How to Make Yellow Sheet Cake with Chocolate Frosting and Chewy Peanut Butter Cookies

[Music] welcome to america's test kitchen at home today i'm baking a yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting jack walks us through the wonderful world of dark chocolate and aaron's making the best chewy peanut butter cookies we've got a lot in store for you today so stick around [Music] who doesn't love a good snack cake and i might be making the ultimate one today it's a yellow sheet cake with creamy chocolate frosting i mean what more can i say for the cake i'm looking for really tender crumb it's plush inside and it's going to melt in our mouths we'll get to the frosting a little later but let's start with the cake so any good baker will tell you that it's always better to weigh your ingredients than to measure by volume that's really a good way to get precise ingredients and i'm going to start today with bleached cake flour and i'm going to weigh out nine ounces so to create a plush crumb inside of our cake we need to create something called a high ratio cake and that's where we're using more sugar per weight than flour we're going to add 12 and a quarter ounces of sugar now sugar doesn't just add sweetness it adds moisture and gives the cake the right texture i need to add a little bit of leavening now for this i will measure out instead of whey this is baking powder i'm going to use one teaspoon plus one quarter teaspoon quarter teaspoon of baking soda and i need a half a teaspoon of table salt so that's it for my dry ingredients i'm just going to give them a quick stir here and i'll go ahead and fit this onto my stand mixer so next up buttermilk it's going to add some beautiful tang so i need a half cup we also need some eggs we're using four large eggs plus two yolks crack these one at a time all right now for these last two i'm going to separate the yolk from the white and we're going to add the yolks into our cake now one of the hallmarks of a yellow cake is vanilla and this uses a tablespoon we're going to whisk this just with a fork mix it to break up those eggs all right that is going to be a rich and custardy cake so this is looking pretty good now let's start mixing i'm going to fit this with my paddle attachment and just give it a quick stir to make sure all of those dry ingredients are well mixed that looks good so now let's talk about the fat that we're going to add we're using two types i have vegetable oil and unsalted butter we're using a stick of unsalted butter and a half a cup of the vegetable oil now we're using the butter because butter just makes everything taste better but we found if we used all butter the cake could start to get a little bit dry and a little bit crumbly vegetable oil added in place of some of the butter is a great way to make sure that your cake doesn't start to stale too soon so i'm going to cut up the butter just into some small pieces this is softened just break it up a little bit and add these right to my mixer and i'll go ahead and add the half a cup of vegetable oil at this point as well so i'm going to turn this to low and we're just going to mix this until the butter is incorporated that's going to take about 30 seconds all right that's looking a little bit like sugar cookie dough now i want to aerate this just a little bit so i'm going to increase the speed to medium and let it go for about a minute [Music] that is looking good now i want to point out that even if it doesn't say it in a recipe if you see some things clinging to the side of your bowl at any time it's always a good idea to give it a good scrape down you want to make sure that everything is mixing evenly i'm going to turn this back to low speed and gradually add our egg and buttermilk mixture that's looking great so at this point i want to give the bowl another scrape i'm also going to scrape the beater at this point everything's scraped down looking good i'm going to increase the speed to medium high and now we'll let this mix for about three minutes we want to get some air in there smells like a bake shop in here oh look how puffy and fluffy that batter is it's actually changed color i'm going to put the batter in a 13 by 9 inch cake pan which i've greased and floured doesn't that look good it's almost a shame to bake it the smell of vanilla amazing so i just want to scoot this to the corners of the pan here and smooth the top a little bit make sure it's in an even layer and then what i can't get to with my spatula here i'm going to even it out even more i'm going to whack this pan on the countertop a few times just to make sure that any air bubbles that are underneath have a chance to come up to the surface and break otherwise you might get a big gaping hole in your cake nobody wants that and that smooths the top of it so about five wraps on the counter if you see any big bubbles you can just go ahead and poke them so this is ready to bake i'm going to put this in a 350 degree oven and i'm going to keep it in there until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with just a few crumbs attached and that's going to take anywhere between 28 to 32 minutes [Music] oh that's smelling good let's take a look and see if our cake is baked all the way through now remember i said i need a toothpick to go right in the center and come out with a few crumbs attached now a high ratio cake does have a lot of sugar in it and therefore a lot of moisture and if we'd used unbleached cake flour we could expect this cake to be a lot more dense actually start to collapse but since we used bleached cake flour we can get some good structure in