Smores cake

Happy easter (and end of march) everyone!! As I am still currently on that little challenge where I bake a cake every month to celebrate the birthdays of my classmates born in those months, I sent out a poll to my class chat for them to choose what type of cake they wanted and i guess you can see by the title of this blog what cake they chose - a smores cake.

BUT what is a smore? How do you make that into a cake? How does it even taste like? Well, read on to find out everything you need to know about this dessert and take your baking connoisseur profession to the next level.

Name : Smores cake

Description: fudgy, moist and decadent chocolate cake with a crunchy digestive biscuit crust, silky milk chocolate frosting and warm toasted marshmallow filling.

Flavour Rating: 7.5/10 (It wasnt superrr phenomenal but it was still a heck of a good cake, just not KNEE-SLAPPINGLY good), you get what I mean)

Difficulty rating: 5/10 (there are quite a few components to this cake, the crust, cake, chocolate frosting, marshmallow filling, so it would probably take quite a bit of time. still nothing in this process that is complicated to complete)

Occasion: Happy birthday march babies!! (to evonne and kristy if yall are reading this)

Origins of "smores"

I feel like we are so used to just knowing some things, but we rarely question it. Like, how were post-its invented? How about ice cream? How about smores? These are the kind of questions I always find amusing to search up on and learn more about. So in alignment with this smores cake I made this week, Let me share with you a bit of the origins of smores...

The first ever published recipe for smores (previously known as "some mores" because who doesn't want some more of cookies stuffed with chocolate and marshmellows) was found in a 1927 publication called "Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts", written by Loretta Scott Crew.

Her original recipe called for 16 graham crackers, eight bars of chocolate, and 16 marshmallows. It instructed the s’more-maker to toast the marshmallow until it is in a “crispy, gooey state.” Then place the marshmallow on top of a chocolate bar and in-between two graham crackers, and now you’ve got “some more.” Pretty cool huh?

Something I found pretty interesting about the origin of this dessert is the fact that it was started by Girl Scouts, which I currently am and have been for 4 years HAHA. To be honest, I feel like I should have known this from a while ago, since every once in a while my CCA would make us all start our own campfire and make smores (singaporean version with meji crackers, Nutella and marshmallow inside). But I never actually questioned it until today. Well, the more you know!

Talking about Girl Scouts, the time of year where we have to sell cookies is coming again, so if you guys would like to buy any Girl Scout cookies OR would like me to try to recreate some of the most popular flavours (eg Tagalongs, thin mints), then please let me know in the comments of this blog.

What to do with extra batter

Going a bit deeper into the actual making of this cake, I want to talk about the problem of having extra batter. We all know how expensive things are these days and how it's super important to NOT WASTE FOOD!! As such, one of the worst things I face as a baker is when I make too much of a dough, or a frosting, way more than I need, and have nothing to do with it. Now if this is you, don't worry because im gonna share with you about a little hack you can do if you have extra cake batter and frosting.

This recipe made enough batter to fill two 8 inch cake pans (standard cake size), but for my class parties I usually bake in a smaller amount and use two of my 6 inch cake pans (smaller size). If you do some simple maths, you would probably be able to figure out that I made a bit too much batter.

While one thing you could do to reduce the amount of extra batter you make is to adapt the recipe to make only the amount you need, Its often very complicated to do (especially for me as I try to do the division and multiplication of ingredient quantities in my head while I am baking). When I used to do this, I often ended up with adding unproportionate amounts of different ingredients because I would do things like divide number of eggs by half but keep the same amount of baking powder.

Quite obviously a recipe like that would not work out. Sometimes, recipes even call out for small quantities of ingredients from the start, like 1 egg, which again, is a recipe for disaster to divide into three parts and use.

Here comes my solution to this problem.... simply use the extra batter to make something else, like cupcakes (if you also have extra frosting) or muffins!

It's literally so simple and it still tastes amazing. PLUS, if you are baking a big cake to bring for a party, you obviously cant just cut a slice of the cake to eat right after you bake it. Instead, you have to hold back the temptation until your party starts, then give it a taste. Not only is this extremely beneficial for you and your soon to be happy stomach, this is also really important because it allows you to taste whatever you are making before you serve it. I learnt the importance of this step a few months ago when I made my Christmas log cake. After spending a full day of effort making this cake, when I tasted it on Christmas night as well as served it to all my party guests, I realised that it tasted SALTY!! Maybe if I had cut of a small part of the cake off to make sure it tasted fine, I would have been able to save myself the embarrassment from serving all my guests this salty cake.

