skewer inserted at an angle comes out clean
6. Cool the cakes in the tin for 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely (do this top side down to get flat, even layers)

Passionfruit cream cheese frosting

• 2 tbsp strained juice of a passionfruit
• 42g butter, softened
• 114g cream cheese, cold
• 2 1/4 cups sifted icing sugar

1. Beat the butter and cream cheese in the bowl of your stand mixer until thoroughly combined. Pour in the passionfruit juice and continue to beat for another minute or so
2. Add the icing sugar in one go and just beat until light and fluffy (you may need to stop and scrape the sides of the bowl), for about 5 minutes. Do not beat for too long as that will make it too runny

Assembling the cake
Place one layer top side down on a cake plate, and pipe a circle of cream cheese frosting around the edges of the cake. Fill the middle with passionfruit curd (I used about 1 cup of curd as I piped a thick layer) and place the second layer of cake on the top, bottom side down.
Apply a thin crumb coat and allow it to crust for about 15 minutes before frosting the rest of the cake. I chose to go with a simple frosting design this time around, placing the cake on a revolving cake stand and just running my offset spatula along the side, tilted at an angle while I spun the stand. I should try to make a tutorial video to show how I blended the colours... 

The beautiful seaside themed cake toppers you see in these pictures was made by Zurisha over at Tinytype: Propfolio, a local designer who takes orders for themed cake toppers and the like. If you're in the KL area, you can contact her at tinytype.propfolio@gmail.com to order some or check out her instagram page @TinyType to see her work. I'm definitely looking forward to getting more of these to go with some of my upcoming dessert spreads.

Thomas the Tank Engine Cake!

I had another recipe lined up to share here, but I just wanted to share this cake I made over the weekend for a friend's son. Okay, so he's more, actually, my boss, but whatever. Semantics. Anyhoo, his son turned two last week, and he (the little boy, not my boss) is currently obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine (choo choo!), so I was asked if I could make a cake for roughly 50 people and in the theme.

Didn't think I could do it until I did. You all know how scared I am of working with fondant! I was actually toying (heh heh) with the idea of sculpting a Thomas the Tank Engine out of cake, but with limited time on my hands... it was safest to just go with a toy to perch on top.

The birthday boy with his new toy :) 

The cake is two tiers, the bottom tier being my favourite chocolate beetroot cake, and the top tier is vanilla bean cake with lemon curd filling (mmm!). I have yet to share the recipe for that, but I've got another birthday cake to bake this coming weekend for one of my dearest friends which I'll be using that recipe on. With some changes, as after the first time, I think there are minor adjustments I'd like to make. Anyway, I'll wait and share that version once I've tweaked it. 

For now, enjoy the joyful pictures of Oli's Twoo Twoo cake!

And if you would like to order a kid's birthday cake, please email me at nabmac@gmail.com or ring me if you have my number. I would appreciate two weeks notice so I may plan it around my day job :)

Much love! Had so much fun at the birthday party, thanks Andrew & Serena for trusting me with your son's birthday cake! Throwing in this pic of me on a giant revolving teddy bear lol

Happy Holiday Cake!

Holidaaay~!

It's been a very, very long time since I've taken a good break from work; with TWO public holidays falling on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, I did what any sane person with too much annual leave left over and took the three other days off for a total of 9 days to do whatever I want to do (or not do, rather).

So in addition to all the pampering and self indulgence I've been doing, catching up with my friends and family, I have obviously been taking this opportunity to try out recipes I've shelved for a while now. This particular recipe I'm about to share with you is of the cake I made for my sister's birthday earlier this year but was unable to snap pictures of. I finally have the time to revisit this cake, for no other reason than the fact that I want to eat it and take pictures of it.
I came across this recipe in Smitten Kitchen's blog years ago when browsing for classic birthday cake recipes, and it remains one of my top 5 cakes to bake for friends and family. Or really, just days off. Let's quit pretending to have reasons for cake. 

Here we go, according to Deb (Smitten Kitchen) the best birthday cake ever:

Yellow Cake

• 4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 225 g unsalted butter
• 2 cups caster sugar
• 2 tsp mexican vanilla extract
• 4 large eggs
• 2 cups buttermilk

1. Preheat the oven to 180C, grease and line 2 8-inch pans with butter and parchment paper then set aside
2. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl and set aside
3. In the large mixing bowl of your stand mixer, beat the butter until light and creamy with paddle, then toss in the sugar and continue to beat until mixture turns white and fluffy
4. Beat in eggs one at a time, then beat in vanilla. Be sure to scrape down the side of the bowl to ensure the entire mixture is incorporated well
5. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture to the batter and beat shortly, then 1/2 of the buttermilk, and continue adding the flour and buttermilk alternately and end with the flour
6. Divide the batter in between the two pans and bake for 35-45 minutes at 160C, until a skewer inserted at an angle comes out clean. Take the cakes out and cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then remove to cool completely on a wire rack

