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It's super yellow from the yolks. Not even a humble brag. We just have really yellow yolks from our chicken eggs. Just a regular brag. Hi everyone. I'm Claire Sappitz and I'm very excited to show you a recipe for a coffee trees cake because there's nothing I love more than like a really milky coffee in the morning. And this takes that and it kind of combines it with like all the great things about tiramisu and trese cake into one super delicious cake that will give you a little bit of a jolt. Dessert I really love translious cake and I'm always thinking about variations and it's almost always about flavoring the soap because that's what that's where the flavor comes from. Today I'm using
Cometier because in addition to it just being like the best morning cup of coffee, it is so great for baking because it's brewed at such an intensity that you can add tons of flavor without a lot of liquid and it's incredibly delicious. Anytime there's coffee, I kind of just think about tiramisu and it's like if t leches is normally topped with whipped cream, why not do a little whipped muskar pone on top and top it with some chocolate shavings and then you have these two desserts in one that's like so good. This is just a coffee choice lettuce cake but it's like tiramisu inspired I would say. So, we have a couple different components. We have the sponge, we have the soap, and then we have the topping
and like assembly. So, for the topping, I have some mascarapone, 8 oz, and a cup of cream. These I can actually go away because they're going to come later in there. I want them to stay cold. For the soak, I have three cups of milk, another cup of heavy cream, one can of sweet and condensed milk. This recipe uses the full can cuz it's like very annoying to have a little bit of sweet and condensed milk left over. Some vanilla is going to go in this soak as well as coffee. So I'm using cometier which is very intense and like low liquid out of the pod. If you are not using cometier you can use like a strong espresso. So I'm going to use a half a cup of cometier. That equals like about
four of the pods. And for the sponge I have some allpurpose flour, sugar, melted butter, eight large eggs, vanilla extract, salt, and a little bit of cream of tartar. One thing really cool thing about translators cake is it's like such a good example of how baking is a miracle because it's like how is all this gonna make like if you look at this and then look at the final thing it's like wow how'd that happen? It's a big transformation. We're going to make a 13 by9. It's kind of a lot of batter of sponge. So you're really going to want to use a stand mixer to put it together cuz we're whipping a lot of eggs. So I have a stand mixer with the whisk. I have my pan behind me, my 13x9. You'll
need like a big bowl, a strainer for sifting, a couple spatulas. So, I'm going to start by doing the sponge. So, I'm going to put away the ingredients for the soak and the topping and just focus on the sponge. You're going to need your oven on 350. Before we get into the recipe, I want to thank our friends at Kate for sponsoring this episode. Keter has really changed my whole morning ritual around coffee. It is the most important thing when I wake up. It's what gets me out of bed. There's no grinding. There's no machines. I don't have to like worry about like weighing out beans because I love coffee but I do not have the patience or the dedication to make
myself into a barista. So Comier kind of does it for you. Come brews coffee from renowned roasters from around the world and around the country and is brewed at 10 times strength according to their like proprietary method flash frozen and then it comes in these little recyclable pods. No machine required. I thaw them in the fridge overnight and I'm I'm an iced coffee time of year. So I come in, pour it over ice, flash a little milk and it is the best coffee I've had at home. It tastes like the latte from the best coffee place in your town. So, where I am in the Hudson Valley, there's really no coffee of note anywhere near me at all. I have to drive like a pretty far distance. But now, I can get coffee
from the best roasters around the country and around the world sent to my home ready for my consumption in the morning. And I want to introduce you to the World Mug Collection. This is a really cool new special thing that Comet is offering. It has two coffees each from 16 different notable roasters from around the entire world where they can go headtohead and you can rate them. You can like make your selections in the app. It comes with two coffees per roster. So you could even try them in different ways. You could do one hot. Pour hot water 68 ounces over the pod or you could do it iced and like an iced latte. So if you want to get $20 off of your first order, you can go to the link
in the description below. I love Cometier. It makes me feel like connected to the world where I am in a rural area and makes me look forward to my coffee every single morning. It's so good. So, I want to thank Commenter for sponsoring this episode. And now back to the recipe for the sponge for our trace leches. This is kind of a modified Geninois sponge, meaning there's like not a lot. There's really no added liquid. It's just egg yolks, egg whites, a little bit of flour, and some butter that's folded in. So, I'm going to start by separating my eggs. I have eight Need to get those separated. I'm going to stick the yolks in here. I'm putting
that bowl just behind me so it's out of the way for the a moment, but we're going to use that. So, I'm going to add my whites to my stand mixer bowl, and I'm just going to hold my yolks in here. We're going to whip this in the stand mixer in two different parts. We're going to start with the whites. Then I'm going to scrape them out, put them in that bowl, and then we're going to use this for the yolk mixture. It's not really a shenanas because I'm not heating it, but it's like it's a style of sponge cake that's similar. Okay. So, the most important thing is that I don't get any yolk in the whites. If I get a little whites in the yolk, that part doesn't really matter.