Therefore, now I always find some way to try out whatever I made. Whether it is through this method of making cupcakes with the same base, frosting and filling as the actual cake or just slicing off a thin part of the cake and lathering on some frosting on it to make a mini version of the actual cake, I find this step super important now and of course yummy.

Decoration/Assembly

I think up to now, one of the parts I still struggle quite a lot with is the decoration/assembly of the end product of the cake. Im not sure if it's because I am always a bit too impatient to let the cake or frosting cool properly before stacking them up together but this last step seems to always find its way to somewhat failure. In this scenario, I was in a bit of a rush to finish making this cake before dinner so I couldn't leave the cake in the fridge to cool for a while (which is what is suggested to ensure that it does not start to break apart and slide as it is assembled together). Instead, I just let the cake cool in room temperature and didn't give the frosting much time to cool in the fridge either.

As you can see in the image, the weight of the second layer of cake was pushing down on the frosting in between the two layers of cake, squeezing it out and creating quite a bit of a mess at the sides of the cake. This also caused the second layer of cake to slide around (which made me have to readjust it a few times). If you look closely, you can also notice that the frosting is pretty soft looking, so I obviously needed to give it more time to chill in the fridge if I wanted this cake to be stacked properly. Lesson learnt. 1. make cake ahead of time and chill cake in the fridge

2. do not overfill cake (eg in this case putting in too much marshmallow frosting, making it even easier to ooze out)

3. make sure frosting is sufficiently cool and smooth

The last part of the decoration of this cake was the marshmellow topping. Initially, I wanted to put a couple of chunky marshmallows and flame torch it before bringing it to school so that it could replicate that warm toasty feeling you get when you bite into a smore. HOWEVER, to my shock, I could not find my blow torch anywhere. As such I tried to use a mini lighter to toast the marshmallows on the cake a bit, but it didn't give that nice golden crispy layer and instead just created mini black patches on the cake which I later decided to remove.

Note to self : a lighter does not give the same effect as a flame torch

Photo taking

I don't have much to say about this part but I wanted to just share some of the techniques I use to get better pictures.

Since these monthly school birthday parties always occur in, you guessed it - school, I usually don't bring a nice looking setup or plate to plate my cake slice on a get a good picture of. So, I have to make do with using things like the back of a pizza box (from the pizza my class ordered for the party), to plate my cake. Yeah I know, not the most aesthetic thing. To fix this problem a bit, I usually use the function on iPhone where you press and hold on the image and press copy subject, then paste it into canva and choose a nice background so I can cover up the hideous one I initially used.

This works perfectly when I am trying to create posters as well, especially those for my farmers markets sales, as I also need a clear image of ONLY the dessert with not weird background. I suggest you give this a try too, maybe even experiment with putting more interesting backgrounds like a window looking out into Paris or something, be creative!

Another issue I realise that I run into often is the bad lighting that I take my pictures in. Since I have a pretty busy life, I rarely have time to wake up in the morning to bake something and have a 2 hour long photoshoot during hte golden hour at 9am when natural light is shining through the window. Instead, my reality is finishing baking whatever I am working on, at 9pm at night, when it's dark outside and the only light source I have is from my artificial kitchen light. This gives me pretty ugly looking pictures (as seen on the left), where the colours don't look very distinct and the cupcakes just look bleak and sad. To fix this problem, I don't need to use any fancy editing softwares like adobe. I just yet again go to my handy dandy photo settings and edit the differnet function on the image (tone, warmth, brightness) so as to make the colours look more distinct and stand out more (as seen on the right).

I realised people on Instagram practically eat with their eyes, so if I wanted to stand a chance to capture someones attention, I needed to use some of these simple methods such as changing backgrounds or editing picture colours so that I could get one step closer to being like my favourite bakers (broma bakery, butternut bakery, Claire saffitz).

