How to Make Sheet Pan Cakes | Bake It Up a Notch with Erin McDowell

[Music] so real talk i was really inspired by rick's super simple sheet cake recipe and i wanted to keep it simple on this month's episode of bake it up a notch too because there are really so many wonderful recipes that you can make that are not super complicated and these two family favorites are some of them but because of that this episode is a little bit different than some of our episodes we're really just gonna make two fabulous cakes all the way through plus show you a little extras to take them over the top so let's get going as always the recipes are linked in the video description below so you can follow along as we are baking together and do me a favor if you love cake content be sure to click like and subscribe so you can be made aware of all of our new episodes as they become available now let's get baking [Music] did you know you can make your own sprinkles with royal icing it is so fun and so easy let's do it i love making my own sprinkles and you may have seen this around the internet some of my baking friends like stella parks have really popularized this and it is so much fun and it's fun for a few different reasons one we've already talked a lot about making royal icing here on bake it up a notch go back and check out our royal icing episodes and you can learn a lot more about how to make this very very simple icing but it really is remarkable because it dries to be super firm so by piping long lines of this icing onto a baking sheet and letting it dry we can then cut them and form kind of typical style shapes of sprinkles that you often see i've got some real icing here and i'm going to flavor this icing with cinnamon and you could do this with so many different things and of course you can customize it by adding your own colors as well as your own flavors once we get our flavor incorporated we can just go ahead and transfer it to our piping bags and we're going to pipe some long lines onto parchment paper and of course i've already done some of this so i want to show you what it looks like with a skinnier tip and also with a little bit wider one like this so one thing you can do when you're working with royal icing like this is actually secure the parchment paper with a little bit of icing just so it's not coming up on you as you pipe this is kind of like one of the basic lessons i taught in the piping 101 but the good news is it really doesn't have to be perfect you are kind of trying to do a continuous line but as you can see my first line broke that's totally fine what we're going to do is just start applying pressure and squeeze and just continue oops i did it again see just to continue to guide it across the baking sheet in these long lines and they can be very close together and like i said don't worry if they break because we're eventually going to cut these into little bite-size sprinkles so if there are natural breaks when you're piping that's not the most important thing here it's totally fine and here i even said you can pipe them close so i'll pipe one in between those two lines that i already did just to show you because otherwise you're going to need a lot of baking sheets because we have to pipe a lot of lines to make a lot of sprinkles but it's really fun and this is a really fun project also that kids will really love because they will think it is so cool to make their own sprinkles and the hardest part about it is having to have the patience for them to dry that's the most difficult thing so there's a couple skinny lines but let's see what it looks like when we use our bigger piping bag here and a thicker line like this from the wider tip is going to take much longer to dry so just remember that we really want these to be completely set i usually let them set overnight and since it is summertime where i am right now i need to say that if it's very humid where you live it might take even longer than overnight for them to dry effectively so just remember if you're dealing with a really humid environment that moisture in the air is going to make it take longer for these these sprinkles to dry let's fill a whole tray shall we so as you can see we have a whole bunch of lines here and i even have more icing so i'm going to keep piping that so i have plenty of sprinkles to choose from we need to let these dry completely then we're going to come back and chop them up so let me go get some that i already made that have had a chance to dry so here i have some trays of sprinkles that have already dried and i actually used the biggest sheet trays that i had just because i was trying to make a lot for our sheet cakes so if this looks a little bigger than the tray i was piping on before that's why but any tray that you have even on the backs of trays anything just line it with parchment and make them and then when they're dry they should just whoa pop right off the tray and they are really delicate and brittle so that's why we're going to chop them and you might not even need to chop them you can just do this and then there's sprinkles [Music] and i kind of like to do a coarser chop so that i have big sprinkles let's bring in some of the fatter sprinkles i'm feeling like i want to celebrate them [Music] i'm really happy right now that sound [Music] this is very asmr yeah so i'm gonna keep chopping up all these sprinkles i'm gonna put them in an airtight container and then they're gonna be