How to Make Yellow Sheet Cake with Chocolate Frosting

[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 9 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 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 you 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 gonna 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 and 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 going to 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 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 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 so 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 going to 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 thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well 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: 95,924

Keywords: americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated, cooks country, yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting, chocolate frosting, yellow sheet cake, sheet cake, cake recipes, chocolate frosting recipes

Id: 0IvLktF-bF0

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022