- [Babish] This episode is
sponsored by Squarespace. I used Squarespace to build
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all beautifully designed. If I do say so myself. Get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace.com/babish. - [Announcer] It's the
strip house chocolate cake. - You can do it layer by layer to get our 24 layers chocolate cake. We put the first layer here, then we kind of put chocolate, chocolate custard. - [Announcer] It's like
a crescendo of chocolate and it happens over and over.
- Another one. And this one we have to put
chocolate ganache on top. - [Announcer] Here you have 20
something layers of chocolate coming at you. - [Alvin] Hello there. Welcome back to another episode
of "Anything with Alvin", where I attempt to make
something from a food video that I've been watching in my spare time. Today I'll be attempting the
famous 24 layer chocolate cake from Strip House here in New York City, a well-established steakhouse in the city that has become very famous
for this dessert specifically. This video is exciting to
me for a couple of reasons. One, instead of a frosting, they seem to be making a chocolate pastry cream or custard, which I think
would taste a lot better. And two, I'm curious to see how
all those layers would taste after you do them a lot
thinner than a normal cake. And three, well, this
just sounds like fun. Fortunately for us, the recipe for this cake is actually
quite available online. So that's what we are gonna do. We're gonna start by creaming
seven sticks of butter with four pounds of sugar. Keep in mind that this is
gonna be split into two batches 'cause our stand mixer
can't fit all of it at once. Now the studio is quite cold today. So in order to make this
butter cream properly, we're gonna warm the bowl with
our hands, using the power of friendship and community
to make this cake happen. And fun fact, it's actually working. Feels kind of like a butter
spirit bomb of sorts. Then we're gonna beat in 14
eggs at room temperature, one egg at a time, so that doesn't get all
too chunky in there. Now we're gonna get our
dry ingredients sorted. We're gonna combine
three quarters of a pound of cocoa powder, two and
one-eighth pound of cake flour, quarter cup of salt. Yes, trust me. Two tablespoons of baking soda, three quarters of
teaspoon of baking powder, and just whisk it all together until all of our dry ingredients are mixed. Then we're gonna handle
our liquid ingredients. Two and one-third cups of coffee, two and one-third cups of milk, and one quarter of a
cup of vanilla extract. Somehow I can never make these things without spilling a little bit, so there's our spill for the day. Basically making a vanilla
latte as liquids for this cake, which I think is pretty awesome. Then we're gonna alternate
adding our dry ingredients and our wet ingredients roughly
one third at a time just to make sure that everything
kind of gets a chance to incorporate and nothing gets too either wet or too sticky. We're gonna go ahead and
finish adding our dry and wet ingredients until our
batter is looking pretty good. Now we're gonna do this all over again to make a second batch of cake batter 'cause they couldn't
all fit in the same one. Then in two 11 inch spring form
pans, which have been lined with a sheet of parchment on the bottom, we're going to evenly
divide up our batter until that they're the same height
across all three of them. Then these cakes go into
the oven at 325 degrees for about 50 minutes to an hour. Now I'm a big fan of cakes that
don't actually use frosting. So for this cake we're gonna
be making a chocolate custard. We're first gonna crack and
separate three whole eggs and five egg yolks into one bowl and whisk that together until homogenous. Then we're gonna bring
three cups of whole milk and six cups of heavy cream to a scald. Once you see wisps of steam starting to emerge from the surface of
the white liquid, we're going to slowly ladle one cup
of this into the eggs and whisk continuously,
sort of tempering the eggs until we add about three ladle fulls. Once the eggs have been tempered properly, we're gonna add this
mixture back into the pot and bring this back up to a slow simmer. Then we're gonna add in a mix
of three quarter cups of flour and two cups of sugar
whisking the whole time. Then we're gonna add in a mixture
of one cup of corns starch with one cup of cold milk as sort of a corn starch milk
slurry, which is gonna be one of our thickening agents and whisk that in, stirring continuously as well. Once this has started to thicken,
I'm gonna retake this off of the heat and add in one
pound of bittersweet chocolate. This is Valrhona chocolate,
probably my favorite brand because of its shape and
its flavor and its quality. I'm using 60% cacao
content chocolate here, pretty good balance. We're also gonna whisk in two tablespoons of vanilla extract as well. Once this is all whisked
in, it seems to me that this is still a little thick, so we're gonna loosen this up, adding in one more cup of milk
and one more cup of cream. After tasting it, I realized
there should be a little bit more sugar, so we're going to go ahead and add one quarter cups
of sugar additional. Now this is looking pretty good, but there's probably a couple lumps from all that starch in there. So with Rachel's help,
we're gonna go ahead and strain this through a fine mesh sieve, whisking the whole time, making sure that our end
result custard comes out silky and smooth. Now, as the person who
is making the custard, it is your right and your right only to have the first taste of
the whisk after it comes out. This little snack is completely entitled to you or whoever you would
want bestow this gift upon. Now that our custard is
good, we're gonna wrap that and set that in the fridge
