Jiggly cake — homemade giant Castella

so many hours of my life i have spent watching these videos from bakeries in taiwan and singapore and malaysia and such where these people cut these cakes the size of toddler beds and when the knife goes in the cake kind of goes it is transfixing i had to have one and the only way that was going to happen is if i baked it myself so here's my recipe it's really just a simple sponge cake called castella portuguese traders introduced it to japan in the 16th century as near as i can tell the more popular version in japan these days has cheese in it this does not this version seems to be more associated with taiwan it's just a simple egg sponge baked on the scale of a toddler bed the first thing you'll need is a cake pan and then you'll need a bigger one because we're going to bake this thing in a water bath that right there could work but the cake would not go wubba wubba very much when you cut it too much rigid surface relative to its pudding like inner mass the pan's just too small too short especially i want to bake in this tall sided pan that i've got those walls are three inches almost eight centimeters so what can i put this inside my big roasting tray where i do my thanksgiving turkey just barely fits use whatever pans you've got you could probably use those big disposable aluminum ones if you wanted i worked out a simple formula for calibrating the recipe to any pan's dimensions it's in the description math is your friend now i'm going to pour some water in here doesn't have to be hot yet we're just testing to see how much the inner pan is going to displace it looks to me like those jiggly cake bakeries in taiwan and such use steam injection ovens best way to simulate that at home is by baking in a water bath you'll see what it does the inner pan is floating i'll push it down a little bit but honestly it'll probably still float with the batter in it this cake is mostly air the water does not have to come all the way up the sides now the inner pan can come out and i'll load that into the oven rather than trying to pour hot water into the oven later we can just let that heat up with the oven i baked a dozen of these damn cakes in a weekend and found 325 fahrenheit to be the winning temperature in my oven that's 160c and i'm not using my convection fan i find the fan makes the top of the cake crack now you're going to need a huge bowl and another huge bowl time for the batter and when i studied all the castella recipes i could find it became obvious that the varying ingredient quantities i observed all kind of orbit around the same simple whole number proportions i think this must have been the mother recipe it's by weight four parts eggs to one part fat one part milk one part flour and one part sugar i'm not saying all the recipes do that but they all seem to be doing slight variations of that and i think it's a great place to start my pan is 432 square inches so according to my little formula we're going to need 20 eggs yes 20. the mass of this cake is literally half egg and we need to separate the white from the yolk i normally do that by passing the yolk between the two sides of the shell but in every one of these jiggly cake videos from the bakeries i see people unloading all the eggs whole into a big bowl and then going in with their hands to separate out the yolks you can just kind of pass it between your hands and eventually the white will slither out between your fingers put the yolk into the other giant bowl this works but here's the catch if you rupture one and i need just one of these yolks and some of the yellow leaks down into the bowl with all the whites you will have just wasted all of these eggs we need to beat the whites and their proteins won't foam up if there's any fat in the bowl the yolk has a ton of fat i do not understand why the manager of a castella bakery would trust their employees with this procedure i would totally have them separate the eggs one at a time in a separate bowl keeping each white quarantined until it's clean god burst one get it away get it away i'm sweating luckily that's not a problem thanks to the sponsor of this video native deodorant whom i'll now briefly thank it sounds kind of funny but if a chef were to make deodorant i'm pretty sure native is what they'd come up with look at these scents coconut and vanilla herbal citrus cucumber mint that one's my favorite for sure i love cucumber in just about anything my wife has been on me about switching to an aluminum free deodorant for a long time aluminum salts plug up your pores that's how they work but that has caused me some problems that i won't describe in detail in a food video woe is me the shilling in the armpit that's a little joke for you history buffs anyway lauren's used native for years the scents are super classy they sort of remind me of cocktails in a good way especially that citrus one tons of scents to choose from and they last all day long even in a hot kitchen they're also vegan and cruelty free three deodorants are normally 36 dollars but if you use my link and code in the description you'll get them for 24. that's 33 off link and code in the description thank you native now we've got 20 eggs separated if we look at our mother proportions we can calculate how much we need of everything else a typical large chicken egg minus its shell weighs about 50 grams 50 times 20 eggs is a kilo a thousand grams of eggs all the other ingredients should weigh one quarter of that right so we need 250 grams of fat in the yolks some people apparently use melted butter that'd have nice flavor but vegetable oil will get you a softer texture and i think this cake is entirely about the texture oil is what i see the pros using in the videos time for the milk 250 grams of milk now for 250 of flour all-purpose flour would probably be fine but most people seem to use cake flour and i think that makes sense cakes built on egg foams can sometimes be a little tough so it makes sense to use a softer flour now there are some small additions that are not covered by the macro formula a lot of recipes call for a little cornstarch and i think it's good it makes the interior crumb of the cake finer more pudding like i'd use like a tenth of the weight of your flour so i put in 25 grams a giant glug of vanilla though the easiest way to play with different flavors here would be to put in different extracts maybe do some orange extract plus some orange food coloring whatever and then salt i would do like a heaped teaspoon for this much that apparently works out to half a gram of salt per egg if you want to know last thing we need to measure is our sugar into a separate bowl and this is where i deviate from the mother formula a bit i've gotten a glossier top on the cake when i use a little more than one part sugar what is that 270 grams okay i lied one more thing to measure a little