(uplifting jazz music) - Greetings, my beautiful
lovelies, it's Emmy. How are you, it's great to
see you, and welcome back. Today's video is sponsored by HelloFresh, the food delivery service
that brings pre-portioned, fresh ingredients right to your doorstep so you can prepare a
meal in about 30 minutes. So we are coming into
the busy holiday season so why not let HelloFresh help you out with their quick and easy options, like their 20 minute meals
and easy cleanup recipes. It's so great to not have to
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for sponsoring this video and for their continued support, so I can make better
videos for all of you. So today my lovelies, I'm
gonna be making a recipe that seems super appropriate
for the holidays. It screams elegance, yet it has a beautiful kind of simplicity, and of course it contains chocolate. I'm going to be making Julia
Child's Queen of Sheba Cake. And in French, it's called Reine de Saba (my apologies for my terrible French.) It comes from this lovely book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" -- this is Julia Child's famous tome. This is from the first book:
there are two books in the set. This is written by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone
Beck, and this is a classic. I have made a few recipes from this, I think the first one I
made was so many years ago, I made a coq au vin. And some of these recipes
are pretty technique heavy because this is
traditional French cookery. Julia holds a special place in my heart, as does Jacques Pépin, I
watched a lot of her on PBS with my mother and my
brother on the weekends. She was such a great
combination of mentorship, yet accessibility in the home kitchen, yet a level of professionalism as well. But it still felt accessible
somehow or attemptable. And anyway, let's keep
her spirit alive today by making her Queen of Saba Cake from "Mastering the
Art of French Cooking". It is the Reine de Saba and
you're supposed to bake this so the center remains slightly underdone, and so that has a kind of
of creamy quality to it. I suspect you can melt your
chocolate in the microwave but I'm gonna follow Julia's instructions and do it in a double boiler. Got some semi-sweet chocolate
that I've chopped up and some coffee. Julia says you can also
do rum if you like. And we are just gonna let this sit until everything melts together. (Emmy scatting) This is an eight inch cake pan (butter whipping) and liberally rub it with butter, I find it helps if your
butter is at room temperature. Adding a little bit of flour and then we just shake it around (Emmy tapping) and make sure it goes
up on the sides as well. Take this over to the trashcan
and give it a good bang so that the excess flour is removed. Tada! Our prepared, buttered and floured pan. And you could do this (Emmy exhales) in a stand mixer as well but
I think this will be simpler. One stick of room temperature butter. (Emmy scats) And I like to scrape the paper because look how much is on there. And then we're gonna cream this
till it's light and fluffy. And we're going to add 2/3 of
a cup of just plain old sugar. (hand mixer mixing) (spring bouncing) Oh my gosh, I have butter
and sugar everywhere. Wonderful, I should be
using a bigger bowl. You'd think after all these years of cooking and making
things, I would know that but some things don't change, right? (vinyl scratching) Silly, use the appropriate
size bowl, okay? Don't be lazy cause it's
just gonna be a pain later. We're gonna be adding
more ingredients to this, it's not gonna get any
better, it's gonna get worse so just wash the extra bowl. Or better yet, next time
use the right size bowl and you won't have to
wash an extra bowl, right? Yeah, someday. Someday I'll learn. (hand mixer mixing) So much better, so much better. To our fluffy butter and sugar, we are going to add three
egg yolks, one at a time. How sunny those egg yolks are, so cute. (hand mixer mixing) (Emmy groans)
(hand mixer mixes) The girls decided to both jump in there but I think where we're gonna be okay. Now we are done with this portion, we are going to clean off our beaters till they're nice and squeaky clean because now we're going
to beat some egg whites and if we have any grease on these little mixer whiskey things our egg whites will not beat up as nicely. I have the whites from
those three egg yolks. And in my experience,
and from what I've read, when your egg whites
are at room temperature, they are easier to whip up into peaks. (Emmy scats) Kosher salt and then
beat these to soft peaks. I'm gonna be quiet for
this part, here we go... (Emmy humming) (hand mixer gently mixing) All right, look at that. Now we are going to add
a little bit of sugar just sprinkled gently on top. And now we're going to
beat this to stiff peaks but be careful not to over beat it, we don't want the foam
to start separating. If it starts getting
grainy, you've gone too far so watch it. (hand mixer mixing) I think we're just about there. We're gonna take the egg
mixture that we had earlier and the chocolate and coffee, and we're just going to combine that. Now, we're adding some almond flour, this is just ground up almonds, just a little smidge of almond extract. Work with that in there. I'm so glad I switched to a bigger bowl to be able to stir with
this kind of freedom. (Emmy mixing) I'm growing up. Okay, now we're going to add a quarter of this fluffy meringue that we made. And this will lighten the batter, the batter is pretty thick right now, so we don't have to worry about getting rid of too much of that air or the volume of the egg whites because the purpose of
adding this part of it is just to lighten the batter so it'll be easier to
incorporate the rest of it. Next I've got some cake flour, I'm gonna add some of that to this. And we're gonna alternate