until we're ready to use it. Our cake slices have finished baking. This is what they look like,
pretty nice and even and flat. Because we bake them
at a lower temperature, we're gonna allow them to cool completely before we cut into it, which means resting them
for a whole day for us. It is now day two chocolate cake making. We're gonna take these cakes and attempt to get these into super, super, super thin layers. Now in the video, the chef
handling the cake is clearly skilled and has done this many times. He's able to get the cake
into almost half a centimeter thickness, which is really
insane if you think about how hard it is to level the cake. At this point, Andrew also
came downstairs to give us a great idea about how to level
the cakes in this fashion. He said that if you started to level the cakes from the
bottom instead of the top, by stacking them on something and putting them on a sheet
tray, you should be able to get the same thickness
every time by using the edges of the sheet tray as a
guide for your knife. Although this seems perfect in practice, this is actually a little
bit harder than I thought because the cakes are cold from refrigerating it from the day before. Nevertheless, I will chug
through all of these layers and attempt to get them
as leveled as possible, and I will say using
that cake board technique to slide under the cake to lift off that thin layer is a
great, great technique. when making these. They must have some really skilled, skilled pastry chefs who would make this cake every single day. They probably make this
cake many times per day, so I can't even imagine and
think about all the labor and the skill required to make this. Not all my layers are perfect either. I'm getting a lot of holes,
a lot of unevenness, having to patch it up with this nice
cake, which is actually nice because this cake is so dense and gooey that you can kind of use it as a glue patchwork situation for any holes that might arise. Out of the three cakes we
baked, I was only actually able to get 10 layers of cake,
not the 12 that we needed to make this 24 layer cake. So I asked Rachel to help
me make one additional cake for layering off to the side. Thank you, Rachel. All the remaining scrapped are gathered in a bowl for a future use, which we're gonna show very soon, and by very soon, I mean right now. So we're gonna take all the trimmings that we got off the layering process, and after snacking 'em quite a bit and exclaiming how super good
it is, we're gonna go ahead and crumble them evenly onto a sheet tray lined with parchment paper. Once these are small in size, we're gonna put them into an
oven at 350 degrees convection for about 30 minutes or so, tossing them every once
in a while to make sure that they cook and dry out evenly. While our cake crumbs are
getting crispy in the oven, we're gonna go ahead
and assemble the cake. Now, in the video, they seem to assemble the cake in two different deep pans and then stack them together, so that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna line the side of
each 11 inch spring form pan with a strip of cake
acetate, which is going to help the cake keep its shape and smooth texture on the outside. We're gonna start each one with
one layer of cake, followed by a healthy helping of the
chocolate custard spreading to make sure that it is
even all the way through. We're gonna try to be as even as possible with these, rotating it to
make sure that it's as level and as smooth as possible. We repeat this process
with as many cake layers as we have filling up each
spring form as high as we can go until we have no more cake
and no more custard leftover. Rachel's extra cake that she had baked had to help lend us another four layers. So we actually have a
total of 14 cake layers and 14 layers of custard. So yeah, that's 28. But hey, here at the BCU
we strive for greatness and overachieving is
just the right amount. These cakes are gonna go into the freezer for a quick chill while we work
on our finished cake crumbs. These crumbs have been
cooled for about 30 minutes or so until they've gone
to room temperature. We're simply just gonna put them in a food processor until fine. These are just really nice cake crunchies and surprisingly crispy. I have once second spilled
all over the counter as usual. I'd like to say that
those are just an excuse for me to have my snacks. Oh no. Once the cake crumbs have been
pulverized into small bits, I'm gonna put them in a bowl and set them aside for later use. Now, Strip House also tops off their cake with a really beautiful layer of ganache as a finisher, so that's
what we're gonna do. In a bowl we have 12 ounces
of Valrhona chocolate, 85% this time because I like
my ganaches quite bitter, and one and a half cups of heavy cream, which has been brought to a scald. We're gonna give this
little shake to get rid of any air bubbles and
cover this with a cake board to let the chocolate
slowly warm to temperature. I realized that the heat
from the cream was not enough and the studio was kind of cold that day. So I'm gonna put this steel
mixing bowl directly over a low flame and carefully stir it
until it has come together and is become glossy and silky smooth. This ganache is going to get
poured directly on top of one of our cake stacks, the one that's going to be the top layer. Spread out and tilted until
evenly spread across the top. Any leftover ganache
is going to go straight to either your mouth or someone else that you really care about. Like to also give this a
pretty hard tap on the table a couple times to release any air bubbles that have risen to the surface. Then we're gonna return this cake and the other cake into
the freezer overnight. It is now day three of
making this chocolate cake. We're gonna go ahead and take these frozen cakes out of the freezer. I'm gonna use remaining chocolate
custard as sort of a glue between the two stacks, sparing