cream of tartar into the egg whites acids make egg foams more elastic and thus more able to mix with other ingredients without deflating some people say it's a quarter teaspoon for every four egg whites some people say it's twice that i don't think you need to be exact and you don't have to use cream of tartar a lot of people use a little lemon juice or white vinegar instead then we'll just beat this up into a foam not in a million years would i make this cake without some kind of electric mixer took about five minutes to get it that fluffy we don't have stiff peaks or anything yet that's fine we're not done yet in goes like half the sugar and we'll beat this until it goes noticeably firmer and glossier some people mix the sugar in with the whites from the start but that can keep your foam from ever forming it's safer to mix in the sugar gradually at the end the sugar will significantly strengthen the foam at this stage make it way firmer you can see how i've got like medium peaks now peaks that flop over when i've taken it all the way to stiff peaks with the sugar in it i've gotten cakes that puff up more in the oven but the top cracks more if that matters to you now we just go right into the other ingredients just blast it with the mixer until it's really smooth some people apparently sift all their dry ingredients into the bowl i see no point the mixer is going to smooth everything out don't worry you're not going to develop the gluten and make the cake tough we're using cake flour and there's hardly even any of it in there the structural matrix of this cake is egg not wheat now i'm just going to start stirring in my meringue it's easier if you do it in a couple installments you might have it in your head that you need to gently fold in the egg foam lest you deflate it but you'd never be able to get a homogeneous mixture here through folding there's just too much meringue it's more meringue now than cake twisted and evil i'm just mixing that until i don't see any streaks of yellow anymore i've seen people in the taiwanese bakery straight up whip these together in a stand mixer and their cakes still come out like pillows only reason i'm using a spatula is because i'd have to totally submerge my hand mixer to keep using it in here all right time for the pan and you've gotta line your pan with parchment paper sponge cakes are both sticky and delicate a deadly combination when it comes to extracting something from a pan how you line yours will depend on the dimensions of your cake and your roll of parchment but i've got a couple of little strips for the two sides and one big one down the middle with enough excess on either side that i can use it as a sling later to lift the cake out don't worry if things are collapsing or not lying flat the weight of the batter will hold everything down this batter came out particularly thin i think that has more to do with how stiff i beat the meringue as opposed to any of the other ingredient proportions but i definitely find i get a smoother more attractive top with a thinner batter there look i didn't even have to smooth that out with a spatula in this goes to the water bath and you'll probably have to just drop the pan in which will result in a little splash but that's fine an initial burst of steam in the oven will probably be good for the cake you bake a cake in a water bath for two reasons one is to create a steam environment in there that will keep the top from setting up hard and restricting the upward expansion of the cake the other reason for the water bath is to keep the sides of the cake from overcooking water can get no hotter than its boiling point and 212 fahrenheit or 100c is well below the temperature needed to brown anything the water will keep the sides of the cake pan relatively cool a smaller castella might need an hour this needed an hour and a half before it looked ready to test by poking it with a skewer nope still too wet on the inside look at the crumbs clinging to the skewer if you're afraid your top is going to burn before the inside is done you can always just turn the heat down or turn it up if the top isn't browning fast enough like 10 minutes later there we are skewer comes out clean time to lift this out and i see no reason to unload a giant pan of hot water right now i'd say just turn off the oven and come back for it when it's cool in the bakery videos they turn the cakes out by inverting them onto a big cutting board but ours is only the size of a couch cushion not a toddler bed so we can simply grab the ends of the big parchment piece and sling the cake out without folding it over on itself and breaking it or anything we can pull all the paper off now note how light the sides are if we didn't bake it in the water bath they'd be very brown come on man look at that it just looks like the airplane seat that you can use as a flotation device in the unlikely event of a water landing look at it jiggle time for the big moment and you'll want the longest knife you have they have these crazy long ones at the bakeries that whoops right there that's what happens when you don't have a long enough knife so obviously it looks awesome and it feels awesome but does it taste awesome honestly when you eat it while it's still very warm i think it kind of tastes like farts remember it's half egg and eggs have sulfur in them that taste really does go away though as the cake cools i don't know if it's the sulfur off-gassing or breaking down or what but the cooled cake does taste nice i do think this is mostly about the novelty value of making something so springy and pillowy how much of it is air well i can show you precisely how much those hydraulic press videos are my second favorite sub-genre of oddly satisfying youtube videos the first of course being jiggly cake cutting you can make this taste more interesting by putting in different flavorings or some chunks like chocolate chips people do that maybe we'll try that another time but for now let's just revel in this simple pleasure wubba wubba wubba

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 2,571,757

Rating: 4.9211922 out of 5

Keywords: jiggly cake recipe, jiggly cake cutting, jiggly cake recipe at home, jiggly cake recipe without cream cheese, jiggly cake making, jiggly cake, giant jiggly cake recipe, giant jiggly cake cutting, giant jiggly cake, castella, homemade jiggly cake, homemade castella cake

Id: _vfdupZNKqo

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/The-Bigger-Fish]

"I think it kinda tastes like farts."

-Adam Ragusea, 2020

[u/Chefbot_9000]

Wubba wubba wubba

[u/2Liberal4You]

Very weird video (not in a bad way). It was quite enjoyable.

[u/[deleted]]

These cakes with pineapple in them are popular in Okinawa. Make one with pineapple and thank me later! 🍍

[u/CheeseBadger]

This is the second video where we have seen Adam’s nipples. I am uncomfortable.