(light jazz music) - Greetings, my beautiful lovelies. It's Emmy and welcome back. Today, I'm gonna be attempting to make an absolutely stunning cake. And I have YouTube
recommendations to thank for the inspiration. I was doing my usual late
night YouTube watching, and this popped up in my recommendations and I said, what is that? And it is an island cake. So the cake is absolutely stunning and the recipe tutorial
that I will be following comes from Kitchen Journal by Kalpana -- I'll put the link down below.
And it is pretty thorough, which gives me a pretty good feeling that this might be successful. That's always how I judge
recipes or tutorials: is how thorough the recipe is written. I feel like the more thorough
it is, the more descriptive, the better my chances
of getting it right are. So as you can imagine, this recipe is pretty labor
intensive and involves gelatin. So you need some time to chill everything and have everything set up. So I've done some of this already. So let me walk you through the steps of what I've done so far. Because I knew this recipe
was going to be intense, I went ahead and purchased a
sheet cake from my supermarket. If you want to bake your own
cakes, more power to you. So I bought a half-sheet sheet cake, and I used my six inch diameter
spring form pan as a guide to cut out three cakes. So based on my observations in the video, I figured out that the three layers should be a total of three inches tall. So go ahead and shave your
cake layers accordingly so that you have that height. Okay, so once you have your cakes cut out, you're gonna glue everything
together with ganache. So ganache is simply
chocolate mixed with cream in equal proportions. I used an entire bag of
semi-sweet chocolate chips. So my chips weighed 342 grams. So I added 342 grams of heavy cream, which I heated up just to scalding. And then I pour that
over my chocolate chips. Let that sit for a couple of minutes and then stir it all together. It'll seem like it won't wanna mix, but just be patient and stir it. If it still doesn't melt, take the whole lot and
place it in the microwave and give it 30 seconds
to warm everything up. And you want to make
sure that that chocolate is fully melted and incorporated. It's going to look really runny. Don't be dismayed. You just have to cool it down, but the ganache will slowly
thicken up and you want it to be spreadable, kind
of frosting-like texture. Now, if you let this chill completely, you can actually roll this
into balls and make truffles. Ganache is super handy, it's beautiful. And it's delicious because
it's just chocolate and cream. We're gonna take a dollop
and spread it onto our seven inch pan. This is the base of my pushup pan. You can also use a springform pan and then place your first layer. Then put a layer of ganache. Put your next layer and
continue until all the layers are stuck together. Now I placed this in the refrigerator for a little added insurance
to make sure that the ganache could set up and glue
everything nice and tight. I've also discovered carving
cakes is a lot easier when the cake is nice and cold. And now we're going to carve
out basis of the mountain and the bowls will represent the kind of underwater portion of the cake. So make sure you save all the cake scraps that you cut off. And then we're going to mix a little bit of ganache with that. The amount of ganache you're gonna add, it depends on the
consistency of your cake, but you're just gonna knead it together until you get something that
is moldable like Play-Doh. Then we're going to take this crumb dough and then we're gonna shape
the peaks of our mountains. Once we have our peaks in place, we're gonna take our ganache and we're going to slather
it all over the cake. You wanna make sure you
cover this entirely. So it's really important to
seal in the entire cake because we're gonna be adding gelatin in this, and we don't want the gelatin
to seep into the cake. So the ganache acts
like a bit of a barrier. I placed the cake back in the refrigerator and then I went ahead and
prepared my white chocolate. I melted a handful of
these in the microwave. And then I added a couple
of cold ones in there. I think the key part
of the white chocolate is that you don't want it to be too runny. If it's runny, it's gonna drip. You want these kind of like
wavy swoopy marks on the cake. So you're gonna place that
on the bottom two thirds of the cake. And then for the upper third, you're going to take
some white food coloring. Gently painted the top one
third of the mountains, kind of blend in with
that white chocolate. You want these little brush marks, so have a pretty dry brush. So now it's time to make the jelly ocean. Now you're gonna need a lot of gelatin. You're gonna need the
120 grams of gelatin. This works out to be like
16 envelopes of gelatin and add one and a half cups of water. You're gonna mix this
really well and let this sit for about 10 or 15 minutes to bloom. You want all of that gelatin to absorb as much water as possible. Then next in the sauce pan, you're gonna add 150 grams of sugar and then 600 milliliters of water. Bring this up to a boil,
then add two tablespoons of lemon juice, and then pour this over
your bloomed gelatin and mix this really well. You want your gelatin to
be completely dissolved. So I went ahead and
strained this to make sure I didn't have any gelatin lumps. I'm using Wilton's teal. And I used a toothpick and
I did four toothpick dips of food coloring to the gelatin to get at this beautiful turquoise-y,
tropical waters blue. At this point, you're gonna have a layer of little bubbles and foam on top. And so I used a spoon to
kind of scoop that off. We don't want to pour this on
our cake when it's too hot, because it will melt the ganache. Get yourself some baking
acetate that's four inches tall. take some cooking spray,
spray the acetate, and then remove the
excess with a paper towel. Next we're gonna assemble our pan. So if you have a springform
pan, put the edges on, or if you have a pushup pan like mine, put your cake inside of the pan. Now we're going to seal the pan and I just used packaging tape. You don't want any leaks. You don't want your gelatin pooling out. For some added insurance,
