Claire Saffitz Makes Confetti Cake | Dessert Person

this is a recipe that like i as an adult love and obviously is a extremely kid-friendly dessert probably probably made for children but i also love it hey everyone i'm claire welcome back to my home kitchen i am very excited today to show you another recipe from dessertperson i am making one of the most celebratory things you could possibly bake and it is my confetti cake based on of course my beloved pillsbury box cake mix that i made as a kid all the time but it tastes a lot better i think i also just love building layer cakes so it's gonna be a fun one to show you [Music] so because i haven't had funfetti cake mix in so long i did go ahead and buy a box mix and so i'm going to go ahead and read the ingredients just for old time's sake there's a lot of them enriched bleached flour parentheses wheat flour niacin reduced iron thiamin mononitrate riboflavin folic acid close parentheses sugar candy bits spread the seeds sugar cornstarch vegetable oil bracket palm and palm kernel clothes brackets soy lecithin dextrin confectioners glaze red forty lake yellow five flake natural and artificial flavor blue one lake carnauba wax yellow six lake close parentheses leavening parentheses baking soda calcium phosphate sodium aluminum phosphate close parentheses contains two percent or less of canola oil dextrose salt cellulose cornstarch propylene glycol esters of fatty acids monoglycerides xanthan gum natural and artificial flavor cellulose gum sodium steel oil lactolate soy lecithin whey sodium caseinate palm kernel oil bht and citric acid try this is antioxidants how's the mouthful this is one of the more opaque or non-transparent ingredient list i've read actually obviously a lot of preservatives in here and i think that that tends to give kind of an off flavor and even like a little bitterness to a lot of boxed cake mixes so this recipe for confetti cake takes everything about the box mix that i love which is like the extreme tenderness and fluffy texture but gives it a much much better flavor point is we're taking all the nostalgia of funfetti and making a homemade version [Music] no no this cake is a scaled down version of the wedding cake i made for my sister but it still makes a very large amount of batter so it's important to use a stand mixer if you want to use a hand mixer you still can but have the have all the ingredients because otherwise the volume is just going to be too great for you to do by hand and then i have three nine inch cake pans so this again makes a three layer 9 inch cake which is quite a large cake and it serves a lot of people you could probably get like 20 servings out of this cake so for this recipe i have my dry ingredients cake flour salt baking powder and soda then i have egg whites and whole eggs buttermilk oil three sticks of unsalted butter vanilla and almond extracts and most importantly the really waxy tasteless grocery store sprinkles sometimes you go to like a like whole foods hazard or a organic food shop or something like that or health food store and you'll see like fancy sprinkles that are made of i don't even know what you do not want those you want the this is betty crocker brand you want the like very waxy tasteless brightly colored grocery store sprinkles just like this and that's because these stay really vibrant in the cake if you were to use another kind of sprinkle that's more natural sometimes it kind of dissolves into the batter and disappears and we want really bright little polka dots of color so use use the shitty sprinkles um all right should we start this cake method of mixing is very different than what you're probably used to if you make a lot of cakes at home typically you start with butter and sugar and you cream it together into light and fluffy and then you do you know you go into eggs and dry and wet whatever this method is opposite it's called reverse creaming so i'm starting actually with all of my dry ingredients in the mixer plus sugar i have a note here that says has salt because i was making the layers last night and i got confused about the ingredients that i had measured out so this already has a salt added now reverse creaming is a method pioneered by the doyen of cake making the doyenne of cake making rose levy berenbaum author of the cake bible and it is just a different method of mixing the batter that produces a very tender cake and really flat layers so this is great if you're making a large volume of batter granulated sugar then three quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda and i have soda and powder because i have buttermilk so it's an acidic ingredient and then four and a half teaspoons of baking powder all right so that is all of my dry ingredients plus sugar sugar is not technically a dry ingredient it's a wet ingredient i want to start by mixing all this together and i have the paddle attachment you know what i really need to be doing right now which i forgot about i need to be preheating the oven and preparing my cake pans can we back up all right i'm turning my oven on 350. also this is very important we're baking three layers at once so i have two racks in the oven one in the upper third one in the lower third and that's because when we bake what you don't wanna have in the oven is like a pan right above another pan because it's gonna block the heat from the surface of the one on the bottom so we're baking one on one rack and then the other two staggered off to the sides on the other and then we rotate them so that it goes like this and that one comes up okay uh what am i going to use i have some i'm going to grease the pans with oil you could use butter just using my pastry brush to work it all the way around so then your parchment goes down in the middle and then i use the pastry brush to not only grease it but to also press it down and eliminate air pockets so by greasing the bottom and then placing the parchment i have a surface that isn't gonna like this parchment paper won't move around when i go to pour the batter in [Music] now that we have the oven preheated and our pans prepared i'm going to pivot back to the batter and what i want to do first is just use the paddle to incorporate all the dry ingredients plus the sugar kind of just pulsing the buttermilk eggs and butter are all completely room temperature and that's very important especially the butter i'll talk about why so but first i'm going to just beat the egg whites and the whole eggs i just want to incorporate them i don't i want to break up the whites themselves and also incorporate the yolks so i'm just going to mix this until it's free of any streaks and then to this i'm going to add my extracts so how much vanilla is it is it a whole tablespoon yep in layer