good as long as you keep them away from any kind of moisture for a really long time as like i said the moisture is not your friend here so you might notice that if for some reason any moisture gets to them that they could not last as long but i've kept some of these homemade sprinkles on my shelf for three months or more and it is really a lot of fun to spend a day making them and then get to surprise people with sprinkles that not only look good they taste so good too [Music] i'm a big fan of carrot cake of course a lot of people have a million different versions this is my favorite version and a version that i think my parents would really love they actually had carrot cake at their wedding that was their wedding cake and it was a sheet cake so it feels really fun to be making that as sort of a celebration cake for them but also as a family we don't eat carrot cake very much since their wedding because my two older brothers snuck off during the ceremony and ate about half of the carrot cake before the reception had even started they ate so much carrot cake that they have never wanted to look at it again so we haven't made a lot of carrot cakes but i know it's one of my parents favorites so i thought it would be so fun to surprise them with this version so it's super simple we don't need any special equipment to make this cake we're gonna actually just mix it in a bowl by hand and it's going to come together really really fast i've got a lightly greased 9 by 13 pan at the ready that's what i'm going to bake this cake in and i'm going to start by mixing some of my dry ingredients together i have my all-purpose flour i have some cinnamon some ginger and some nutmeg for me any cake that has warm spices i just have to add nutmeg i love it it's one of my favorites and i think in a carrot cake it's truly essential i'm also going to add some baking soda and some fine sea salt i'm just going to whisk these together until they're nice and combined and then i'll get started on everything else okay we've got vegetable oil in our bowl and now i'm gonna add some melted butter that's had a chance to cool slightly sorry the pouring spout of this is here i'd like to show it to you but it means i have to be left-handed now i put brown sugar only into my carrot cake because it keeps it super duper moist and for me it's just one of those things like a carrot cake should just be like like fudgy with moistness i feel like we should not use that phrase edit that out this brown sugar will keep this cake super duper moist and that we can all agree on i'm gonna go ahead and whisk that until it's nice and combined and especially with brown sugar when you're not using the mixer sometimes i even take my whisk and kind of break up some of those clumps with like the bottom of the whisk now i'm going to add five eggs but one at a time i'm gonna just break one egg mix it in and make sure that i'm really incorporating it well before i add the next one this is always really important when you're adding eggs because especially when a recipe has a high quantity of eggs it's a space in the recipe where it naturally is going to want to separate because we're adding both a lot of liquid and moisture into it but also some fat and we kind of have to make sure that we're mixing it in a way that it's going to emulsify and bring it together [Music] last one [Music] look how silky it is now all right next i'm gonna add some vanilla extract can't be without vanilla in any cake i'm gonna go ahead and add my dry ingredients and at this point i usually put my whisk away i might bring it back if things are looking clumpy at all but it becomes a little bit easier to mix with a spatula once we start adding the dry ingredients and we'll just stir to combine now comes for me the most fun part of carrot cake which is the carrots and all the other additions that you put in i'm putting these in with kind of my parents favorites in mine but just remember whatever your favorite combination of things to go in your carrot cake that is awesome just remember that ingredients that have moisture might affect the base recipe so if you're somebody who likes to add things like pineapple or something like that remember you're adding something more wet than some of these ingredients i'm choosing today so of course i've got lots of carrots sweetened shredded coconut and we've got pecans i hope especially with baking you know like you'll see these comments where somebody's like but my carrot cake has walnuts and it's like that sounds delicious do it walnut it up so i'm just gonna fold all these things in to combine and we've got ourselves a really good looking cake batter into the pan this is a nice loose batter so it will usually settle kind of and form its own even layer but i always like to make sure that i take a little extra care with the corners because sometimes the corners get a little less batter than everywhere else so i just like to make sure i take my spatula and push a little into those corners all right we're gonna take this to a 350 degree oven and we're going to bake it for 40 to 45 minutes or until a toothpick or skewer inserted into the center comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs attached to it [Music] all right my cake baked and while it is cooling let's make the frosting so i wanted to make a cream cheese style frosting to go with this sheet cake but i also wanted to do a little bit of a twist because my dad is