Moose’s Cake Diaries Ep #2: In The Butter Soup
ft. obscure and viral food tweets
Hi food friends,
Last week I came across The Verge’s bloggy redesign and stopped at this line by EIC Nilay Patel: “But there’s only one real goal here: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you open it. If we get that right, everything else will fall into place.”
It’s our hope for Currant too, though sometimes I wonder if I obstruct the line to the fUn slide with my email intros. So today’s amuse-bouche: the frivolous/serious stuff I spit out on our tweeter, @currantlyinfood. Follow along if you enjoy obscure or viral food things at low frequency. And keep reading for the main entree, episode two of moose’s cake diaries!!
Stay hungry,
Vicky Gu
Currant Founder & Managing Editor
Banner design: Clare Lagomarsino
Who’s this? I'm moose (he/him), an avidly keen amateur baker, and fiend for all things food. I'm always on the hunt for the next flavour high, yet all too often cocking-up and landing a low. All of this just to distract from my day job as an oral surgeon.
What’s this? Dispatches from the moose test bakery - trials, tribulations and lessons from an amateur baker in search of show stopping cake
Where at? Robin Hood County, UK
Ep #2 - In The Butter Soup
The title is a riff on the book I’m currently reading, ‘In the Miso Soup’, that so far seems to be about murder and sex tourism in Japan. The only resemblance that this week’s events have with the book is the soupiness of it all.
After last episode’s lacklustre performance in finessing a vegan cake, I promised I’d change tack. Why not tackle the cornerstone of vegan baking, the saviour for the prohibition of egg? I introduce you to the aquafaba adventures.
Aquafaba is that golden elixir that your canned beans swim in, most commonly chickpeas. Yes, that nectar that you throw away every time. That very stuff is the ruler of vegan baking, or at the very least, vegan meringue. It’s full of starches and polysaccharides that whip up into a foam, just like egg whites do, and can be transformed into meringue. Meringue would need to be the first thing I need to master, for without meringue you have no buttercream, and without buttercream you have no decor, and without decor all you have is a sad excuse for a tower of sugar.
A brief internet search points out that Gretchen’s Vegan Bakery has THE recipe for Swiss Meringue and Italian Meringue buttercreams (SMBC and IMBC from hereon). Because of my, now obvious, masochistic tendencies, I began with the IMBC. In place of normal butter, I used a vegan butter, with coconut oil as its main constituent. With the sugar syrup bubbling away in the background, the aquafaba was whipping up into a foam very nicely. I felt confident. I slowly, and tentatively streamed in the sugar syrup, holding my breath, waiting for everything to go wrong. But no, the foam transformed into that glossy white, silky smooth, cloud of unctuous foam that we know as meringue. It was indistinguishable from its egg cousin. See for yourself.
My first attempts at non-vegan Italian meringue was a trial of patience riddled with flops and collapses. Yet, here I was nailing vegan Italian meringue in one go. Things were looking good. Now to throw in the faux-butter, piece by soft piece. I watched with eyes wide in horror as the cloud disintegrated into rain. I’m sure it’s just curdled, let’s give it time to re-emulsify, I tried to convince myself. Alas, coconut oil has a really low melting point. It can barely stand up on its own at room temp, let alone in a warm-ish meringue. That seems so obvious now, and all the warning signs were there - the butter melting in my fingers as I threw it in, the pool of butter leftover on the plate. Alas.
Back to the start we go, this time with a different faux-butter in tow, one that doesn’t have coconut oil in, as well as an SMBC recipe, again from Gretchen. To go off on a quick tangent, and show off my amateur-ness, I’m not sure why SMBC and IMBC require the respective meringue mixtures to be heated to ~160F, roughly the pasteurising temperature of eggs; I understand the need to with eggs, but with no eggs, is there a need? I ought to research that really.
SMBC seems to be the easier meringue buttercream to make, with no separate sugar boiling step, instead everything is made at once. This time round, the new faux-butter was no longer forming a puddle in my plate, shy to show me its constituents. With renewed vigour, I tentatively slapped cube after cube of butter into the whirring meringue. I stared in disbelief as this time I had not made soup, I had made SMBC. I ran with a spoonful to my wife and damn nearly choked her on it. Were it not for its taste, which was near enough indistinguishable from non-vegan SMBC, I think I’d be out on the streets.
With one component down, I only have two left to solidify: the cake itself, and the flavours. Small tasks really, no biggie. My friend has requested two cake flavours: a kulfi, pistachio, cardamom-y cake, and a coconut and lime cake. Kulfi is a frozen Indian dessert consisting mainly of condensed milk with cardamom and pistachio. There are heaps of possible combinations that I could work through to nail her request.
For now though, the Aquafaba Adventures will continue for at least another post, wherein I’ll be focusing on how good a substitute it truly is for egg in cake.
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Moose! Your writing is an absolute delight; I felt like I was there in the kitchen with you (and cheering you on!). The kulfi cake sounds amazing. Your friend has good taste: both in people, and in flavor.
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