This might be my crowning achievement of the semester. Definitely the best thing I've ever baked. With a dream of baking with taro, a bit of baking advice from my roommate, and a good amount of hard work I created a wonderful and unique cake recipe. As I've mentioned (see the taro milk tea post) I love taro and it is really special. If you want to know more about that go read the other post, but basically all you really need to know for this cake, is that taro has a nutty/vanilla flavor and a wonderful purple color. Both of these make it an ideal ingredient for baking. So I decided to try it out. I used a vanilla cake mix, a vanilla pudding, and about 7/12 a cup of taro powder to the cake. The key to this recipe though, is whipping the egg whites (which my roommate suggested)(see below). Mainly, I decided to do this because the mix called for 3 eggs, but we only had 2. What the result ended up being, was the fluffiest cake ever!!!!! So fluffy that I dubbed it Cloud Cake. I used vanilla cake mix instead of yellow, because I thought it would compliment the flavor of the taro better and I was right (see below). We have an electric mixer now so that was incredibly helpful in making this recipe a success!
The cake batter was extremely yummy, we cleaned the bowl before it actually got washed, if you know what I mean ;). I had enough batter to make a cake (see below) and 24 mini cupcakes (see below). Both of which turned out wonderfully purple because of the taro. I baked them both at 375. The cupcakes for exactly 10 minutes and the cake for 35 minutes. The center of the cake sagged a bit, I'm not sure what to try next time to prevent that from happening. I greased the pans with baker's joy, which works wonders. I let the cakes and cupcakes cool before I removed them from the pans and frosted them.
For the frosting I used whipped white frosting. Which was perfect because it added to the fluffiness of the dessert and also complimented the taro well. I decided to get fancy and use the electric mixer to mix the taro in. I used a bit over 1/3 cup of taro power for the entire container of frosting (see below), and you can certainly taste the taro. Then, if that wasn't fancy enough, my roommate helped me cut a plastic bag to frost them in style. She showed me how to cut the bag so that the frosting comes out with a pretty design. I spooned the frosting into the bag (see below) and it was a really efficient way to frost the cakes! I did the larger cake the traditional way with the remaining frosting. The frosting was as flavorful and fluffy as the cake itself and the cupcakes are so so so so yummy. This was a wonderful cake!
Thoughts on this Recipe:
- Next time I make this I will try to do everything the same since it turned out so well this time.
- I'm happy that I can add whipping egg whites to my list of baking skills
- My roommate also showed me this wonderful trick to separate egg whites. You use a water bottle to suck out the yolks.
- I also really liked using the bag to frost the cupcakes, so much easier!
- I want to learn some more cake decorating techniques, they would be an awesome way to compliment this wonderful cake.
- On that note, I wonder what other flavors go well with taro? I'll have to ask my sister, she's a cupcake artist, and has awesome baking skills.
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