the additions of the flour to the remaining egg whites. So add some of that in
there, gently fold it in. I'm just folding it and then
lifting it over the top. Now we're going to transfer
this to our prepared pan and spread it around. And then I'm gonna pop this
into a preheated 350 degree oven and bake for about 25 minutes. The outer two or three inches
of the cake should be set and the middle should
be slightly jiggling. And if we put a cake tester
in the middle of the cake, it should come out clean but oily. We're going to let it cool for 10 minutes before we invert it onto a rack. And then we must let it cool
completely before we ice it. Alrighty, my lovelies,
here is the baked cake. I went ahead and made a
little platform for my cake. I took a piece of corrugated
cardboard, traced my pan, cut that out, and then wrapped it in a little bit of gold
paper that I happen to have, you can use foil. I found it's an easier
way to transport cakes and I want to put sliced almonds around the edge of this cake so this way it makes it
a lot easier to handle. You do not have to do this
step if you don't want to. And we are going to melt
some more chocolate. Once again, add some coffee
or rum, I'm opting for coffee. Bloop! And once the chocolate is melted, we can start adding our butter
one tablespoon at a time. (Emmy mixing) And once we've incorporated all the butter you can see it's very liquidy completely dissolved and melted. Now we're gonna cool it
down in an ice water bath. Now I've seen some recipes for this cake, pouring something that's
very glazing and liquidy on top of this cake. But what Julia instructs is to make it a spreadable consistency. The butter's gonna re-solidify and then we're gonna have something that's more like a frosting inconsistency. Here's a little story time. So this cake that, this
beautiful cake that I just made, I spent much of this day making this cake so I was letting this cake cool outside because here in New England,
winters are pretty cool and I was sweeping off the porch. I had the cake covered
with a little colander but the wind could blow
on it to cool it off. And then I thought, if I
take that colander off, I bet it will cool off faster. I'm standing right here,
chickens won't get to it. So I'm sweeping the porch, sweeping the porch, watching my cake cool. Turn around, check out the yard, turn back and there is a squirrel, right... (Emmy scatting) Right to get into my cake and
it didn't get into the cake but it was right on the cake. So I had my cake sitting on a little stump that I have outside of my porch and it was right on the stump
and it was just about to go... And I said, "Hey!" Scared the crap outta that thing but it didn't eat my cake, thank goodness. Moral of the story: put
the colander on your cake, be patient, let it cool. Don't let the critters get your cake cause that would be bad. Within minutes, we have a
beautiful spreadable icing. Now we're gonna add this
right on top of that. (Emmy be-pop scatting) Oh yes, get in on that. So we're gonna use some sliced almonds and stick 'em to the side. A lot of them are gonna
fall but that's okay, you can reuse them. See, I'm gonna just stick 'em. (bright chillhop music) Alrighty, my lovelies,
look at my beautiful cake! Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Simple elegance. All right, let's give it a slice. (triumphant music) Julia said that it should
just be creamy in the middle and yeah... Oh! Itadakimasu. (Emmy savoring) (Emmy savoring) So good. As most of you know, I am
a huge fan of chocolate, dark chocolate in particular and I usually don't like my
chocolate adulterated too much. I don't really like fruit
additions or so on and so forth. I'm just like chocolate
milk, yes, sugar, yes, but pretty simple. This little bit of almond
in here is so nice. I also have a thing against
almond, a little bit, almond extract in particular. I feel like sometimes
it's just so heavy handed, it's just so overpowering. But that little quarter teaspoon of almond extract in here is so lovely. It goes so nicely with the
chocolate and the coffee flavors. It does not overpower and
definitely compliments, such a great combination. Texture? Mm, lovely and Julia is 100% right, the middle has kind of a
creamy texture, not fudgy. It's still light, it's not dense. It's got a lightness and
kind of an airiness to it but it's not quite cake like either, like a fluffy sheet cake, for example, it doesn't have that texture. The crumb is unique, it's tight and moist. It's a little bit more
like a chiffon cake. Fantastic, love this cake,
will 100% make this again. Not only do I enjoy the
kind of aesthetic look of the sliced almonds, contrasting this beautiful
dark ganache-y top, I also like the texture it offers a kind of flaky, soft crunch. Mm-hm.
(Emmy chewing) Goes really nicely with a cake. Mm, so good! All right, my lovelies, there you have it. The stunning Queen of Sheba Cake, or the end Reine de Saba Cake. Fantastic, highly recommend this one. If you wanna see more Julia recipes, let me know now in the comments below and let me know what particular recipe you are interested in. Thanks so much for watching
and big thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this video. If you'd like to try
HelloFresh for yourself, click the link down below
or go to hellofresh.com and use my code EMMYMADE18 to receive 18 free
meals and free shipping. Thanks again for watching,
I hope you enjoyed that one, I hope you learned something. Please share this video with your friends. Follow me on social
media, like this video, subscribe, and I shall
see you in the next one. Toodaloo! Take care! Byeee!!! (inspirational orchestral music) (uplifting chillhop music) Mm, I kept that one to myself. We're in the presence of
a very elegant cake here. (Emmy baby-talking)
(gentle chillhop music)