there and a really fine crumb here's why flour is composed of gluten proteins and starch to bleach flour a bleaching agent such as chlorine dioxide gas is introduced and it changes the chemical properties of flour and how it behaves although bleaching affects gluten it primarily alters the starch in the flour damaging the membrane that surrounds the starch granules our batter starts off by cutting fat into a mixture of flour and sugar the first thing to note is that the modified starch binds to the fat in the batter more readily dispersing it throughout the batter that creates a tender texture and a finer crumb when the liquid ingredients like buttermilk and eggs are added to the mixture and the sugar begins to dissolve damaged starch granules in the flour can now absorb more water from those liquid ingredients the bleach starch also behaves differently during baking in the heat of the oven the starch granules swell and burst this is called gelatinization this creates a sturdy gel structure throughout the cake that can hold all the sugar and the water in the recipe with bleach flour more of the starch can gelatinize but with unbleached flour not all of the starch can gelatinize the resulting cake will bake up more dense with a less sturdy structure now the cake needs to cool completely before i can frost it that's going to take a good two hours so i'm going to leave it here of course if you didn't want to leave it on your stovetop you can move it to a wire rack [Music] now that the cake is cooled we can start on our frosting it's the best part of the cake right we're making a chocolate buttercream it's an american style buttercream with a little bit of a twist so i've got some bar chocolate here see if i want a golden ticket nope not a winner today so this is a four ounce bar i need two ounces of that i wonder what i'll do with the remaining amount and i'm going to chop this fine because i need to melt it and i'm going to use the microwave for that it's just good to go at an angle so you start at one of the points here you can also use a bread knife for this it works great and i'm using 60 bittersweet chocolate that means it has 60 cacao in there so it's gonna have some really good flavor all right so this is going to go into the microwave all right so i'm going to start the microwave for 45 seconds on high and then after that i'll go in there and stir it around i'll check it every 15 seconds until everything looks melted it's nicely melted oh super smooth and creamy okay so we're going to weigh our ingredients i need nine ounces of confectioners sugar and in addition to the chocolate we're also going to add a little bit of cocoa powder this is going to make it taste just so deep and rich and chocolatey i need one and a half ounces of cocoa powder a couple other ingredients i have a little bit of salt here quarter teaspoon and i also have here eight tablespoons of softened butter obviously we want softened butter so that our frosting is nice and creamy just gonna break it up into some blobs before i put this on the mixer i've got one more ingredient to get so we're using a little bit of hot water and that's going to make this buttercream so smooth and silky now american buttercreams will sometimes feel a little bit gritty and that's because of those tiny sugar particles in the confectioners sugar so a little bit of hot water you don't have to use boiling water just hot water is going to smooth everything so i need a quarter cup of it not a lot so i'll just pour this right in and get it on my mixer so i'm going to start this on low speed and i'm just going to mix this for about 20 seconds until it starts to come together all right so everything's coming together but i'm going to increase the speed now to medium and really start to work some air into that and get everything nice and smooth so that's going to take about a minute and during that time i'll probably have to go in there and scrape down the sides in the bottom of the bowl just to make sure that it's all mixing evenly this looks absolutely gorgeous just going to take a little blob there so you can see nice and smooth but we haven't even added the chocolate yet so that's going to go in now now that any lumps have been worked out from the butter i'm going to mix this on low speed just until it's incorporated shouldn't take too long as promised all right so i want to show you this beautiful texture let me give it a nice stir here i mean that is gorgeous frosting now it's a little too runny at this point we want to let this set up so i'm going to leave it at room temperature right here on the counter really well guarded and i'll leave it here for about 30 up to 40 minutes and the cocoa solids from the chocolate and of course the cocoa powder are going to help this set up a little bit now this frosting has thickened just a bit you can see oh it looks so silky so it's ready to be used and of course the cake is completely cooled we're going to plop some blobs here across the cake now i'm going to use an offset spatula here just to start to push the frosting towards the edges oh my and i want to make sure that i'm getting everything evenly so it's a good idea to turn the pan this is just a first pass making sure it's all evenly covered oh it's like a beautiful wave of chocolate just hitting the cake now it needs to set up before we slice it i'm going to go put this into the refrigerator for 20 minutes payoff time i get to cut into the cake serve myself a nice big piece i've got my milk ready it's always a good sign all right now i'm going to get in here with my offset spatula gorgeous look at that crumb in