Happy Halloween

Made a raspberry cake today, it didn't go so well.

Look at this unsightly mess.

Once in a while I get a really bad bake, yesterday was one of them. An accidental Halloween cake, or as I would like to call it, the Menstrualberries Cake, and like menstrual blood, it does not taste good.



Just look at that mess, that ugly cake crumb with the weird moldy yellow colored crumbs, horrible French Buttercream that tasted like straight up butter and raspberry jam that was too thin to even be considered a jam.


The first mistake I made was not thinning out the frozen raspberries long enough in the pot. It got thick until I strained it and got left with a concentrated raspberry juice, which tasted great but was just not thick enough. $10 worth of frozen raspberries gone just like that.




The second mistake I made was trying to incorporate the "jam" into the cake batter, thinking it would create nice ripples through the cake, obviously it didn't do the job because the whole thing just merged with the cake and I ended up getting that odd color, it's like trying to create a marble cake using vanilla cake batter and a cup of hot cocoa.



And the recipe for the cake never really did produce very nice crumbs, even when I made it in the bakery, it never really look fluffy when I cut it open, it was moist and soft but the interior never looked fluffy.




Third mistake and the biggest one I think was my choice of buttercream. French buttercream taste amazing when I made it in the bakery, it was light, not too sweet and surprisingly did not have an over powering taste of butter to it, because the boss was trying to cut cost and got the cheapest brand of butter available, French buttercream also always had a very smooth and shiny finish. The ones I made at home on the other hand always reeked of butter because I always got good French butter that taste like butter should and really that's the whole issue I have with this butter cream, it was shiny and smooth but the butter smell and taste was just too much for me to ignore when I was having a bite of the cake.



I felt like I was eating cake spread with whipped up butter, it's gross and maybe there was some miscalculation on my part as well because it left an oily feel in my mouth afterwards, it really wasn't a good day to bake that day.



In the end, I deemed the cake to be a complete failure and did what I would have done in the bakery, turn them into cake pops. In the past I would have thrown the whole thing away or leave it in the fridge until someone else but I have learnt my mistakes... and the 2 sticks of butter I used to make the buttercream is fucking expensive.

Ta-Dah~! Minimalist Chocolate Cakepops
...because I don't have sprinkles, otherwise I would have blinged this shit right up and turn it into a disco ball 

I would have preferred to use Candy Melts to coat the cake pops, but because I had a bad experience with Wilton's Candy Melts, I decided to just melt some chocolate instead, and it's also very unfortunate that I do not have a microwave to make my life easier, so I had to melt the chocolate using a double boiler.

It came out well, nothing fancy but once again, would have preferred with candy melts simply for the vanilla taste because I'm not a huge fan of dark chocolate. I have the taste bud of a child, it simply doesn't understand the flavor complexity nor is it able to enjoy the smoothness of the dark chocolate in the mouth... I just want my chocolate to be sweet and creamy like White and Milk.

The cake pops definitely taste better than the failed raspberry cake though that's for sure.

So now, I won't be doing anymore french butter cream, fuck that, now I'm going to stick with American Buttercream and maybe give the Swiss Meringue Buttercream a chance as well. French Buttercream holds up horribly in Singapore weather as well, the last time I brought home cakes from the bakery, the buttercream started melting on my way home, it tasted great but it was really sad looking.