Chocolate jiggly cake | homemade castella

jiggly cake or castella cake is the original name you could say it looks a lot more awesome than it tastes it's been a big food fad across east asia for years these bakeries make cakes the size of love seats and then millions of weirdos on the internet like me watch videos where all they do is cut the cake because the cake goes back and forth and it is spellbinding i've made them myself before but with this chocolate recipe i have focused on making it taste as good as it looks the historical mother recipe for castella is i think four parts egg then one part each of fat milk flour and sugar by weight this is the basic ratio that all the recipes i've read seem to orbit around to convert it to a chocolate cake people usually seem to add an additional part of chocolate which itself is about half cocoa powder and half solid chocolate and then they usually up the sugar a little bit i played with these ratios until i got a cake that i think is really tasty and super jiggly rather than bake a giant one i'm doing a normal home kitchen size this is an 8 inch cake pan 20 centimeters and then you need a bigger pan that it will nest into my roasting tray is my biggest pan and in it goes to the middle of the oven where i will fill it part way with water not so much water that the displacement of my cake pan will cause a flood that's an easy thing to test for time to get all that heating up to 350 fahrenheit 180c i'm using my convection fan castella is a sponge cake and with any kind of sponge cake you pretty much have to line the pan with parchment paper i'm just cutting that piece into a square like the pan and then i will snip a little diagonal into each corner each cut is about the same length as the pan is deep now all i have to do is smash that in there and the corners fit pretty well there are more precise ways to line a square pan with parchment but that is good enough for me now batter a microwave safe bowl on the scale this is a rare time that i really think i need the precision of weight measurement 75 grams of any neutral cooking oil then comes about 35 grams of semi-sweet chocolate chips or any solid chocolate you like then about 60 grams of milk i find you got to cut back on the moisture a bit from the mother recipe to account for the moisture of the melted chocolate and melt this i will in the microwave you can do it on the stove just really gently for like 45 seconds in there until it's bubbling i'll take that out and whisk it smooth in goes about 40 grams of dutch cocoa i'm pretty sure they use dutch at original cake bakery in taipei whose recipe i'm basically trying to reverse engineer here their batter looks very dark at this stage it would be lighter if we use natural cocoa than cake flour and i really find bleached cake flour does better for jiggly cake it holds more moisture and gives you that pudding like texture 75 grams of that i don't think original cake does this but i really found a big splash of vanilla in there improves the flavor a lot and it's okay if this is kind of unmixable at this stage the egg yolks are coming six large eggs that i'm cracking into a bowl that should seem too big for the job we're gonna whip the whites in here the yolks all go into the chocolate mixture i've found that really fresh eggs help you avoid the kind of farty sulfurous egg aroma that a cake this eggy can have problem is fresh eggs are harder to separate the white really wants to stick to the yolk which is why i'm separating them in my fingers you can literally pinch off stubborn bits of white between your fingers i'll mix the yolks into all of this while it's still warm if the temperature drops too much the chocolate might solidify into hard little grains no worries if you can't get this totally smooth there's still more moisture coming over here the whites along with a tiny pinch of salt and a little bit of cream of tartar or really any food acid both chemicals help us to whip these proteins into a foam so pillowy that you would want to dive face first into it like my new mattress from the sponsor of this video helix let's thank them helix is a premium mattress in a box company it literally came in a box and it's made to fit your body and sleep preferences you just do what we did you go to helixsleep.com and take their quiz tell them your body dimensions and those of whomever you're sharing your bed with tell them how both of you sleep side stomach whatever and helix matches you we got the moonlight the super soft sheets and pillows and everything are also from helix lauren always wants a firmer bed i want a squishy one and this met us right in the middle it's like snuggling into a giant jiggly cake the way it kind of wraps around you but it is firm and supportive under there too do your back and this channel a favor and go to helixsleep.com you'll get up to 200 off your helix sleep mattress plus two free pillows that link is in the description thank you helix and did i mention that i weighed