not the biggest fan of frosting so i wanted to make something that i thought was not too sweet and something that he would really really enjoy so what we're doing is we're actually making a version of my stabilized whipped cream now i've made this in some of my recipes even here on food 52 we've made it with the uh strawberry not so shortcake which is from my first book the fearless baker and kristen featured that on genius which was so so much fun and what's cool about this technique the cream cheese the cultures in the cream cheese basically help to stabilize this whipped cream so we can make something that has the texture of a whipped cream frosting but with the tang a little bit from that cream cheese and also unlike whipped cream frosting it's not gonna start to get weepy and disintegrate on you really quickly so you can make this ahead this frosting can actually hold for up to 24 hours which is really not common for regular whipped cream so to start this frosting what we're going to do is actually whip up some of this cream cheese so i've got the whip attachment on my mixer and i have eight ounces of cream cheese get in the bowl there friend and i'm gonna add my granulated sugar actually let's give it a whip first just since it just for a second get it a little bit distributed in the mixer i'm gonna go ahead and add my granulated sugar and the salt for this recipe and i think salt is a really important ingredient in frosting to make sure you're bringing out some of those flavors of the ingredients even things in this case like the cream cheese it's going to give that tang from the cream cheese that's natural a little extra boost okay so we're going to whip this on high speed the granules of the sugar are going to help lighten up that cream cheese and we really want to cream this pretty well so for three to four minutes before we start adding our heavy cream [Music] all right this has gotten nice and light and fluffy you almost can't see any granules of the sugar anymore which is how you know that it's you know gotten to the kind of right point of being nice and aerated with the mixer running on medium-low speed i'm going to add the cream gradually while the mixer is running and some people have seen this in the recipe before and been like but isn't it going to splash out of the bowl and you just need to add it kind of gradually but if you're nervous you can always enlist the trick of putting a towel a clean kitchen towel over your mixer and that way if there are any splatters that occur they kind of just go right onto that towel you can toss it into the wash no harm no worries so i'm gonna go ahead and turn this onto i think while i'm adding it i'm going to be on speed 4 and then i'll raise it up and we're going to keep whipping this until it has more of a whipped cream like texture so first let's add the cream in the early stages of adding it you might even see almost like clumps of cream cheese starting to form because we were using room temperature cream cheese and now we're adding cold cream to it but just keep scraping keep whipping and it's going to go ahead and mix out any of those clumps that occur as we continue to whip up the cream now once it gets to this point where the mixture almost looks like it's all one consistency and it's kind of fluid and liquid more like heavy cream you can go ahead and add the remaining cream a little bit faster awesome so now all the cream is incorporated i'm gonna add some vanilla too and then we're just gonna keep whipping this until it comes to a nice thick consistency like whipped cream and it's really amazing we get this beautiful consistency that's like ultra thick whipped cream it really is somewhere between whipped cream and frosting but it has that lightness and that like i just love a cake frosted with whipped cream i think it's a little bit underrated but a lot of people don't do it because whipped cream doesn't hold very well this trick with the cream cheese allows it to hold and of course then you also get that flavor boost from the cream cheese too okay before i whip this anymore i'm just gonna give it a bit of a scrape just to make sure there's no chunks or anything of cream cheese at the bottom of my bowl and then i'm gonna continue whipping it we're really going for kind of a medium peak here when i'm incorporating the cream into the cream cheese i like to mix on a slightly lower speed like maybe four sort of medium low speed once all that cream is incorporated you can raise the speed up pretty high and just treat it like it's whipped cream so i think i'm gonna whip it on six or eight for these final stages until we get it to medium peaks [Music] it's beautiful this is like one of the most beautiful frostings you will ever make just so easy if for any reason you over whip it you can actually add some more cold cream to it and kind of save it by just stirring that in but it's really really hard to mess this frosting up so i'm just gonna uh transfer like maybe a third of my whipped cream frosting into a piping bag to save for when i'm ready to frost my cake all right i'm gonna go grab my cake which has been cooling and let's get frosting all right let's go ahead and decorate our cooled carrot cake it's cooled and i went ahead and transferred it to a cutting board and i'm just gonna serve it right on this board what's cool about that we can just cut it right there grab pieces it's also great for taking it to a party or a