Chocolate Sour Cream frosting

• 450g good quality dark baking chocolate
• 2 tsp instant espresso
• 2 1/4 cup sour cream, room temperature
• 1/4 cup light corn syrup
• 3/4 tsp mexican vanilla extract

1. Melt the chocolate and espresso in a heatproof bowl over simmering water. Once the chocolate has melted completely, remove from heat and allow to cool til tepid (basically just slightly warmer than room temperature)
2. Whisk the sour cream, light corn syrup, and vanilla, then slowly pour in the melted chocolate while whisking to ensure the mixture is fully incorporated
3. If you need to, pop the frosting in the fridge until it solidifies enough to spreading consistency (think, Nutella)
4. To assemble cake, dollop a good 1/2 cup - 1 cup of frosting on top of one layer of cake, then smooth it out before putting the other layer on top. Use an offset spatula to spread the frosting around and over the cake, then decorate as you please. I just used my spatula and went around, then dropped silver dragees around the edge of the top

Lemony Rainbow Cake

Everyone and their mother is either baking or ordering a Rainbow Cake these days. It's cute, I admit I gasped the first time I saw that picture on Whisk Kid's blog, and then I'm quite sure I was throwing up rainbows when Sweetapolita posted her Rainbow Doodle cake up. My friends Soraya, Pri and I even went around to an obscure bakery in Bangsar to check out their rainbow cake!

It was delicious... but disappointing. It was more of a tie-dye cake than a rainbow cake.

But when my cousin texted me last week to say that her daughter had especially requested for "Auntie Nabiya" to bake her a rainbow cake for her birthday... I jumped at the chance. I may not ever want a rainbow cake for myself, so this was my first opportunity to try out the colours without having to deal with the excess lying around in my fridge because nobody in my household wants to eat that much colouring on a normal day.

Also, how can I say no when she calls me Auntie Nabiya so sweetly? Darn these little girls and boys, they know exactly how to play their cards with me. It doesn't take much, really, I'm a sucker for big eyes and apple cheeks.

So this particular niece of mine, or second cousin once removed, turns eight today! Eight? I can't quite believe how much she, and the other cousins, have grown up so much. I keep thinking that they're all still five or six, and then they turn around and give me this condescending look, followed by an, "I'm *insert some ridiculously high number here* years old, you know?"

I'm getting old. LOL. Let's just get on with the rainbow cake, shall we?

Rainbow Cake

adapted from Whisk Kid's recipe

• 250g butter, room temperature
• 425g caster sugar
• 5 large eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 425g all purpose flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cup milk
• Food colouring gel: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and butter and line your 9"inch springform baking tins with parchment. Use as many as you have, I only have 2 so had to bake my layers in three batches
2. In a medium bowl sift the flour, baking powder and salt, then set aside
3. In the large bowl of your mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy
4. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until incorporated
5. Then add 1/3 of the flour mixture, beat until just combined, add half of the milk, beat again, and keep doing this until you finish off with the last of the flour
6. Split the batter evenly into six bowls (roughly 1 cup per bowl by my count) and add the colouring until you achieve the shade you want the layers to take on
7. Bake each layer for 15 minutes, or until a skewer poked through comes out clean. Change the parchment paper after every layer if you're reusing the tins
8. Allow to cool in the pan for a few minutes before you run a butter knife around the edge of the cake then pop them onto the cooling tray. Once they've cooled completely, wrap them in cling wrap and pop them in the freezer to firm up before you even them out. I left mine in overnight as I baked the layers around 2 am
9. When ready to assemble, take the layers out of the freezer and allow them to come down to room temp

First slice is the deepest... oh man, you have no idea how relieved I was at this point!

Lemony Swiss Meringue Buttercream

• 7 egg whites
• 325g caster sugar
• 360g butter, softened
• 2 tsp lemon extract

1. Cook the egg whites and sugar over a bain-marie, whisking gently until the sugar is completely dissolved
2. Then transfer the mixture into your completely grease-free mixing bowl and whisk for 5-8 minutes, or until the bowl has cooled to room temperature, and soft peaks have formed in the meringue
3. This hurts, but next you throw in the butter, a tbsp at a time and allow it to mix and curdle into the meringue
4. Keep whisking until all the butter is added, then switch to a paddle attachment, add the lemon extract and beat until smooth

More cousins!