use some plastic wrap. Pull it taut, and then
tape it all the way around. Now, take your acetate
strip with the oily side in, curl it up and then gently
place that inside of your pan. Tape it so it sits in place. Now we're going to take our
room temperature cooled gelatin and pour it into the cake pan. This part is so satisfying
and kind of nerve wracking at the same time. 'Cause now we're submerging our cake. So beautiful. This is a great way to teach your kids about island formation. Once you get your gelatin in there, you're gonna notice some bubbles. You want the tiny little fine bubbles. Those are perfect. The big ones, you can take a
spoon and kind of scoop out. And then you're gonna
refrigerate this over night. Lovelies, this cake is
turning out beautifully. We need to extricate the
cake out of its prison. So that means removing all
of the tape and saran wrap that we, you know, wrapped this in. Alrighty, let's try to get this cake out. Yes! Satisfying unmolding. Lovelies, this is looking so beautiful. The water is transparent. I can see all of my waves
and my texture underneath. (Emmy squeals) So next we're going to
remove the plastic acetate. This is so worth it. Oh my gosh. I am so happy. Happy! This is so beautiful. Look at that. Oh, it's coming off beautifully! (Emmy sighs) It's so great, it's so great. It's so beautiful! It's so clear. So now that the cake is
unmolded, we're almost finished. We're just going to add
some finishing touches to the mountain so they look a little, kind of mossy and gorgeous. We're gonna use Maria biscuits. These are wonderful. I love these. We're gonna crush these up. (cookies crumbling) You can also just use a
plastic bag and a rolling pin if you like. But we want to get these really fine. (cookies scraping) So I want to make sure I
get all the big chunks out. So I'm gonna go ahead and sift this. We're gonna leave some plain and the other two, we're going
to dye two shades of green. This is probably not the best method of storing your food colorings. Yeah. Couple of drops, a yellow
in this one or one drop. And one drop of green here. Okay, so I've got my
ground up cookies dyed green and green and plain. But before we do that, we're gonna add a little
bit of shadow and dimension, and we're gonna blend out some
of this white food coloring. Gonna use a clean brush along with some black food coloring. And we're gonna just add some shadow here. This will give it some depth and make some of this white less stark. Just like you would paint
a Bob Ross painting. I love Bob Ross, by the way. Back in the day when they
used to show him on PBS, I used to watch him on
the weekends with my dad. It was great. Remember Alexander? He was the precursor to Bob Ross. I heard that he actually taught Bob Ross all of his techniques. He was just full of life, but same technique, same palette,
same everything, big man. He kind of reminded me of Penguin from Michael Keaton's "Batman" -- kind of shaped like
that, but very nice guy. Not, not a bad guy. (chuckles) Fire it in! And he would take that big
brush and would push it really hard into the canvas
and he'd go fire it in, fire it in. Oh, Alexander. He's probably passed. Oh. I'm gonna save this glove for a minute. (Emmy gasps) Oh my gosh, there was food
coloring inside of my glove. That's hilarious. (Emmy laughs) She puts on a glove so she
doesn't get food coloring on her hands and this happens. And I'm going to shield the entire thing. Because it's so clear and beautiful and we don't want crumbs
marring the surface. And then of course, we're
gonna cover the surface here and sprinkle the cookie
crumbs right directly onto our mountain peaks. Just like that. Add some green. Plain biscuits to give it
a little bit of a shore. Okay. So now that we have our moss in place, now we can remove our plastic wrap. Nice. Alrighty, we're almost there. So for the final finishing touch, we're gonna use some white food coloring and we're gonna add some wave patterns to our ocean right along the
edge of the islands here. Blend it out. Alrighty, lovelies! The cake is finally
finished and I am so pleased with how this turned out. It was a ton of work and I've
got food coloring all over me, but all in all this tutorial was great. Everything worked according to plan. And now I have an island
cake that I'm going to eat. Alrighty, let's do this! Boom. Oh, there we go. Right through the jelly. (Emmy vocalizes) Yes! It came out beautifully. Alrighty. I'm so pleased with how nicely
that came out, that slice. Very satisfying. Alrighty. Itadakimasu! Mm. Nothing surprising there. We just got a basic chocolate cake with delicious chocolate ganache. Let's have a mountain with
tons of food coloring. Mm. That cake dough mixture
that we made, delicious. Lots of chocolate flavor. It has a nice density to
it, similar to a brownie. And then we coated it with more ganache. So it's extra chocolatey. That part was my favorite. Alrighty. The part that I'm most curious
about, let's try the water. Mm. Very squidgy and slippery. I don't detect any of the lemon juice in terms of both flavor or acidity. Yeah, the jello part's probably
my least favorite part. The texture's strange and
it tastes like gelatin, which has a very strong flavor to me. So I think a little bit of
flavoring would help that. So, this recipe was
very, very interesting. It was much more about the
construction of the diorama of the set, of the miniature world, rather than kind of creating
the best tasting cake. I love the attention to detail,
the clarity of the water, the transparency, being
able to go under the water. It's just such a little fantasy. Such a cute little tiny microcosm
and an edible one at that. Alrighty, my beautiful lovelies. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you guys enjoyed that one. I hope you guys learned something. Please share this video with your friends. It really helps me out. Follow me on social media. I love hearing from you. Like this video, subscribe
if you're not subbed already and I shall see you in the next one. Toodaloo, take care. Bye! (light jazz music) (Emmy belches)
