Apple Cake (MMB)

Similarly to the MMB cookies, Christina Tosi's cakes follow a basic formula and I'm stealing from the Milk Bar Project on this one: "are all about texture contrasts. Moist cakes, something gooey, and the dry crunch of the crumb - topped off with an indulgent frosting that adds a final layer of surprise."
There'll be no blog entry about my sister's cake since she's asking me to make my third Arnold Palmer Cake to serve at her bridal shower, but Joe A. presented me with making either the Chocolate Malt Layer Cake or the Apple Cake. Yes, I've been drooling about the former ever since I saw in Bon Appetit magazine months before the cookbook came out (the original East Village location was 3 blocks from where I worked as well).
However I've been spending a bit too much money trying to adequately equip myself for restaurant work (knife guards and decent paring knives though nothing awesome looking like the things L'Espalier line cooks carry around) so I didn't think I show blow some money on a blow torch. They aren't that expensive, but I'm actually broke now. Soon, soon...
So here goes for the Apple Cake:

Liquid Cheesecake
I've always been curious about the Liquid Cheesecake since reading through the MMB cookbook last fall. Is it really liquid? I asked myself even though if my memory of the book was close enough I would have known that it was an under-baked cheesecake that was just more spreadable that a normal cheesecake.

• 225 g cream cheese (8 ounces)
• 150 g sugar (3/4 cup)
• 6 g cornstarch (1 tablespoon)
• 2 g kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon)
• 25 g milk (2 tablespoons)
• 1 egg

Mise en place


A slurry of cornstarch, salt, and egg.


Sugar paddled into the cream cheese.


The slurry is paddled in and spread into a small baking pan lined with saran wrap.


Baked for 15 minutes at 300 degrees F.

Pie Crumb

• 240 g flour (1 1/2 cups)
• 18 g sugar (2 tablespoons)
• 3 g kosher salt (3/4 teaspoon)
• 115 g butter, melted (8 tablespoons [1 stick])
• 20 g water (1 1/2 tablespoons)

Mise en place.


Combine dry ingredients and wet in a stand mixer until they form clusters. Spread clusters out on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a Silpat, a silicone baking pad.
I have one by Norpro and not an actual Silpat. Since it doesn't overfills even a normal baking sheet I don't use it often.


Bake for 25 minutes at 350 degrees F.

Apple Pie Filling

• 1 lemon
• 3oo g Granny Smith apples (2 medium)
• 14 g butter (1 tablespoon)
• 150 g light brown sugar (1/4 cup tightly packed)
• 1 g ground cinnamon (1/2 teaspoon)
• 1 g kosher salt (1/4 teaspoon)

Apples cut according to Tosi's directions. I threw them in a medium bowl filled halfway with lemon juice to prevent discoloration.


All the ingredients dumped in a pan.


Simmered until tender. Tosi says to "Be careful not to cook the apples so much that they turn into applsauce." Only a person who has no business cooking such ambitious things and walk away for so long would do such a thing. It's all so easy peasy.

Pie Crumb Frosting

• 1/2 recipe Pie Crumb
• 110 g milk (1/2 cup)
• 2 g kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon)
• 40 g butter, at room temperature (3 tablespoons)
  
• 40 g confectioners' sugar (1/4 cup)

Pie crumb and milk.


Blended.


Sugar and butter. Such small amounts of both (I guess this is my first buttercream frosting!) in comparison to say baking cookies. Well, the frosting's only for the top of the cake.


Creamed together on medium high for 2 to 3 minutes, until fluffy and pale yellow.


Pie crumb mixture dumped in.


Finished Pie Crumb Frosting.

Barely Brown Butter Cake

• 55 g butter (4 tablespoons [1/2 stick])
• 40 g brown butter (2 tablespoons)
• 250 g granulated sugar (1 1/4 cups)
• 60 g light brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 110g buttermilk (1/2 cup)
• 65 g grapeseed oil (1/3 cup)
• 2 g vanilla extract
• 185 g cake flour (1 1/2 cups)
• 4 g baking powder (1 teaspoon)
• 4 g kosher salt (1 teaspoon)
• Pam or other nonstick cooking spray (optional)

Butters and sugars.


Paddled together over medium-high for 2 to 3 minutes.


Add the egg and repeat.


Mise en place for the rest of the recipe.


"Stream the buttermilk, oil, and vanilla while the paddle swirls on low speed. Increase the speed to medium high and paddle for 5 to 6 minutes, until the mixture is practically white, twice the size of your original fluffy butter-and-sugar mixture and completely homogenous. You're basically forcing too much liquid into an already fatty mixture that doesn't want to make room for it, so if it doesn't look right after 6 minutes, keep mixing."

I threw in the towel after 12 and messing up my whole workspace, stand mixer, and Kindle. I realize now that my usual approach to buttermilk (dry buttermilk) might have broken my attempt since I was just trying to combine water into the mix rather than milk since the milk powder was in the dry ingredients. Maybe I should just start using clabbered buttermilk.


Fingers crossed.


Baked for 30 minutes at 350 degrees F.
It might've been way moister and brown buttery if I hadn't screwed up but at least I had something that was definitely serviceable as a cake.