Here's another one of the birthday girl being all cute and camera shy

The cake was a huge hit with the 8-25 year old crowd gathered at my niece's birthday party, and I absolutely LOVE how the layers turned out so clean! I was terrified I'd end up with crumbly, uneven layers. But that moment of truth when you cut into a rainbow cake is definitely a moment you'll never forget.

Happy birthday, Double Love,
x Aunty Nabiya

Ladies Who Lunch: Mama Zee's Birthday

I consider myself lucky that I have an amazing mother. She is strong, smart, beautiful, intuitive, possesses far more talent in her pinky finger than I do in my entire body, and so full of love that she has shared so generously with everyone around us. My mother really is the best.

Most people are blessed with great mothers, but in our very close-knit circle of friends and extended family, we are exceptionally lucky in that we have a wonderful team of mothers. Best friends for most (if not all, actually) of our (the children's) lives, they have raised us as a group, poured their love on us, shared wisdom wrought from their own lives, listened to our boy troubles, endured our rants, and basically have just been there.

Today one of them celebrates a birthday, and in true Team Mama fashion, they organised a long lunch this afternoon (midweek public holiday, yay!), pooled together for an extravagant present (this year, Portmeirion is all the rage among the group), and sat over good food, laughing, sharing stories and taking every opportunity to scandalise Nisa, Kaly, her hapless boyfriend, and myself with innuendo and downright disturbing comments.

Mama Zee, being one of my six mothers, obviously deserves to get a homemade birthday cake! No bakery cake for any of my mamas, no way. I may not be able to afford to buy a Portmeirion teacup (or even a saucer), but this I can definitely do.

After my friend, Amy's hen night karaoke session last night (I know, you're thinking... where is that blog post?), I hauled myself home, washed my face and found that I couldn't sleep. All I could think about was a cake for Mama Zee! I knew there was no way in hell I'd be able to wake up early enough to do it, and I had actually planned on just baking the cake layers ahead of time, then frosting in the morning... but when I finally did crawl back into bed, the clock read 5.30am.

It was well worth it though. I decided to tackle Swiss Meringue Buttercream for the first time (3am decisions, they make sense sometimes) considering The Mothers have always harangued me for my too-sweet buttercream. It was surprisingly easier than anticipated, and wowweee at that silky-smooth texture and lack of sickening sweetness! Can't believe it took me this long to try it, and now that I have, I think I may have to stick with it...

I used my favourite white cake recipe, which I then divided into four bowls (roughly 1 1/2 cups per bowl) and coloured in increasing shades of pink (a teeeeeeeny tiny drop of Wilton Pink colouring gel in the first bowl, one drop in the second, 2 drops in the third, and 3 drops in the fourth). I baked the cakes in 6-inch round pans, all at once for 25-30 minutes, then popped them in the freezer (triple cling-wrapped) for half an hour.

With leftover blackberries from my Upside-down Blackberry Buttermilk cake, I whipped up a Blackberry Coulis for filling the layers. I've got some coulis leftovers now... watch this space to see what I do with it.

Blackberry Coulis

• 250g fresh blackberries
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup water

1. In a saucepan, bring the blackberries, sugar and water to a boil. Simmer until the fruit is mushy then stir in the vanilla
2. Remove from heat, allow it to cool then pour it all into a blender and whizz to a puree
3. Strain the puree through a sieve, then slather your cake layers with the goop

Swiss Meringue Buttercream

• 2 large egg whites
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 180g butter, softened
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Whisk the egg whites and sugar until sugar is completely dissolved in a heatproof bowl over a bain-marie
2. Transfer to your mixing bowl, and with your whisk attachment, whisk the mixture at medium speed for about 4-5 minutes until soft peaks form (hello, meringue!). Add the vanilla.
3. At this point, slowly add butter into the mixture, by tablespoon-fulls. Continue until all the butter is in, and just whip until the point where when you run a spatula through it... it comes up looking beautifully smooth

If you have a stand mixer, I suggest you step away during that last step of the swiss meringue process. It looks terrifying, and you'll be tempted to "fix" it, as it seems as if the mixture is curdling. But don't you worry, darlings, it's meant to be that way. It will improve upon extended whipping. My tiny batch took roughly 5-8 minutes to finally arrive at a consistency I was happy with.

 

And what a beautiful taste the frosting produces! For the first time, my frosting has not overwhelmed the flavours of my cake, and as The Mothers enjoyed the cake quite a bit... I like to think I did it right this time. No complaints of "Nabiya! This is soooo sweet!" or "A moment on the lips..." and you know how it goes.

Anyway, happy birthday, Mama Zee, hope you enjoyed the lunch and love you loads!

xx Nabs