Yellow cake

What good is a frosting recipe without an amazing cake to go with it? Well, here's the perfect cake to compliment a rich buttercream frosting.

To make this cake, you'll need a mixer, 2 9" cake pans, parchment paper, and the following ingredients:

2.5 C + 2 Tbsp flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 sticks butter at room temperature
2 C sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten and at room temperature
3 egg yolks at room temperature
1 C milk
2 tsp vanilla

Prepare cake pans by flouring, buttering, and lining with parchment paper. I normally use 2 9" pans for this recipe, though it says you can also use 3 8" pans. But of course, I don't have 8" pans. In fact, I really only have 1 9" pan. Good thing springform pans can be used to make cakes too :) Now for the good stuff!

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together in a large bowl. Set aside.

Beat butter on high until it's light yellow and sticks to the sides of the bowl. This should take about a minute.

Add the sugar in a steady stream, beating on high until mixture is light and fluffy. This should take about 3 minutes.

Reduce the speed to medium. Add the beaten eggs in small increments (about the volume of one egg at a time), allowing the egg to be incorporated between each addition. Now add the egg yolks one at a time, again allowing for it to be incorporated between additions. The mixture should have increased greatly in volume by the end of this step.

Since it's summer here and we don't have air conditioning, this is when I turned on the oven. It's important to minimize the time that there's something at 350F in my house. Did you catch that temperature? Preheat the oven to 350.

Now, find the dry ingredients that you set aside. Reduce speed to low. Add the dry ingredients in 4 additions, alternating with the milk, which should be added in 3 additions. So, that's flour + milk + flour + milk + flour + milk + flour. End with the flour.

Now, add the vanilla.

Pour in to the prepared pans and bake for ~35 minutes. They will be very dark on top, so don't be concerned if they're not "golden brown". The cake should spring back when lightly pressed in the center when they're done. Just be careful to not burn your hand. Steam comes out when you press it -- shocker, I know!

And you're done! Top with the buttercream frosting from here, and you're good to go! I like to melt some strawberry jam as a glaze between the layers.

Enjoy!

Buttercream frosting

I've always had this problem with cake frosting. I want it rich and creamy, but not too sweet. When you make the easy buttercream frosting, you mix butter, vanilla, and way more powdered sugar than I can even comprehend putting in my mouth. And it's just way too sweet. So, I always try to cut down the powdered sugar I put in, which changes the texture of the frosting. It never manages to hold its shape quite right, since the powdered sugar is what stabilizes it. I've heard rumblings of this buttercream frosting that's made with eggs. The eggs stabilize it instead of the sugar. Sounds promising, right? Or course, fear of the technique had me running for the hills. I finally decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot, though. And the result was INCREDIBLE!!.



Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that!

And now for the part you're all waiting for -- how to make the magic happen :)

The recipe is from cookingforengineers.com.

You'll need 4 eggs, 4 sticks of butter, 1 cup of sugar, 2 tsp. vanilla, and 1/2 tsp. salt. And a metal bowl, and a saucepan with which to make a double boiler. Yup, that's where this whole process gets scary. And a thermometer.

Crack the eggs in to the metal bowl.

Add the sugar and vanilla extract and whisk until combined.

Now set up your double boiler. You want the water hot but not boiling in the saucepan. Make sure the bottom of the bowl doesn't hit the water. Got that? You need to cook the eggs until they hit 160 ˆ F. Whisk constantly as you cook to stop the egg proteins from forming scrambled eggs. I don't think you want that look in your frosting.

Once you're reached 160, remove from heat and beat on medium-high for 5 minutes. It should turn light and fluffy by the end of the 5 minutes. And it should have cooled down. You don't want to melt the butter when you add it.

Reduce the speed to low and begin adding the butter, 2 Tbsp. at a time. Wait a few seconds in between additions. Keep on going until you've added all the butter.

Keep the mixer running until the frosting is smooth. Just wait for it. It'll happen. Really.

And you're done! This recipe makes enough to frost the 9in. 2-layer cake shown above. With a little extra for hubs to eat while I was working.

Trust me, it was worth the effort.

Kicking this blog off right!

For a long time now, I've been thinking about starting a blog about food. When I came up with the name "Shelly Bean Sweets", I obviously intended for it to be all about desserts. I absolutely love to bake! But recently, I've been experimenting more with cooking creative and healthy meals as well. So, this blog will really be a mixture of all sorts of culinary adventures. So, let's get this started off right! After all, what would a food blog be without some pictures?

Recently, I've been trying to design dinner menus with a theme. For instance, this Indian-themed dinner with coconut curry, homemade naan, and mango chutney.




The coconut curry recipe is from one of my favorite websites: Oh She Glows.

Now that the sun is out for more than 20 minutes a day and we can walk outside without fear of frostbite, Hubs and I got bit by the grilling bug. We couldn't wait to take the cover off and fire it up! We decided that this grilled veggie salad would get our spring off on the right foot.


Last summer, we bought some Jamaican Jerk marinade from Williams-Sonoma (definitely one of my favorite stores!) but never got around to opening it. I was so excited when I found it a few weeks ago! We decided to make some Jerk shrimp and it turned into a delicious salad!


The grilled bananas really made this salad! It was sweet, smoky, and spicy! Such a great combination! I made the dressing out of a reduction of the reserved marinade, but that turned out to be a bit of a mistake. That marinade has some kick! Next time, I'll stick to making my own. I think something with oil, vinegar, garlic and a little sugar would be perfect!


These salad tongs are great! They were a gift from my little sis after a trip to Kenya. I just had to include a picture!

And now on to the "sweets". First up is a chocolate raspberry frangipane. What? You don't know what a frangipane is? Honestly, neither did I. I picked this recipe out of the cookbook because I thought it looked amazing! Actually, the recipe called for cherries instead of raspberries. Unfortunately, Hubs has a strong dislike of cherries, so a small substitution was needed. But the raspberries were great! Frangipane is an almond filling. According to Wikipedia (my go-to source for just about everything...) it was originally an almond custard, but the term is now applied to a general almond filling for cakes and tarts. From the pictures below, it's pretty obvious that this one is a tart. And a delicious one at that!


It starts with a pastry shell. Then, you scatter the bottom with chopped chocolate and cover the chocolate layer with raspberries. Honestly, any recipe that starts this way is bound to be good in my book! The almond filling then goes on top of the raspberries.



What dessert would be complete without a chocolate drizzle on top? Definitely not this one! The raspberries poked through the filling more than I would have liked. But in the end, the dimpled top with the red tips sticking out gives it a bit of an unpolished charm.


Pastry, chocolate, raspberries, and almond? This tart was amazing!

Last up is the pound cake I made as dessert for our Easter dinner. Some friends were kind enough to invite us to join them for a wonderful Easter dinner with lamb and some awesome veggie sides. So, we brought this cream cheese pound cake with lime glaze (recipe from Williams-Sonoma).


This cake is so dense! I love how the tart from the lime complements the sweetness in the cake and the glaze.

Wow! That was quite the marathon post! They definitely won't all be like this, but I had all these pictures on my camera that I wanted to share. Please excuse the roughness of the site as I get everything set up. I've had this blog in the works for about 6 months now, and I finally decided that if I didn't just start posting, it would never got off the ground. Enjoy!