And these eggs are room temp, which is better. Eggs are easier to separate when they're cold. So, you can go ahead and separate them ahead of time, but they whip up better when they're room temp. So, then let them warm up a little bit. You know what? I kind of got ahead of myself. What I really should have done is prepped the pan. Now, typically for sponge cake, you don't grease the pan, which I love cuz like greasing the pan to me is like a it's always a step I'm like impatient around and I don't want to do. But I actually am going to show you. I thought of this idea recently. I feel like this is a thing I invented, but you never know. You want it to rise really tall in the pan and it needs actually
some friction between the pan and the batter to like cling to it. If you use a non-stick pan, it's like too slick of a surface and the sponge doesn't really rise. So, it's better to use an ungreased pan, but it can be hard to then in a 13 by9 pan where the bottom doesn't come out, it can be really hard to remove the sponge from the bottom of the pan. So, I came up with this idea of these like strips of parchment just along the edges because this part that always gets stuck is the part along the bottom that is up against the sides. Once you can get your hand under there, it's really easy to peel the sponge off the rest of the surface. So, I'm just going to lay I did it last night and it worked really well. So, I'm
going to just lay these strips in here and use like a little bit of grease, even just like a little bit of the butter. And I'm gonna grease the strips just to give it enough cling to the so that it sticks to the bottom. So see that strip? So that's gonna sit there. So no other part of the pan is getting greased. I have a proprietary the saffets uh the sapit approach. Now another thing that I'm going to use this is really optional because it's sort of a very specialty piece of equipment is I have these baking cores.
They're these little like spiky things. Anytime I'm making a sponge cake, if I have anything larger than like a 9 in pan, I like to use them because what they do is they conduct heat and so they bring heat into the center of the cake and help it to rise and prevent it from then sinking. So again, you do not have to use these. The cake actually bakes up just fine without them, but to me, it's like a layer of insurance that I really like to have. So I'm going to put You could just do one in the center. Maybe I'll just do one in the center. Last night I used two like that, but maybe I'll just do one in the center like that for now. Part of it is that it gives the sponge in the center something
to like hold on to as it's baking. So that's my prepped pan. I'm going to set this off to the side. So now we're going to start by whipping our whip or our whites. And I'm going to grab my larger bowl. And I have a big spatula. I have one cup of sugar. I'm going to add half of this sugar. I'm just going to eyeball it to the whites. Then I'm going to add my cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is an acid. It helps to stabilize the egg whites. And that's important because we want and also I'm adding the salt. The structure of the cake comes from the egg whites from like a nice stiff egg white foam. So I'm going to start by whipping this on kind of medium speed until it's nice and frothy. After that point, we're
going to gradually increase to medium high. And I want to whip until I have very firm peaks. I'll show you what that looks like. That's going to take a few minutes. So, after a couple of minutes of whipping in the stand mixer, I know it's very close to that stiff peaks point because the mixture is looking obviously it's like very voluminous. It's holding the marks of the whisk. It's also almost starting to ball up a little bit inside of the whisk as it spins. So, I'm going to show you what it looks like. So, I like to kind of make sure that everything is even. And so, when I pull the whisk up, this is what a stiff peak means. Like, it makes this peak and it's standing straight up. it's not drooping. So, that's the right end
point. It's important that the egg whites are beaten to this point and nothing less. But, you also don't want to go past this point cuz they're going to get dry and kind of grainy and they're going to get hard to fold into the rest of the mixture. So, it's sort of a it's a balancing act a little bit. If you think you're getting close, you can turn down the mixer a little bit so it's not going so fast. And then just check it often, stop it, take the whisk out, see how it looks. if you feel like. A lot of times I like to get to the point where I'm like, h it's really close, but I'm not sure. And then I give it like 10 more seconds on high and then I'm I'm usually pretty good. So, I'm going to scrape
everything into this bowl. No need to wash the whisk or the bowl. And I'm going to now pivot to the second part of the assembly, which is the egg yolks. The whisk goes back on. And I do the egg whites first because I don't want to have to wash everything. If I were to do the yolks first, then I risk getting some of like the yolk residue is going to get in the whites and they're not going to whip. So, this is purely for efficiency. So, my yolks are going to go in And I'm going to beat this on high until it's very pale and light and moussey and forms a ribbon. So, that's going to take a few minutes.
