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Hello and welcome back to my kitchen. I'm Gemma. This is the Cupcake Gemma channel. This is my home. I'm cooking the books again today. And I thought it was time I cooked from, I don't know, my own book, The Crumbs and Doilies book. You've probably heard of it if you've been watching the channel at all. It's been a while since I baked from my own book, so I thought it'd be nice to do something from here. So, I'm going to do the Velvet Volcano. Now, I don't know if you know this about me, but out of all the layer cakes in this book, the velvet volcano is my fave. This is it here. It's an absolute mish mash of various things. And the story goes, many years ago when we were just doing cupcakes,
one of our team at the end of the day thought, I've got a bit of leftover cookie dough, got some caramel, got some ganache, got this and that, got some red velvet cupcakes, some Oreo icing. I'm just going to put them all together and make a Franken cake. And this was the result. Well, the cupcake version was the result. We layer caked it up. It's in the book. In the book, it's a four layer cake. But today, I don't want to make an entire four layer cake, which is basically enough for like 35 people. I am going to do a sheet cake and that way it's simple to make, not too difficult to decorate. I can share it with my neighbors and it'll be really nice. Now, I've done a lot of prep in advance of
today, and I'll get to that when the time comes. But right now, I'm going to make the sponge. So, put you back there. The first thing I'm going to do is get my buttermilk ready. Now, I actually don't have buttermilk, and I went to three supermarkets today. I couldn't find any buttermilk. So, what do we do when there's no buttermilk? Well, normally I would put lemon juice in with milk, but I don't have any milk either. So, what I've done is I've used yogurt, which I have loads of all the time cuz we always have natural yogurt in the fridge. because of the differences with like fat content and acidity, what I've done is I've done 2/3 yogurt and 1/3 water. So, in total there's 170 g of
buttermilk or whatever you're using instead. Um, and but in my case, it was like I can't do the math right now, but 2/3 yogurt, 1/3 water, and I've just mixed that up. And so, it's it's like a loose buttermilky yogurt, I guess. Um, and we're going to prep that now so we don't have to do it later. I'm going to add a teaspoon of very, very concentrated red food color paste along with about a/3 of a teaspoon of good quality vanilla extract. And just give that a little whisk until it's all combined. Now, you might have noticed if you have the book that these um measurements are not exactly as they are in the book, and that is because I'm just going to be using one sheet. So, this is a 9 by13 in uh tin. Forgot what it's called there.
And the recipe in the book is for four layers of 8 in sponge. So, if you do the math, 9 by13 gives us 117 square in. An 8 in round tin. Oh my gosh, the maths. Okay. Surface area of that is 50 square in. So obviously that's just under half of this. So what I've done is I've it's a bit complicated, but I've halfved the recipe in the book, but then bumped it up a little bit. I've bumped it up one egg's worth of ingredients. If we take the book and have a look, it's difficult to split an egg, but it's really easy if you've got scales to measure little bits of other ingredients. So, whenever I'm bumping up or reducing a recipe, I
usually bump it up one or however many eggs worth it is and then adjust all the other ingredients accordingly. So, I'm not very good at maths and therefore not very good at explaining it. But basically, divide by two, divide by 3, multiply by four. Okay, got it. Great. So, I have 400 g of caster sugar, which I'm going to put into my mixer. And I'm going to add 167 g of butter. Now, if you want to round that down to 165 or round up to 170, that's okay with me. Do what you feel. I always like to do it exactly. And this is why it's really important to have electric scales. We're going to beat those together for about 2 or 3 minutes. This is quite a lot of sugar in comparison to
butter. It won't ever go like super duper pale and fluffy. So, just beat it together for a few minutes and just lighten it up a little bit. Then, once your butter and sugar is looking lovely and pale, you can add your eggs. I'm using four as previously discussed. I'm going to add one egg at a time and beat for 30 seconds to a minute between each one. Lovely. So now I'm going to get rid of the paddle for a second just because I'm going to put the sieve directly over this bowl to s my dry ingredients. So I have 250 g of plain flour, about 15 g of cocoa powder, and about a/3 of a
teaspoon of salt. So third of a teaspoon is like a round/4 teaspoon. So pop that through the serve and just sit it directly into the bowl. Then once all your dry ingredients are in, you're going to pop that paddle back on and put the mixer on to the lowest speed to fold that through. So when the mixture is about halfway mixed, you can grab your red buttermilk mixture and pour that in. When it's almost all mixed together, you're going to add bicarbonate of soda and apple cider vinegar. This is going to give it that distinctive flavor and also lift it a bit. So I've got a teaspoon of cider vinegar. I'm adding that to a little bowl which has 2/3 of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Give
that a little brief mix. And then while the mix is running on the lowest speed, just pour that in. And then you can finish it by hand if you want. Just fold that through until it's all mixed in. Once it's all mixed through, you can pop it into your tin. Now, I'm just going to dump it all in and then use a cranked palette knife just to level it off a little bit. And then you need to bake this at 170° C for anywhere between like 22 to 26 minutes depending on your oven. This might be a little bit different because obviously the sizing and the shaping is different. So I'm going to set my timer for 22 minutes. Check it with a skewer and then just add minutes accordingly. My cake is cooling down. As you might have gathered from the