cakes i tend to add a lot of vanilla especially because this is a very delicious pure vanilla extract and then i do like to add the almond extract it just kind of gives this cake an identity okay so now i i'm going to show you how to mix together a cake using this method again it's called reverse creaming so the first thing i'm gonna do is add my butter so it's three sticks oh god this is very soft butter oh good okay and then i'm also gonna add the oil this is only a third of a cup i also want to add a little bit of liquid and that way the fat and the liquid together will kind of create the right amount of gluten development pulsing this in and then once i see most of the flour kind of hydrate i can let it go so if the butter or even the least bit firm i would get like lots of lumps rather than it evenly working into the batter so this is looking good and then i'm going to speed it up a little bit you should beat it for about a minute with this method of mixing which creates as i said a very tender and very evenly baked flat layers um you actually want to mix it more than you might think because again we need some development of the batter so now i'm going to add the rest of my liquid ingredients which are my eggs and the extracts and then i can increase the speed as it begins to incorporate now that i've added the eggs it's looking particularly smooth and satiny and now i want to work some air into the batter because i didn't have that initial step where i creamed together the butter and sugar which creates a very airy fluffy batter so now i want to kind of try to whip it a little bit so i'm going to turn the speed up and just let it go for like a minute or two a minute by the way if you ever time i would have been like yeah that was a minute minutes actually go very slow when you're using the stand mixer so i do actually set a timer but i just want to wipe down the sides this is giving me mrs doubtfire face mask vibes this is my favorite part of this recipe because i love folding in the sprinkles when i was a kid i don't know why my mom bought this was very unlike my mom but she got me sprinklin's yogurt which was just yogurt that you put sprinkles inside and i have no idea why i ate that didn't have a sprinkle i was never allowed to have dunkaroos which was a great tragedy of my childhood my mom never bought them i wanted them so bad all right i actually i'm gonna add more sprinkles because i kind of want to exaggerate i know the recipe calls for half cup but i'm editorializing myself and adding more so this is nicely distributed i'm going to stop mixing so in order to have the most even layers for the easiest assembly i'm weighing the batter in each of the pans so i know i have exactly the same amount [Music] so i'm going to weigh out again it's a lot of batter one pound 12 ounces in each layer what does that say eleven and seven eighths yep twelve and a quarter damn it now what does it say twelve and a quarter eleven and seven eight god okay wait hold on using these measurements i should it uses like every last bit of batter so scrape the bowl very very well all right that one's just going to be 11 and 7 8. i'm giving up on that one before i bake them i just want to smooth out the layers with the greatest tool ever created the small asset spatula um i still haven't named it i totally forgot that i was going to do that what were the suggestions mister mr smooth uh i gotta i gotta try that one on and see i'll think about it count spatula that's a good one that's a really good one count spatula i like it wait hold on did the vet text me hold on oh no i think this is just saying that our food was delivered yeah never mind sorry i'm waiting here from the vet maybe you guys notice that felix isn't here he's sick poor kitty he's at the bed these are going into my preheated oven oh [ __ ] well whatever i didn't really adjust the racks as much as i should have but that's fine okay so i'm going to bake these for a full half an hour before i rotate them and they'll bake 40 to 45 minutes total while i'm waiting for the layers to bake we're gonna roll into cream cheese frosting so this is classic version you've seen it before i've made it on the show you will need a stand mixer to put it together you could do it with a hand mixer if you needed to but we have room temperature butter and then a pound of room temperature cream cheese then just a little vanilla extract salt and one pound of confectioners sugar so i actually let these sit out overnight because i wanted to make sure they're very room temp and for the love of god please don't use low-fat for this it's just not there's no point it's not gonna be good so i'm gonna beat the cream cheese first i want it to still be kind of dense and now my butter now i'm going to add a generous pinch of salt what i like about this i hate measuring out powdered sugar it's just a pain and i usually get it everywhere so i like this recipe because i know i can just use the whole bag now i cover up the mixer to protect from flying powdered sugar and then i just gently pulse now that i have all the sugar incorporated and it's not sitting on top of the butter cream cheese mixture i can start to beat it now i have this beautiful smooth cream cheese frosting i'm going to add my final ingredient which is a little bit of vanilla extract uh if you want it to be particularly fancy you could do a vanilla bean this is done now because it's quite warm in the kitchen today as it always is this frosting is a little bit loose mostly because the butter was warmer than room temperature it's hot so i am going to put this in the fridge where the hell am i going to put this uh um [Music] type of milk number one milk number two ignore this lactate milk this was a mistake from the grocery store all right all right so now we have eight minutes left on that initial 30 minute timer so almost time to rotate but we're gonna press on with our swaps [Music] so my timer is about to go off which means i'm 30 minutes into the big time for the layers and these cakes take between 40 and 45 so now is a good point to rotate because they're gonna start to take on color and that's when i want to make sure they're not browning unevenly so that one goes in the middle that one switches sides this one switches sides and that's that okay uh these will probably take another 10 to 15 minutes so i'm going to set my timer again i know the cakes are about ready because well i looked at them but i also can smell them so use your nose that's a good indication you'll probably know exactly when they're done so i'm going to test just to see comes out clean so i'm going to set these off to the side these are going to cool completely in the pans but fortunately i have layers here that i baked last night