This is blanching. This is basically blanching. Yeah. So, after maybe 3 minutes, the yolks are done. When I lift up the whisk and the mixture falls back onto itself, it sits on top of the mixture and like holds its shape for a few seconds before it settles back down. So, that's called ribbon. So, now we're going to continue with the assembly of the sponge. I'm going to stream in my butter, which is melted and cooled. It's one stick. So, I want this to emulsify into my yolk mixture. There's so much yolk. It's just better to go slow. Okay, so that's the butter. Now, I'm going to add my vanilla. I have 2 tsps of vanilla.
The next thing I'm going to add is the flour. This I'm going to sift over the yolks. So, directly into the mesh strainer right over the bowl. The sifting really helps prevent lumps. If I were to just dump it in, there's like a high probability of flour lumps. So now just low on low speed. Just let this flour incorporate. This is kind of in place of me like gently folding it in by hand. Oops, I turned it up instead of turning it down. Oops. It'll be fine. Okay, so now the last step is to incorporate the egg whites to basically combine the two halves. And we're going to lighten this yolk mixture. And it's going to make this like very airy batter. It's going to bake into a light sponge cake.
The better bowl for folding is the wider bowl. But I h I'm going to put some into here to lighten it and then everything back in the big bowl to fold all together. All right. Before I start folding, I want to just make sure that this yolk mixture is mixed really well. So, I'm going to take about between a quarter and a third of the whites. And that was really more of a quarter. And I'm going to fold it into the yolks. Look at the color contrast. It's so cool. So, I'm going to use this initially just to lighten the texture of the yolks. The first edition is kind of like a sacrificial addition because you end up mixing it quite a lot in order to get it to incorporate.
And then once I have this light batter now, I'm going to scrape the whole thing into my bowl with egg whites. The stand mixer bowl is the way is the shape the way that it is so that like you can basically get maximum contact with like whatever attachment is in there. It's so it's tall and narrow. It's not the optimal shape for folding. So it's much easier to fold in something wide like this other bowl. And once these two things come into contact with each other, the yolks and the whites, you want to try to work quickly because egg white foam becomes more unstable once it comes into contact with fat. So, we have the butter and the yolks. So, we want to just fold this mixture. And folding is the kind of motion of
bringing what's on the bottom up to the top. And as soon as the mixture is pretty even and like there's no more streaks, then you're done. overmixing will pop a lot of the air bubbles. You're not going to have as light a sponge. So, I'm going to get that into my pan. And again, my oven is on 350. I have a rack in the center. So, I'm going to pour this in. It's super yellow from the yolks. Not even a humble brag. We just have really yellow yolks from our chicken eggs. Just a regular brag. All right. So, now I'm going to just smooth this into a single layer. And the whole idea here is that
everywhere there's an air bubble from the egg white that gets filled in with the milk soak. So you want something for the best dresses starts with a really light sponge. So this looks good. Make sure that you have your oven ready to go because you don't want this mixture to really sit before you bake it. It's just going to deflate. So now, one quick step before baking is I'm going to tap it pretty sharply on the counter. And that's just going to pop some really large air bubbles, which you don't really want cuz like it's just you want a more uniform texture. There we go. So now into the oven. This is going to bake for 25 to 30 minutes. And we're going to know that it's done cuz it's going to be domed and like very
nice deep golden brown across the surface. Now we're going to make the soaking liquid for the tres leches. So in traditional tres leches, usually it's sweet and condensed milk, evaporated milk, and then either whole milk or like half and half or heavy cream. So I really like the fresh dairy taste. I don't love the like more cooked taste you get with evaporated milk. So, I'm going to I'm actually just using three cups of whole milk, one can of sweet and condensed, and one cup of heavy cream. You could kind of like change the mix a little bit if you wanted more like you could do all half and half. But, I like the idea of it like translates to like three milk. So, it's like heavy cream,
sweeten condensed, and whole. So, I'm going to just combine everything in this large bowl. And I'm using the stand mixer bowl because it has a little pore spout. So, it's actually just very convenient for soaking the cake. One reason I really like the coffee in here is because I'm always trying to work with bitter flavors in baking because bitter offsets sweet so well. So it's like if I were to just do like a plain vanilla trace leches cake, I would worry that a whole can of sweet and condensed milk was making it too sweet. But when you add the bitterness of coffee, it balances it out so well. So I'm going to add my whole can of sweet and condensed.