Recipe

S'mores cake

prep time : 2 hours

cook time : 30 minutes

servings : as many or as little as you want HAHA

Special equipment : three 6-inch cake pans (you can use any cake pan size, just take note that cook timing might change)

Ingredients

Chocolate cake :

210 g all purpose flour
400 g white sugar
75 g cocoa powder
2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
240 ml buttermilk (this can be substituted by taking 240ml of milk, taking out 1 tbsp of milk and replacing it with white vinegar, leaving it for at least 5 minutes before use)
120 ml oil
240 ml hot coffee

Crust :

Any biscuit of your choice (Oreo, lotus, digestive) --> just make sure its a plain cookie biscuit
Melted butter
White sugar
Salt

For the crust, i just YOLO it, crush up as many biscuits as you want and add enough sugar until you feel that it's sweet enough. you can take charge of this part!

Chocolate Ganache :

142 grams dark chocolate
178 grams heavy cream
150 grams sugar
70g softened butter
½ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla

Marshmallow cream:

2 egg whites
100g sugar
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Additional

Marshmallows for decoration

Steps

Cake + Crust :

Preheat oven to 180º/350F
Add biscuits of your choice to a plastic bag/food processor and smash/blend until there are fine crumbs, then transfer to a mixing bowl
Add melted butter little by little until texture of crumb resembles wet sand (if its too dry, add more butter, too wet, add more crushed biscuits)
Add sugar and salt to taste (if you like it sweeter, add more sugar vice versa) (personally I like a saltier crust so I add quite a bit of salt, just be careful with this part)
Evenly distribute the cookie crust to the base of your cake pans and bake for 10 minutes (until slightly golden). Allow it to cool while you make the cake batter.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the white sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Stir it together with a whisk until evenly combined.
Add vanilla, eggs, buttermilk and oil and stir with a whisk until just combined (make sure there are no lumps!! usually I see a lot of grainy pockets of unmixed flour and cocoa powder, so make sure to whisk it until all of those are gone!) (the batter will be quite thin at this stage)
Pour the batter into your cake pans (with the crust at the bottom) and set it off to bake for 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out with moist crumbs attached. Then set aside to cool.
Once it is no longer hot, wrap cakes in cling wrap and place into the fridge so that it can chill further (this will make it much easier to apply cream onto and decorate)

Additional tip! If you don't want to have cakes that dome (uneven and hard to stack on top of each other), I suggest that you buy cake pan strips from amazon, soak it in cold water for a while, then rinse it out and cover the sides of the cake pan with it) (alternatively, I read somewhere that you can do the same thing but with a cloth only? someone please try this and lmk if it works)

Chocolate ganache :

Add chocolate, butter, salt and vanilla into a bowl.
In a small pan over medium heat, heat cream and sugar just until hot (before boiling)
Pour heated cream over the bowl of chocolate and stir it until combined
Allow it to set in the fridge until cold (make sure it's not too hard to spread!)

Marshmallow cream:

Boil a bit of water in a pan over low heat until it is simmering (not boiling)
Add egg whites, sugar and cream of tartar to a heat safe bowl ( I usually use glass) which is big enough to be placed on top of the pan without touching the water.
stir the egg white mixture until gently warmed and sugar is dissolved (you can check this by touching the bottom of the bowl until you don't feel anymore sugar granules) (be careful not to let the water touch the bottom of the bowl as it might get too hot and start to cook your egg whites...)
Once the sugar is completely dissolved, whip egg whites on high until stiff peaks from and the mixture looks glossy and thick.

Assembly/Decoration:

Place a cake layer (with the crust side down) and spread ganache onto the cake as well as pipe ganache on the rim of the cake to create a small bowl.
Fill the middle of the cake with marshmallow cream (ganache should be strong enough to hold the cream in place but just in case, make sure not to overfill your cake!)
Repeat this step on top of the second layer and coat the entire cake with the chocolate ganache
If you have leftover marshmallow cream, you can smear some on the sides of the cake and toast it for additional aesthetic purposes. You can even add marshmallows at the top of the cake and toast it!
Enjoy your hard earned dessert ((:

xoxo,

nadzcrumbz

sundayzcrumbz entry #4

Recipe inspired from : https://kitchen-by-the-sea.com/smores-cake/