there it's so even so plush and velvety that is gorgeous all right so i'm gonna go in for the the big point here lots of frosting on there fudgy and tender i mean the fork just cut right through there it just melts in your mouth it's so tender it's plush it's a really nice vanilla forward flavor coming in there of course i can taste the butter and the frosting is so creamy and dreamy it doesn't feel like that gritty american buttercream it's kind of perfect it's like the best parts of my childhood all wrapped up in one and if you want to make this beautiful cake use a high ratio of sugar to bleach cake flour and use a combination of butter and vegetable oil for a super silky frosting beat a little bit of hot water into the other ingredients so from america's test kitchen at home a childhood dream the very best ever yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting it's disappearing quickly [Music] i'm a happy person and i like to think i'm happy because i eat chocolate every single day yeah i really do and the good news for those of us who love chocolate it's gotten so much better as manufacturers come up with new products that deliver more chocolate and less sugar yeah that's right they're taking out the sugar and giving us more chocolate that's a big hooray now i should say i'm not talking about unsweetened chocolate i'm not talking about eating baking chocolate i have been known in moments of desperation to try that it's 100 chocolate zero percent sugar and 100 pain it's gritty it's chalky it's not meant to be eaten now these are dark chocolates the legal definition is anything with more than 35 chocolate is a dark chocolate now people will call this bittersweet or semi-sweet these terms aren't really regulated the most important thing is to read the label and see the percentage of chocolate so let me start with the test kitchen's favorite for everyday use this is the ghirardelli bittersweet it's 60 cacao or chocolate that means it's 40 sugar we use this for brownies potato you could nibble with this the important thing about this is widely available inexpensive it is great for both nibbling and baking now if you're somebody who's like hey i want to step it up i want a little more chocolate and a little less sugar our favorite in the 70 plus category was choco love this one is super fruity it's really creamy one of the secrets of all of these low sugar chocolates is that they're putting more cocoa butter and taking out a little bit of the cocoa solids so chocolate has two components the cocoa butter is the fat it's what makes it creamy it melts in your mouth the cocoa salads are important it gives you the flavor but too much cocoa solids and you get that graininess so this one is a top choice in that 70 plus category you want to go up one more category and you're somebody who's like i want the 80 plus this is the lint excellence 85 chocolate meaning 15 sugar tastes like coconut this one melts so beautifully in your mouth oh it is so much fun to eat this chocolate and last but not least if you're somebody who wants to go to extremes and you want to try a 90 chocolate this is our favorite in the 90 plus category it's actually 90 chocolate 10 sugar it is alter eco and it's got this amazing berry peaches cherry notes it melts beautifully it is just a delicious chocolate less sugar more chocolate it's a beautiful world eat more chocolate [Music] when i was a kid one of my favorite memories was making peanut butter cookies with my mom and one of my favorite parts about it was the fact that i could take a fork and make those crisscrosses on each cookie and then once they came out of the oven my mom would give me the sifter filled with confectioners sugar and i would dust them all over the cookies and it was one of my favorite childhood memories now i've graduated to an adult peanut butter cookie they're crisp on the outside they are packed with peanut flavor and they have a nice soft and chewy texture so let's get started make sure you tear out your scale and i'm going to use seven and a half ounces of all-purpose flour now i'm going to add a teaspoon of baking soda you always want to dip and sweep i like to use the handles of my measuring spoons now i'm going to add a teaspoon of table salt so now we're just going to whisk this together let's get to our wet ingredients i have teared out my scale and we're going to start with brown sugar just 10 and a half ounces of dark brown sugar a lot of recipes call for packed brown sugar our recipe calls for packed brown sugar as well but again the scale really comes in handy here because your idea packed and my idea packed might be a little different and they might yield slightly different results now we're going to add our peanut butter so i'm using one cup of creamy peanut butter and peanut butter is really important with this recipe you know there's chunky peanut butter there's creamy peanut butter there's a natural peanut butter this recipe is really designed to use creamy peanut butter so don't get tempted to use whatever you have in your pantry make sure you have the creamy so this isn't a just a cup another favorite tool of mine and it's as easy as that so this is one cup of peanut butter and i'm gonna add two tablespoons of honey another baby adjust a cup now i'm gonna add one teaspoon of vanilla and now i'm gonna add four tablespoons of melted butter to get the perfect chew comes down to saturated fat and unsaturated fat our butter is saturated fat and peanut butter is mostly unsaturated fat and the best ratio is 30 saturated fat to 70 unsaturated fat and that really will give us the chew if i had more