It also has a little bit of it gives you like a little bit of Vietnamese coffee because of the sweet and condensed milk and the coffee flavors which is so good. I'm going to add just a little pinch of salt. And now we're going to add the kiteer. This is morning blend from Birch Coffee. I got so excited with this one because Birch is my neighborhood coffee place in the city. But when we're we're full-time in the Hudson Valley and so like every coffee we have is basically coffee from home and Harrison makes coffee that's his job and one morning he made me a coffee and I was like I am drinking a birch ice latte and it was so cool because like brought me back it was it
was so crazy how the flavor brought me back to like that is my city coffee but I was having it like at in our cabin kind of in a rural area and like what a dream that was. So, I'm going to add four of these. This is the equivalent of about a half a cup of liquid. So, if you're making this at home and you're not using a Kate coffee and you can use like a very strong espresso, but as I've said many times, the great thing about kamater is how intense it is. And so, you're adding so much flavor without a lot of liquid. And by the way, pods are recycl recyclable. I just love that we're going to have a birch flavored translious cake. All right, so now I just need to whisk this together mostly to get the sweet and
condensed milk dissolved. It would be really good if we just poured this over little ice, but I need it. Sorry. So that's our soak. We're going to set this aside and we're going to wait for our sponge to come out and cool. And then we soak. 27 minutes later, the sponge is done. It's mostly I can smell it, but it's like very even golden brown on the surface. I know it's done. If you're not sure, you can always poke it with a toothpick and make sure it comes out clean. But based on color alone, it's done. So now what we actually want to do is cool this upside down. So as soon as it comes out of the oven, you actually want to invert it onto your cooling rack. And this is gonna basically this is taking
advantage of gravity and helping the cake to maintain its height without collapsing. Sponge cake when it's hot is like very delicate. This is like if you've ever made an angel food cake, this is the same thing you do. And that is to avoid like the structure is very fragile from all the steam that's in it. And this just helps it to like cool off and release the steam without falling back onto itself. And that's why we don't grease it. If you grease it, you risk the whole thing falling out. So I'm going to set this aside. This is going to cool and then we're going to go ahead and unmold it. There's like a little bit of prep that you do for the cake itself before you soak it. But then everything goes back in the pan. It sits
overnight and that's it. Then we top it and eat it. So this the sponge is cooled. When I touch the bottom, it's room temp. So now we're going to take it out. So, what I want to do is just use, you can use a butter knife. I'm just using a little offset and cutting along the sides. Another step that's important with trace leches is you want, you need to expose the crumb of the cake. A lot of sponges develop this like film on the surface. So, we're going to peel that off. It peels off like a layer. So, this is exposing the crumb so that it can pull the soap down into the cake. So, now we're going to unmold this. Having those strips along the edges is going to really help. So, so see this the border where I had the
strips and then the film on the bottom. So, like that film like the cake clung to it as it cooled. We had this nice tall sponge, but it was super easy to unmold. So, we're going to peel these away. And now we have a sponge where there's like exposed crumb on the top and bottom. So, we're ready to soak. But I want to just do one thing, which is I'm going to clean out my pan, line it with a little bit of plastic, which is going to help to get every like it's going to make it so that I can unmold the cake after it's soaked. And then we're going to put it back in and pour everything over top. Sorry. Watch out, kitty. So, this is going to go back into my pan. I have some plastic in here. It's
not like you have to get it sealed so that nothing gets underneath. It's just to help you pull everything out. So, now before putting this soak on, I'm going to poke some holes. This cake has like somewhat of a tight crumb and so the holes just helps to create like little channels where the cake can pull the liquid down into the crumb. You have to do this in advance because it takes basically like a full 24 hours for the cake to become fully soaked. So, this part's really fun. Literally, just pour it over and it's going to pull on top like crazy, but eventually the cake is going to expand as it soaks everything up. And it seems like a ton of liquid, but trace leches cake absorb a surprising amount
of liquid. All right, so I'm just going to poke a few more holes, the bubbles. So, you can see the cake already like swelling up as it absorbs. Now, I'm just going to cover this with some plastic and get it into the fridge. This needs to sit in the fridge for 24 hours so that the sponge can fully soak in all the liquid. So, I made one last night so that we can go ahead and like finish it and taste it. And I put a little plate over it to help keep the sponge like a little bit submerged. So I'm gonna grab that one. This one is gonna go in and we're going to do our little maserapone topping kind of tiramisu treatment and cut and paste it.