introduction and the description of this cake, there are a lot of things that go into this cake. Yesterday, I actually did all my prep. Starting with the cookie dough. So, this is the cookie dough. Now, this is slightly different to the one in the book because I thought I'd give it a go with toasted flour. I've never tried it before, so I was like, "Well, I'll do it." All I did was I put it into a pan over a kind of medium high heat and just stirred it for about 10 minutes until it became like a light golden color and then I cooled it down. And it has definitely changed the flavor of the cookie dough. It tastes super toasty. So, it's really easy. You need to do that first cuz it needs to be
frozen when you're using it. I used the recipe from the book, but I did a half batch. So, I divided all those ingredients in two. I'll put all the quantities down in the description box because there's just so many and my head is already full of numbers and I'm stressed out. But basically, in a mixer or in a bowl using one of these guys, you want to put your butter, light brown sugar, caster sugar, yogurt, and salt and vanilla. Now, when I made this yesterday and I was filming it, uh I started mixing it at this point and then I realized it looks a bit weird and then I was realized I hadn't actually put the flour in that I'd spent so long making. So, I popped it in with the rest of my
ingredients. Beat that together just briefly, just till the ingredients were combined. And then I added my dark chocolate chips and just stirred those through until they were distributed evenly. Then I put that into a lined tray, pressed it down or leveled it off with a palette knife, and then popped that into the freezer to completely solidify. And as you can see, I have gone ahead already and just chopped that up. I'm not going to be using it just yet. So, I'm going to put that in the freezer now. And then the next thing I made was the salted caramel. So, here it is.
Beautifully dark and very sticky and lovely. It's actually a little bit darker than I had intended. So, it is on the bitter side, which I quite like. Some people don't. Um, the reason for that is it's really hard to film caramel on your own with one camera. Just saying. So, I was doing a lot of running around trying to like get nice shots for you guys. Over a medium heat, you want to put your water and your sugar together. Give it a little stir before you turn on the heat just to make sure that all the water is soaking into the sugar. This is a wet caramel, so you don't want to disturb it once it's on
the heat. So, pop that over a medium heat and just let it bubble away. In the meantime, you want to get your cream, vanilla, and salt together. So, I've got a little jug here with my double cream. Going to put some salt in, some good quality vanilla extract, and give that a little stir. Once the sugar has caramelized to a lovely rich amber color, take it off the heat and then gradually and carefully pour the cream into your sugar. Now, you want to do this a little bit at a time. Remember that steam is very hot. It can burn. So, make sure you've got a long spoon and stir it constantly. Stir that first bit through and then keep adding little bits at a time. Stirring that
well. Pop that to one side. Let it come to room temperature before chilling it. What else? Oh, yeah. So, I had a bit of a brain wave. Uh, well, I don't know if it was a brain wave. I just wanted to experiment with the icing. So, in the original Velvet Volcano recipe, it's Oreo buttercream and cream cheese icing. I thought I could like kill two birds with one stone by making Swiss mering buttercream as a base and then adding Oreo crumbs to one half and cream cheese to the other half. I've never done that before with the cream cheese. I didn't know how it was going to go, but you know, you got to try these things. Let's just say it didn't work with the cream cheese, but it did work with the Oreo, so I'm
sticking with that. You have to have a banmarie with a bowl over it. You put your egg whites and your sugar in there. Give it a little stir over the bananar, which should be set over a medium heat. Keep stirring that gently with your whisk until ideally until it reaches like 63° C cuz that's then a safe temperature for the eggs. You particularly want to look out for the fact that there's no grains. Then take it off the heat. Transfer it to the bowl of your mixer with a balloon whisk attachment and just get that whisking on a medium speed. Once that mixture has voluminized, is that a word? Once it's really glossy and white and holding pretty decent peaks, then it's time to
add the butter. And also, it's really important at this point that it is not warm. Otherwise, as soon as you add the butter, it's going to melt and go all sloppy. So, I've got soft butter here. I'm going to add that in a little bit at a time. And just keep that going with the whisk on quite a high speed, adding your butter in little nuggets all the time until it's all in. And then you can add a little bit of salt and some vanilla if you like. It should look silky and smooth. And then all I did to make this Oreo is I pulverized some Oreo crumbs in a food processor and just added to this amount, which is a half batch of Swiss mering cream from
the book. It's all a bit confusing with the numbers, but um I just added it to taste and I ended up adding maybe four or five tablespoons and it is delicious. But back to the cream cheese icing, which definitely didn't work. I added the cream cheese and it just kind of split and now I'm making regular old cream cheese icing from the book. All these recipes are obviously in the book. Um and I'm making a half batch of my cream cheese icing. Allah this page. So to start with, I've got my soft butter. I'm going to pop that into my bowl and just mix that with some salt.