picnic because it's nice and easy um so i'm gonna put first all of the frosting that i still have in my bowl and just look how beautiful it is first of all let's spread this out now again you can make a little more frosting and take that frosting onto the sides but one of the things i really love about sheet cakes is keeping them nude on the sides like we don't need frosting everywhere as long as we've got plenty of frosting up on the top i'm going to get as close to the edge as i can but i'm also going to use a decorative border since i am going to do that i don't need to worry about being too precious with that because i'll cover any of it up so i've got my board here on my cake stand that is a turntable so i just like that ability for flexibility especially when i'm doing any kind of piping project because it allows me to pipe continuously while rotating but it's also really nice for getting a nice even top on our cake as well oh it's looking so pretty let's pipe a pretty border oh you know sometimes there's a first pancake rule with piping and you know what i don't even need to i'm just gonna just make that remember when you're piping there are air pockets in there that's what was just happened to me mistakes happened [Music] one thing that's really important to remember when you're working with whipped cream frosting is that the pressure and the heat from your hands is going to change the consistency of the frosting more than with a typical buttercream so it is kind of important when you're piping to go ahead and work a little bit fast because we just want to make sure that we're maintaining the consistency but with that said this cream cheese really does stabilize this frosting in a way so this is a great time if you've always wanted to try whipped cream frosting but you found them hard to work with this one is a lot easier to use and a little bit more forgiving now let's top it with our homemade cinnamon sprinkles [Music] i feel like i could even do more but again my parents don't love sprinkles so we'll keep it a conservative amount of sprinklage so that i can really prove my point to them and um one more sprinkle oh no i closed it that's for the best [Laughter] all right this is our beautiful carrot cake i'm gonna set it aside and now let's make our second cheap cake a white cake let's make one of my parents all-time favorite cakes white cake or wedding cake this has been sort of the stuff of lore in my house since i was really young my parents talk about wedding cake in these like sort of hushed reverent tones they just like love it and what they mean by wedding cake is a nice fluffy white cake with a really light fluffy white icing and they both have that little tiny bit of almond flavor added to them so even though at its core it's just a white kind of vanilla e cake very vanilla forward it has that hint of almond that makes it really creamy really delicious and definitely very nostalgic if you love this flavor of cake too and best of all it is super easy to make especially as a sheet cake so we're not going to mix this one by hand like our carrot cake we're going to use our stand mixer so we're going to start out the same way mixing some of our dry ingredients together so i have my all-purpose flour here and i'm just going to add some fine sea salt and i'm also going to add some baking powder those are our only dry ingredients in this recipe so i'm just going to give that a bit of a stir and set it aside okay next up let's start creaming our butter and sugar i've got three sticks of unsalted butter nice and at room temp i'm just gonna drop that in let's give that just a brief mix all right now let's add our granulated sugar to it [Music] and we're going to cream this mixture on medium speed until it is nice and light and fluffy four to five minutes this is getting nice and close and fluffy so while it is finishing up i'm just gonna whisk together my milk and my oil a little bit of oil in this recipe even though we're mostly using a creamed butter and sugar it just keeps this cake super super super moist and it's one of the things that will make this a great make ahead option for parties you know you can make it and not worry about that cake drying out so i'm just going to give those a little bit of a whisk to combine and then set them aside until i'm ready to add it along with those dry ingredients this is looking so nice and light and fluffy we can really see a color difference actually foggy come up here because this is like one of those times where we can see there's kind of what it looked like before a lot yellower up at the top where i didn't scrape it well and then there's how nice and light and fluffy it is now now i will scrape it and make sure that it all becomes light and fluffy after a good scraping i'm going to start adding my egg whites now using only egg whites is really what makes this white cake so i'm going to add them gradually and let that mixture incorporate fully maybe giving a couple scrapes in between it'll probably take me three or four additions to add all the egg whites i need to put in [Music] let's go ahead and add in our two extracts we've got vanilla extract and of course our almond extract and almond extract is a really strong flavor so we don't use nearly as much of it and it goes a long way let's mix that to incorporate and then what we're going to do is we're going to start adding our dry and wet ingredients in alternating additions