All right. So I have 8 oz or 1 cup of mascar pone and I have the same amount of heavy cream. And I'm going to make some softly whipped mascar pone. And I'm not sweetening it. I think there's enough sugar elsewhere. I'm going to add a little bit of vanilla paste mostly because I like to see the specks and I like the flavor along with the coffee. So, I definitely have some liquid underneath. With tight taste, I always like to see a little bit of pooling soak underneath the cake when you go to unmold it. Oh, you know what? I now have a cordless I want to say shout out to Jesse Sheen who was like I got a cordless um hand mixer and it changed my life and then I got a cordless hand mixer and it changed my life.
So, this is just about softly whipped. I can see that it's holding the marks of the whisk. You basically want it to be just past the point of being still pourable. That's how softly whipped I like it cuz maser pone will also stiffen the mixture as it sits. So it should just kind of barely hold its shape. Okay, that looks great. Now I had a big platter somewhere. I don't know where it is. So my only platter big enough for this is has a turkey on it. So I'm going to take off my top layer of plastic. All right. I'm going to uncover the sides. Nice. A little bit leaking. See how it's like suctioned to the pan? This is why we have the plastic. So, just pulling it a little bit.
It's actually quite a lot of soak. Huh. I can always pour some off. Should I get a straw? TBH is kind of more than I want. Pulling. That's like a lot. So the last step is to scrape the whipped mascar pone over top. Final step before tasting is to grate some bar chocolate over top. And this is like a fairly bitter chocolate. This is I think is a 72% cuz I want the bitterness. You could do unsweetened chocolate. I don't love cocoa powder, which is what you see a lot with tiramisu because to me it's like kind of drying in your when you go to taste it. So I like grated chocolate instead. It does make you cough. This serves I would say 15. You can slice it 3x5. There's been a breach.
Oh my god. Good thumbnail. Can you just look up real quick while you're doing this? We're ready to serve. It is a lot of soak. It's more than I thought it would be left over because I have made other trices in this dimensions where it really absorbed a lot more. I spooned a little bit of the excess soap onto the plate because I it's like a sauce. It looks so good. You can see the sponge is soaked all the way through. No dry spots. So now I'm going to taste it. It really does kind of give tiramisu, but like totally different texture-wise. I didn't really poke it enough. I can see that like it would have absorbed more of the soak if I poked it more. Put that in the recipe. Not too sweet. The
soak on its own is sweet from the sweet ganets milk, but once it goes inside the cake, it's really tempered. And that's also like serving it cold I think really helps. It does kind of give you like coffee hogenas a little bit. And then the mascar pon on top, not sweet. A little bit of bitterness from the chocolate. I don't know. I used to feel like stuff that's cold and wet is not my favorite, but Trace LE just works. And I love what happens when you take a really, really flavorful, high quality, intense coffee like Cometier and you dilute it with dairy. It's just so good. Such a good carrier for like all the flavors. And what I love about Trace Lease is it's endlessly riffable. You can make like so many different kinds
and versions. And this is a coffee one. Taking some flavors from Tiramis Sue, but you could really do anything. I've seen like Thai tea versions, matcha versions. It's just delicious. any think of like any good latte like that can be made into a trace later cake. But this is a really fun one. I hope you give it a try. It's great I think for warmer months because it's served cold and you can like make it totally ahead, pull it out of the fridge, top it and serve it and you get a little caffeine jolt as a bonus. All right, so I want to thank our friends at Commenter for sponsoring this episode. If you want to learn more about Commenter, you can check out the link in the description below. I hope you give
this one a try. Thank you so much for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe.