Just a pinch of salt until it's pale and fluffy. Then you're going to add your cream cheese. And it's really important that this is room temperature, otherwise it's going to solidify the butter. Give that a really good mix together. Once that's really well combined, you need to add your icing sugar. And of course, you need to sift it first to get rid of any lumps. Put that in two stages, beating really well after each addition. So, here we are. I've got a cool cake.
I've actually leveled it and trimmed it just to get rid of all the kind of caramelization on the sides and also so that it fits onto this board because I don't have a bigger one. Um, so that would have been awkward. So, I've got everything ready. I've got my Oreo buttercream in a piping bag with a nozzle. It's a really dark and I think that's because I added the Oreos yesterday and then whipped it up again today. and it means that the Oreos are a bit smooshy already having sat there. Um, and so as I've whipped it up again, they've just kind of smeared the way through. So, if it doesn't look like the picture in the book, then don't sue me because this is what's happened.
I've got my cream cheese icing. I'm going to do a base of that. I've got my cookie dough. I've got my I've got some extra Oreos. I've got caramel. I've made a little bit of chocolate ganache just with a 50/50 cream chocolate ratio. Let's get cracking. about heat.
Look at that guy. I just love a velvet volcano. It doesn't look like the lack of buttermilk and the replacing that with yogurt and water has had any impact on the texture of it. It's still really fluffy and velvety, which obviously is partly why it gets its name red velvet. Obviously, it's red, so that's great. And it all smells really delicious. Now, this um cookie dough isn't quite defrosted yet. But that's okay. Um, when it gets to room temperature, it'll be nice and soft. Having the toasted flour element has kind of taken away a little bit of the cookie dough flavor, if you will, because we've cooked the flour, but it is a really nice flavor. It tastes like a toast cookie. I mean, I guess that's
exactly kind of what it is. It's just it's raw. The cream cheese icing has given me that lovely tang, which goes so well with red velvet. I could probably put a bit more caramel on and maybe I don't know if maybe if I had my time again maybe I didn't like inject it into the sponge. Maybe that would work. Am I happy that I switched up the buttercream? It's okay. I would stick to the original recipe next time and do like an American style buttercream with Oreo. This is lovely but it just hasn't got quite the same texture which I think is really good with this cake. All together just a lovely little bite. Oh, chocolate chip. Now, obviously, there's loads of recipes in the Crumbs and Doors book. In fact, many
of them are in this actual cake. You know, I love you when I'm making you a cake with six different elements in. But obviously, all of those recipes are in here. Hopefully, you got the gist of how I adapted it for my tins, but I will put all the ingredients and measurements in the description box so that you're not confused. Let me know if you are an OG and you've had this book since it came out. And of course, I love to do things like adapt these recipes. So, I highly recommend you having a little play with recipes that you know and love and trying to present them in different ways. And you know, like me with the Swiss mering buttercream, like give things a try. If you think it would be better with like French buttercream,
German buttercream, whatever it is, go for it. You are the boss of you. You are the boss of you and your cakes. So, I wholeheartedly encourage you to experiment and just try new things. Make sure you take notes about what worked and what didn't so that when you come around to it next time, you can be like, I'm not going to waste my time with that. I really hope you grab yourself a copy of this. I'll put a link to the um where you can buy it in the description box. I bet you guys wish you were my neighbors right now cuz I've got 11 pieces to give away. So, I'm going to be very popular girl later.
Catch you later. Bye.