probably two to three additions for each starting with the dry [Music] this looks truly beautiful so thick smooth i'm just so excited for this to go into the pan we're gonna do the same thing as we did with the carrot cake we'll put it into the pan it's pretty much going to form an even layer but i'll make sure to take a little extra care to nudge it into those corners so that it's even all the way across all right we're taking this to a 325 degree oven and we're going to bake it until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs it's going to take 30 to 35 minutes [Music] my white cake has cooled and i've transferred it to a board so now let's go ahead and make our super simple frosting for our white cake and i actually just talked about this in one of our episodes of bake it up a notch bite size i've talked about it a few times on bake it up a notch because i'm obsessed with this style of buttercream it's called sweetened condensed milk style buttercream or russian buttercream one of the reasons that i love a sweetened condensed milk style buttercream is that it is less sweet significantly than an american style buttercream but really just as easy to make so um i'm gonna start we've got our whip attachment and i'm gonna start by whipping we've got a whole pound of butter here baby and we're gonna whip it up until it is nice and white and fluffy and then we'll start adding our sweetened condensed milk gradually until the whole thing forms a beautiful frosting [Music] all right let's add our condensed milk gradually this is looking so good i'm going to add my vanilla extract and my almond extract to give this that flavor that's going to be perfect for our white cake but i also want to point out that while this frosting is super duper easy to make it is a little bit prone to separating if you add that sweetened condensed milk too fast so if at any point it looks grainy or oily and it just doesn't look like a smooth beautiful frosting just keep whipping it it will absolutely come back together with enough time [Music] all right let's put some of this frosting into a piping bag so we can do some decorative edges and then we'll throw the rest on the top of our white cake i don't throw it we'll place it [Music] [Music] let's get some of our homemade vanilla bean sprinkles [Music] okay i think we're there oh this is truly one of the most glamorous white cakes i've ever made and it's also one of the easiest because no layers here no whatever just beauty and deliciousness i can't wait to eat both of these cakes let's give this a little bit of a chill and then we'll come back and slice both of our cakes and see which one is best [Music] i am so so excited to cut into both of these cakes and eat some of both so let's dive in first up i'm going to cut a piece of the white cake [Music] well i'm not going to eat that whole thing you crazy pants what are you nuts is that too big don't slice shame me [Music] i learned my lesson i will never not cut a cake again i got a much bigger slice of the carrot cake that makes it look like i favor the carrot cake but i swear i'm impartial here okay which one should i do first this is like a time i wish we could be live and i could be like all right which one should i eat first but i'm gonna go white cake because it's a little bit more not as strong of a flavor is the carrot cake the most beautiful thing about this cake is the ratio of cake to frosting and these frostings are so creamy and so beautiful that it's like the perfect amount but both of these cakes are so moist i just love how watch focky how the fork goes through this i mean yeah that's a thing smartest thing i've ever said on the series that's a thing okay now the carrot cake you were gonna love this i got a little emotional about this frosting this frosting is so light and it has that tang of cream cheese frosting but it's not as heavy as cream cheese frosting can be no butter in it just cream so light but it's that aeration you know it's so light and fluffy and then the cake is dense and has those chewy bits of carrot and coconut and um ah the sprinkles okay i will put down my cake for just a few minutes to say thank you so much for joining me for this episode of bake it up a notch please be sure to tell me which of these cakes you are excited to try in the comments let me know if you would want the white cake or the carrot cake or if you'd be crazy like me and make both of them to make it the most wonderful celebration ever i want to hear all about it and if you do end up baking a cake and you're inspired to make a sheet cake you're inspired to make one of these recipes please be sure to let us know use hashtag bake it up a notch i would love to see what you are making in your kitchens as always the recipes we used in this episode are linked in the video description below so please join us for our next episode and until then happy baking [Music] oh

Channel: Food52

Views: 130,623

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, erin mcdowell, bake it up a notch, sheet cake recipe, sheet cake decorating ideas, sheet cake tutorial, sheet cake to wedding cake, sheet cake ideas, easy sheet cake decorating ideas, homemade sprinkles for cake, homemade sprinkles recipe, how to make homemade sprinkles for cake, food52 erin mcdowell, baking tutorial, bake it up a notch with erin mcdowell, erin jeanne mcdowell cake

Id: qc_kC35288k

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022