saturated fat my cookie will be a lot more short and tender and i don't want that i want chewy okay so now we're going to add two eggs they're going to add water to the dough which i'll talk about later and two eggs and they're both beautiful now i'm just gonna whisk this together you just want to whisk this until it's thoroughly combined and homogeneous oh my gosh it smells so good i'd be okay with just a spoon right now but i'm going to make cookies now we're going to add our dry ingredients i'm just going to use a typical folding action to work that flour in without overworking the dough all right so our dough our flour is just combined i'm going to set this aside for a minute and we're going to move on to the final ingredient very important ingredient and that is whole roasted peanuts so i'm just going to use a half a cup of peanuts and i'm going to chop them finely these peanuts are going to add a lot more peanut flavor to our cookies without having to add extra peanut butter if i added extra peanut butter that would actually result in a drier cookie this is going to add peanut flavor and also peanut texture my peanuts are finely chopped with a bench scraper i'm just going to dump them right into my bowl now i'm just going to stir these peanuts into my cookie dough until they're just combined okay so as i said earlier adding too much peanut butter can actually make the cookies drier it may sound counter-intuitive but when you combine water and peanut butter it seems like they're both wet ingredients but they're really not when they combine together they actually stiffen up peanut butter consists of about 50 fat and 25 protein suspended in the fat along with the carbohydrates this combination gives peanut butter a stirrable spreadable texture the proteins and peanuts have a strong tendency to bind with water which is why when you have a spoonful of peanut butter your mouth becomes very dry when you add water to peanut butter the peanut proteins bind to the water and clump together those microscopic clumps bump into each other when we try to stir the peanut butter making it stiffer and pasty because the protein is holding onto water there's less free water available in the dough to make it soft and pliable which is why when you add extra peanut butter to the dough it becomes very stiff and unmanageable and it actually results in a very dry crumbly cookie now it's time to portion the dough i'm using a number 30 portion scoop as i'm scooping i am going into the dough and smearing it so i have a flat surface this is going to ensure that each of the cookies that i scoop are all the same size because i want them to bake at the same rate this can be 24 cookies if i do have some dough left over at the end i can take that dough and evenly distribute it amongst all the other dough balls okay the perfect number of cookies and they're all the same size so the next step is we're going to take each dough ball and roll it into a ball now all i need to do is press each cookie dough ball into a two inch diameter round i've told you before i love my bench scraper and i love this one in particular because it actually has measurements on the edge of it so if you're looking for a bench scraper look for one that actually has a ruler as part of it so it's easy to spot check once i do one then i just kind of cruise through and i press them all so that it matches it i don't hold the ruler up to each one and this is the part where when i was a kid i would take a fork and i would instead of flattening them with my hand i would take that fork and make the crisscrosses if it was a dryer cookie it would hold on to those marks but this is a soft and chewy cookie so those marks just go away so it's okay though these are the best cookies you'll ever have so we're baking the cookies in a 350 degree oven for about 10 to 12 minutes i'm gonna rotate them halfway through okay so it's been about five six minutes and the cookie tray is ready to rotate rotating cookies is a very important step to make sure that they bake evenly throughout [Music] okay so our second batch of cookies has come out of the oven and they've cooled and they're ready to eat and i brought in a special person oh my mom hi mom hi erin i thought i would bring you in to try out the cookies i would love to know that um we always made the old-fashioned ones with the crisscross as a kid and these i'm curious what you think of them okay you want to help yourself sure cheers cheers they're chewy these are delicious they're delicious thank you you can make these for me anytime oh i thought you'd say that [Laughter] okay so my mother loves them and you will too i'm sure of it so if you want to make the perfect chewy peanut butter cookie just remember three things make sure that you use the right peanut butter make sure that you use the right ratios and also that you portion your cookies properly so that they're all uniform so from america's test kitchen at home my mom's favorite chewy peanut butter cookie that's to die for cheers cheers the best ever thank you gonna wave to the camera hi america [Laughter] thanks for watching you can get all the recipes and product reviews from the season and more on our website that's americastestkitchen.com thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 87,822

Keywords: americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated, cooks country, yellow sheet cake, chocolate frosting, yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting, frosting, peanut butter cookies, chewy peanut butter cookies, cookies

Id: hRdyBDafqPs

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021