it out evenly to make sure that the cake stack that goes on top has something sticky to stick to. Now, we're gonna take off
through spring form harnesses and unwrap their acetate. After admiring how the acetate peels off so smoothly and all the layers we have, the cake with the ganache
goes directly on top of the cake on the bottom, making sure that all sides are level
and have easily aligned. Gonna hit the top with
a little bit of a trim that any edges of the ganache
that stick out are trimmed off and go directly into my belly. On a cake stand, I'm gonna work quickly to
fill in the remaining holes with the chocolate
custard that we have left. Once all the outsides have
been covered, I'm going to take those cake crumbs
that we made earlier and add a nice sort of coating
to the edge of the cake. Some of the custard
has start to freeze up, so I'm gonna take a blowtorch and lightly heat it up until
it has become a little bit more sticky so that the cake crumbs
have somewhere to adhere to. After rotating and
generously coating the edges of this cake, we're gonna
let this cake just sit out for about an hour or two just so that the inside can come up to room temperature. It is very cold right now, and I'm guessing it's gonna
be pretty difficult to cut. Once it feels a little bit
better, we're gonna go ahead and take a knife, dip it in
some hot water to make sure that it is hot and lubricated and attempt our first slice
down these 24 layers of cake. The cake is still quite
cold in the middle, which makes it extremely
difficult to cut through. Here's Steve also attempting
to cut through it. He is about twice as
strong as I am, so the fact that he can't do it means well, we gotta wait a little bit more. After reheating and making our
wake through our first slice of the cake, I thought to myself, "Hey, clearly the knife is getting really cold while we're cutting. How about we blowtorch it and get the metal screaming
hot so that it can just sort of cut through the second slice like butter?" And great idea. So here I am about torching this knife until it is screaming hot and oh yeah, it kind of
sizzled while it cut through. I didn't really think about that part. Don't worry. It's not burnt and still
is very cold in the middle, which made it a lot more
difficult to cut through. After we have made two cuts, it is now time for the big reveal. Here we go slowly. I like how this looks. I like it very much. Now that is a slice of chocolate cake. Let's go ahead and cut another slice. For whatever reason, when
you cut the second slice, it's a lot easier than
cutting the first one. Wonder why? We're gonna take a second to admire the cross section
and the layers of this cake. Even though I don't really work
with cakes in this capacity, I'm pretty pleased with
how this turned out. The tray technique with the leveling really made
a huge difference in the way that we made our layers, but there it is. I present to you our version of the famous 24 layer
chocolate cake from Strip House, this time with four extra
layers with a total of 28. A towering slice of chocolate decadence that you would be pleased
to receive at any meal, any time, any day of the year. And the big question is,
well, how does it taste? Here we go, let's go for a nice fork shot that goes all the way through
each and every 28 layers. Oh, I like this cake. The texture is quite wonderful. A lot of the chocolate custard
absorbed into the really nice dense cake itself, so it's
more of a like a sticky, chocolate gooey pudding. The salt that we added definitely makes this taste extra awesome. Here's a nice little cross section of all the layers cut from the top. And yeah, we all took a huge
huge slice home that day, which means we're gonna be
eating this through the new year. Maybe we should go for a
hundred layers next time. I mentioned before that this
cake comes from a restaurant in the city called Strip House,
and well, Andrew, Steve and I all decided to go take a trip and see the cake for itself. We went in, got some steak, and ultimately ordered the
24 layer chocolate cake, which our server made sure to mention was 24 layers of indulgence. And when it came out, it
looked very similar to the one that we had made, which was
a really promising sign. The color was slightly
different, a little bit darker, and the server mentioned that
they did make them offsite in bulk because they do tend
to also ship them in whole, in case you wanted an
entire cake for yourself, which seems pretty cool,
and we were super excited and curious in how it stacked
up compares to the version that we made as this is the OG. The cake had a lot
lighter crumb than ours. Ours was a little bit more dense and gooey where I think theirs was a
little bit more airy and crumbly. The crumbs on the side were
also not as crunchy as the ones that we had done, but that's probably because they make so many
of these cakes that need to be held in refrigerators. I personally preferred
the one that we made because it was a lot more
gooey and moist in texture, and I tend to like chocolate
cakes that are more on that side rather than on the
lighter and crumbly side. Nevertheless, it was
still good chocolate cake, although I do look
forward to eating the one that I have at home that we made. - [Babish] Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode. They've been a great partner in supporting the Babish Culinary Universe and bringing my websites to life. From websites to online stores
to domains and analytics, Squarespace is the
all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence. They also have SEO tools so that your site is getting found in search by more people more often. If you want to try it for yourself, you can start your free trial today by visiting squarespace.com/babish to get 10% off your first purchase. (upbeat music)