so these layers i over bake them a little bit you can see that the sides are very dark so these still have a slightly pronounced dome and i'm going to use a serrated knife to horizontally level the layers so that they're very flat and that just means when i go to stack the cake i'll have those perfectly parallel layers that you want in a layer cake so i have one layer here again fully cooled i'm going to hold the knife parallel to the surface and kind of go all the way around the cake and hopefully remove the domed portion in one piece so now i've gone all the way around and i just want to cut now through the very center part which i haven't sliced through yet look at all the funfetti i actually like when i have to level a cake because then it gives you a little preview i get i'm like a little wary of assembling something and serving it that i haven't myself tasted [Music] this cake over here that's fresh i have a feeling this is going to be a really nice light bouncy not dry cake this cake however that sat out overnight and i got a little dark is slightly drier than i wanted to be so i'm going to add a soak you see this a lot in like bakery cakes because they're designed to last a long time and not dry out i'm just going to use a little bit of milk then i have my cake stand i'm going to grab a piece of parchment so i'm cutting strips of parchment all right i usually start by taking a dollop of frosting and i put it right in the center and take your first layer so i'm placing this on top and centering it on the cake stand and then press down gently and that frosting is there to help it stick to the plate so it doesn't slide around and i want to apply this soak in this case milk to the cut side so that it can absorb into the crumb of the cake i'm really just applying like a single application of milk and i'm not brushing i'm dabbing because if i were to brush i would kind of break up some crumbs and then those crumbs would get into the frosting and then it's just not as neat once you've coated the entire cake and the frosting it is hermetically sealed like nothing that fat in the frosting creates a barrier so no moisture is escaping now i'm gonna apply some frosting so a cup is about the right amount for a cake this size actually might be more than a cup in the recipe see what it says might be a cup and a half oh one cup of frosting okay great because the frosting is still a little bit loose i am not going to go all the way to the edge of the cake layer and that's just to avoid lots of oozing of the middle layer of frosting all right so the next layer is going to go down and i'm going to leave it cut side up and you can kind of get eye level with it again these layers are super super even let's see now i just repeat the process [Music] okay um i'm ready for the last layer i'm just trying to decide if i want to put it cut side up or down so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to soak this layer before i apply it and then i'm actually going to turn it upside down we are almost done but there is kind of an intermediate step called the crumb coat something i've talked about in many places many different times basically it's a thin layer of frosting that you apply before you apply the sort of final coat and it just sticks all the crumbs that might come off the surface of the cake to the side so that you don't get those crumbs in the final application of frosting so you have a really nice clean cake you see how the whole thing is sliding better get this thing in the fridge oh god where am i gonna put this didn't i say last time i was gonna plan for space in the fridge i did not do that my bad so i'm going to quickly finish this crumb coat because this has really got to chill all right i'll worry about the structural integrity later i'm doweling it this is not the best crumb coat but it's the best i can do at the moment i just have to take everything out now all right it's not leaning that bad uh this frosting is still too loose so i don't have room for the whole bowl i'm just going to put it in this pine container and stick it in the fridge and hopefully this sets up along with a cake everything just needs time to chill [Music] the cake all things considered is actually not in such bad shape so i'm putting a lot of icing on top in fact i might put most if not all of this all right so i'm much happier with this the icing is much thicker and the cake is not moving around as i arrange the icing frosting i say i say icing and frosting interchangeably they're not actually interchangeable i think of icing as something that's like a thin you know powdered sugar mixture almost akin to a glaze and frosting is something you know fluffy and creamy like this so really i'm frosting the cake not icing it so i've scraped everything on top and then i like to get the thickness of frosting that i want on the surface and then work everything else evenly down and over the sides and then i kind of focus on the sides and then i can go back to the top uh this cake is looking isn't it looking good it looks great i mean i could i could stop here but i will show you a quick technique for creating an even smoother surface so it does require some kind of straight edge ideally a bench scraper like this but basically i hold this straight edge against the cake at an angle and then spin the cake and basically the spatula takes off a thin layer of frosting now if you do have this ridge of fluffed up frosting here's what you do you just gently scrape from the edge toward the center like that wow i'm kind of in love with how this cake looks all right i think i'm done i think i'm gonna call it i'm gonna do one more little area right here [Music] okay i'm done i'm uh stop me tell me to stop okay i'm gonna stop and now the final touch is gonna be just some sprinkles i always like to decorate whatever whatever the thing is with whatever's inside so now the final final step is to remove the parchment paper by just using my count spatula i can't remember the name to like hold the cake in place while i remove the parchment i'm really into this cake so the sprinkles they obviously look great i like the amount of sprinkles to me this is like everything i love about a box mix but with a flavor that is much cleaner and like just better i feel like yes this is a classic celebration cake but i think it's a time when no one should need like what occasions are there to celebrate not a whole lot so might as well make this cake and have a reason to be happy about something thank you for watching i love being back be able to show you recipes from dessertperson and like and subscribe and what's the other one that's it bring the belt ring what do you mean hi kitty hi kitty can you see your legs his legs got shaved you