out like 130 grams of sugar in a little bowl might seem like a lot of sugar but i really think you need it to balance the chocolate and to give the cake a cotton candy like texture once the egg whites are very foamy and leaving trails like that behind the beaters you can gradually stir in the sugar a little bit of sugar you can dump in all at once but with this much you kind of gotta dose it or it might collapse the foam i've really found this is key to jiggly cake beating the sugar into the egg whites until you get a very fluffy stiff meringue the sugar reinforces the foam i'm looking for pretty stiff peaks like that snowy spire right there awesome we're done with the beaters now i'm gonna do that classical thing they do with souffles and such where you take a little bit of your foam and beat it mercilessly into your sticky ingredients you don't worry about preserving the bubbles you just use this to lighten up the mixture to get it smooth and ready to integrate more gently into the rest of the foam i'm doing that cut and fold over move with the spatula trying to integrate this in as few strokes as possible to preserve bubbles if you work it too much you'll feel it get less stiff it'll go all runny and liquid and then it won't bake as fluffy you could actually bake it streaky like that it comes out looking pretty cool but i'm gonna get it totally smooth and it is ready to pour in the pan the taller the cake is the more jiggly it'll be so i formulated this to fill my eight inch pan all the way to the brim if you're using a wider pan i think you'd want to up your batter quantities accordingly nice and smooth and i'm topping with a few chocolate chips sometimes they sink into the batter a little bit sometimes they don't either way they stay near the top where they provide some much needed heterogeneity you could mix them all the way through if you wanted all done just got to drop this gently into the water bath which will keep the sides of the cake from overheating and the steam will keep the dome of the cake pliable allowing everything to expand and balloon with steam 40 minutes in and you can see it's still raw in the center from how it sloshes 10 minutes later i'll poke it with a skewer still very muddy not done yet after about an hour total poke again and i find that you don't want it to be totally clean if it is the cake will be dry and not very jiggly that's perfect right there now i could try to lift out this pan but i'd probably get my oven mitts wet and maybe scald myself instead i'll just use the parchment sling and simply lift the cake right out of there i'll come back for both pans when they've cooled and there you go we can peel the paper off these eggy batters are super sticky imagine if it was stuck like this to the pan and you can't lube the pan the batter needs to stick to the walls so that it can climb and get super fluffy and jiggly cut that up in the videos from the bakeries in taiwan and such i always see them cutting it into big rectangles while it's still steaming hot i think it's good to eat this warm because it isn't so gelatinous after it cools that is really tasty and it's crazy to think that it doesn't have any gelatin or modified corn starch or anything it's just the magic of eggs making it so wobbly and with the chocolate the flavor is almost as good as the texture the chocolate easily overwhelms any unpleasant aroma you might get from the eggs you get the hang of this cake and you've got a pretty easy and simple recipe that'll make people very happy wubba wubba

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 391,046

Rating: 4.9656363 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: aiOEOvy55Rc

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/poopyheadthrowaway]

w u b b a w u b b a

[u/The-Bigger-Fish]

I swear those repeated shots of Adam flopping onto his bed like a fish are gonna become memes of some sort.

[u/jassbuster]

Waking up to Adam is better than coffee. Yes I sleep in late.

[u/lumberjackhammerhead]

Interesting how easy and fast it was for him to use weight for a baking recipe. He didn't even have a /r/wheredidthesodago moment dumping in the flour!

Snarkiness aside, this is something I find a little frustrating. I totally agree with using volumetric amounts or even other measurements (medium onion) for most non-baking recipes being totally fine (or even better) because the precision isn't really needed and can even be detrimental. However, for baking it usually is needed, or at least it's preferable.

He even says this is one of the rare times he feels precision is needed. I'm sure being imprecise would still make an acceptable cake. But it wouldn't be as good - and that's the difference precision can make. Good, consistent results. So why all the arguments against it? I think this is the point he misses - it's not a 1 to 1 relationship. Volume can get the job done and I understand the preference to some extent, but it won't get the job done as well.

[u/XP_Studios]

wœƀƀä