Apple Cider Soak

• 55 g apple cider (1/4 cup)
• 5 g light brown sugar (1 teaspoon tightly packed)
• 0.25 g ground cinnamon (pinch)

I'm just whisking all these ingredients together. This didn't appear to justify a photo.

Apple Cake

• 1 recipe Barely Brown Butter Cake
• 1 recipe Apple Cider Soak
• 1 recipe Liquid Cheesecake
• 1/2 recipe Pie Crumb
• 1 recipe Apple Pie Filling
• 1/2 recipe Pie Crumb Frosting

Punching out the 3 layers with my 6-inch cake ring. I just recently bought a second one.


Bottom layer is composed of scraps pressed in. No one will ever know, but they will know if you've broken all the layers of the cake and the damn thing collapses in my first attempt at Tosi's cakes.


The layer is brushed with the apple cider cake and then 1/2 the Liquid Cheesecake is smoothed in.


Followed by a third of the Pie Crumb.


Apple Pie Filling.


Repeat once more and then top with the unbroken round of cake and the Pie Crumb Frosting.


Top with the remaining Pie Crumb. Wrap top in Saran Wrap and throw the whole thing in the freezer for at least 12 hours or 2 weeks.
Will report back with a picture and feedback in the latter amount of time.

Arnold Palmer Cake: Part Three

Lemon Tea Cake

• 115 g (8 T) butter (preferably Plugrà) [See my note on this topic in my 3/10/12 entry]
• 300 g (1 1/2 C) sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 65 g (1/3 C) grapeseed oil
• 110 g (1/2 C) buttermilk¹
• 70 g (1/4 C) lemon juice
• 4 g (1 t) lemon extract (Whole Foods and Harvest Co-Op in Central appeared to only have alcohol-free lemon flavoring.)
• 185 g (1 1/2 C) cake flour
• 20 g (9 bags) Lipton black tea leaves
• 4 g (1 t) baking powder
• 4 g (1 t) kosher salt

Mise en place


Cake batter ready to go into a 350° F oven for thirty minutes. I think I've used my stand mixer so much in a little over a month that at least a couple weeks ago I've thrown the tilt of the head out of alignment; therefore, the cake isn't 100% homogenized but it's easy to hide.
Finally bothered to twist the screw clockwise a tad after this though.


And 30 minutes passes.


Stamping out the cake rings. Lesson learned this time is that it's useful to stamp out parts of the circle instead of doing my best to try to stamp out two complete circles from a quarter-sheet pan.


Tosi says to use scraps to build the bottom layer of the cake that no one will ever see... Unless of course your entire cake collapses in on itself as it did on my trial run on Sunday. Oh, I tried to be careful, but certainly I wasn't careful enough. "Judy, please pack your knives and go," Padma Lakshmi as if I'd ever be cooking at such the high, hyper-restaurant-paced level that puts you in the running on Top Chef.


A cake layer smeared with lemon mascarpone. Essentially, it's lemon curd lightened up (I think that's the turn for it...) with a bit of mascarpone, an Italian cheese often associated with tiramisu.


The non"pectic-nh" pectin I used this time was not at all quite as successful as when I used the Ball brand pectin at the TAGS hardware store in Porter. Hopefully this doesn't lead to obvious architectural failure when this cake is served two Saturdays from now, but HEY!, I didn't break any layers so far!


What... I don't break any layers at all?!

Yes of course I see the crack, but a crack is not a full break.


All composed and with just a bit of a saran wrap and ready for a 2-week hibernation in the freezer.


Trial run cake before it collapsed. Looks an awful lot like the professional version except a little crooked as I'll never let Joe A. finish saying.


So far I haven't served an actual "slice" of this to anyone. This is what remained after composing the trial run cake. Good lord, I can just see how stupidly convenient it is to make a cake from a box and just ice it with canned frosting, but it makes my skin crawl.
Hopefully I can offer actual slices to my family on March 24th.

¹Excerpts from the Wiki for Buttermilk:

Originally, buttermilk was the liquid left over from churning butter from cream. Traditionally, before cream could be skimmed from whole milk, the milk was left to sit for a period of time to allow the cream and milk to separate. During this time, naturally occurring lactic acid-producing bacteria in the milk fermented it. This facilitates the butter churning process, since fat from cream with a lower pH coalesces more readily than that of fresh cream. The acidic environment also helps prevent potentially harmful microorganisms from growing, increasing shelf-life. However, in establishments that used cream separators, the cream was hardly acidic at all.

Commercially available cultured buttermilk is milk that has been pasteurized and homogenized (if 1% or 2% fat), and then inoculated with a culture of lactic acid bacteria to simulate the naturally occurring bacteria in the old-fashioned product. Some dairies add colored flecks of butter to cultured buttermilk to simulate residual flecks of butter that can be left over from the churning process of traditional buttermilk.

Condensed buttermilk and Dried buttermilk have increased in importance in the food industry.

And what does all the food literature I've read have to say on the topic? Well, that buttermilk in the dairy case is certainly not real buttermilk and since the stuff is used so sparingly I wouldn't buy the stuff. Different authorities support the use of clabbered milk (milk mixed with a bit of lemon juice or white vinegar and left to get lumpy) or powdered buttermilk which is found in the baking aisle of most conventional supermarkets. I'll go with the dried stuff, particularly when baking, but take note to add the buttermilk powder with the other dry ingredients and the reconstituting water with the wet.