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 1,407,084

Rating: 4.9580488 out of 5

Keywords: Claire Saffitz, Claire Saffitz Makes Confetti Cake, Claire Makes, Confetti, Funfetti, Dessert Person, Claire Makes Birthday Cake, Claire Saffitz Dessert Person, How To Make Funfetti Cake, Claire Birthday Cake, Birthday Cake, How To Make Birthday Cake, Cake, Cake Decorating, Gourmet Makes, Bon Appetit, Rainbow, Claire Saffitz Makes, Birthday Cake Recipe, Funfetti Cake Recipe, Cake Recipe, Claire Makes Confetti Cake, Cream Cheese Frosting, Birthday, Happy Birthday, Nostalgic, Cakes

Id: xidcMKR8ikM

Length: 24min 49sec (1489 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Cookie_Oreo]

Claire read the ingredients! Gourmet Makes 2.0

[u/serialragequitter]

I want to make this, but don't need three layers. I don't even have three cake pans, just the one which is.....somewhere.

[u/Lokaji]

I might have to make this for my birthday in a month. The only change I would make is to use nonpareils on the outside.

[u/BobaFettCat]

Loved it. Lots of call backs to the time at the BA kitchen. Plus, it’s a freakin confetti cake.

[u/not_a_library]

I made this cake two or three weeks ago (you may remember me as the one with the monstrosity), and this video makes me want to bake it again to try and do better.

But then I remember how much cake it makes. And that there are only two people in my house (we gave most to my sister, who lives down the street). But I still want to make it. But...so. much. cake.