Joy the Baker transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps, you're listening to She's My Cherry Pie, a brand new baking podcast from Cherry Bombe. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer and the author of three baking books including my latest, Snackable Bakes. Each episode, I'm hanging out with world-class bakers and taking a deep dive into their signature baked goods. Today, we're talking about one of the most popular baked goods ever, the birthday cake and our guest is one of the most popular bakers out there, Joy Wilson aka Joy the Baker. A self-taught baker, Joy was one of the first to use the internet as a tool for teaching and spreading literal joy when it comes to baking.
She's also authored three baking books, is editor-in-chief of the Joy the Baker Magazine and has a line of baking mixes at Williams Sonoma. And then there's her fun Instagram project, Drake on Cake, which is literally Drake lyrics on cakes. Joy and I talked all things birthday cake, including how to zhuzh-up a boxed cake mix and her technique for frosting layer cakes. If you want to make one of Joy's birthday cakes at home, and I hope you do, you can find Joy's recipe in our show notes. Thank you to Le Creuset and California Prunes for sponsoring today's episode.
Since She's My Cherry Pie is a brand new podcast, I have a few favors to ask. First, I would love for you to subscribe to the show via your favorite podcast platform. Feel free to leave a five-star rating. Yes, folks, I'm asking for five and a review. And let me know what bakers and baked goods you'd like me to feature on future episodes. Also, you can subscribe to our free baking newsletter at cherrybombe.com. You'll receive it each week before the show airs, so you'll know about the signature baked good and special guest ahead of time.
Now, here's a word about look Le Creuset. For nearly a century, Le Creuset has been creating joy in the kitchen and beyond as the first in colorful cookware, the finest in quality and design and the favorite for generations of cooks and bakers. And you know what? I love my Le Creuset so much that I have them hanging on the wall in my kitchen. I use them when I bake for melting butter, for making honeycomb candy and caramel for shoe pastry and more, and also of course, when I cook. They are literally my everything. And this season, I will definitely be baking bread in their new bread oven.
If you haven't seen it's a two-piece enamel cast iron set that includes a domed lid to help trap and circulate steam for that perfect golden crispy crust every time. It comes in gorgeous Le Creuset colors, including flame, cerise and Marseille, which happens to be my Le Creuset color. Whether you're making a wish list for your kitchen or want to add to your existing collection, head to lecreuset.com to discover the world of Le Creuset, browse their beautiful colors and even snag some recipes.
Let's chat with today's guest. Joy, so happy to have you here on She's My Cherry Pie. Before we dive into literally my favorite topic, which is birthdays and cake combined, I thought we would do a little bit of background and I wanted to know if you could tell us all a little bit about how you got into baking. I know there was a lot of health food going down in your childhood home and I wanted to hear and have you tell us all how that led to the baker that you are today.
Joy Wilson:
Oh my gosh, there was so much tofu in my childhood home in the '80s, like a criminal amount. Had I known how to call 911, I might have considered it. So the one loophole in my health food family, and honestly, I'm glad for those habits my parents instilled, but the loophole was that if we could make a treat from scratch that we could eat it. And so I was highly motivated as a youth to make anything aside from something with Carob chips. Remember the-
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my God.
Joy Wilson:
Oh my God, the things we suffered through. So when I was little, the first thing I taught myself how to bake was brownies because the instructions were on the unsweetened chocolate box and I was like, "I can read, I can do this," and that unlocked something in me that changed my entire life. Also, my dad is a great baker and my mom is a great cake decorator, so I think it's in the blood.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know you've talked about your dad being an incredible piemaker and his sweet potato pie is Instagram famous at this point and your mom with the cakes.
Joy Wilson:
I know. It's legendary.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that.
Joy Wilson:
I know.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that.
Joy Wilson:
I guess it's all about balance, right?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Joy Wilson:
But also the funny thing about my parents' health food was that it's not like health food was now. The amount of cheese that they would put in things was also legendary. So we had this dish we used to make a lot as a family called tofu potato bake. It was crumbled up tofu, potatoes, green onions and so much cheddar cheese. It's not really health food anymore. That's what we were doing in-
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey, you're speaking my cheese love language.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, for sure.
Jessie Sheehan:
Hello, melted cheese and tofu, I'm in. And then I know for a while you were working at maybe two bakeries when you first graduated from college. Was there baking going on in college too or did it just come upon you when you graduated?
Joy Wilson:
I feel like I've been working in food service just my entire life. So my first job in high school was at Ben & Jerry's, Ben & Jerry's outside of a movie theater in Los Angeles, so we were very popular. And I just really loved working at Ben & Jerry's. Then I loved it so much, I moved to literal Burlington, Vermont to work for Ben & Jerry's and I started decorating their ice cream cakes there and ice cream wedding cakes. It was a whole vibe. And then when I went to college in Seattle and Los Angeles, I worked in bakeries just to get myself through because I knew that field, I knew how to work in food service and I loved it. So yeah, I found myself working in lots of different bakeries.
Jessie Sheehan:
Can I just say the idea that you were decorating cakes at Ben & Jerry's like in Vermont, in the mothership of all the ... I'm just like so ... I grew up in Boston, so even though it wasn't Vermont, it was very Ben & Jerry's focused. So I just love hearing that. And then the blog started in like 2008, is that right?
Joy Wilson:
The blog started in 2008, which makes this year, the year of our Lord 2023, my 15th year as Joy the Baker.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, amazing.
Joy Wilson:
I have done the math on that a couple different times because math is not forte and I'm like, "Is that right? Can that be correct?" but I think it is.
Jessie Sheehan:
And talk to me about the cookbooks, they grew out of the blogging? Was it like one of those situations many of us dream about where you're just approached by someone who knows the blog, who would like to publish a cookbook or how did it go down?
Joy Wilson:
I think that's how the first cookbook went down. A literary agent wrote me an email that I ignored for three months because I didn't know what a literary agent was or I just thought it was fake. I just was like, "This is not a thing." And I was still working in a restaurant at that time, and a couple months later, I got fired from that restaurant job and I thought, "I'm either going to print out more resumes and find another job or I'm going to dig through my email and see if that literary agent thing was real. Is that real? And maybe I can make something out of that email. Maybe I can make more of an entire life and career out of it," and that's exactly what I did.
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey, I love that. I love that. And tell us about your first book. I have it here in my hand, Joy the Baker Cookbook, which I love.
Joy Wilson:
Oh my gosh, Joy the Baker Cookbook, it came out in 2012. She's an old gal by now. So my first cookbook is a hundred of my most earnest, sincere recipes, shot most earnest and sincerely by myself, styled by no one but myself. So it's like it's earnest.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then will you tell us a little bit about the magazine, which I also have right here and which I love because this is so cool. I don't know if the listeners know that there is a Joy the Baker Magazine.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, Joy the Baker Magazine, it started in 2020 and it is a nationally distributed magazine that you can find at the grocery store. I write them usually around Christmas time. I had a one-off that was a summer magazine, but they're usually holiday magazines. You know that time when we're doing all of our best baking, holiday baking, Thanksgiving baking. So yeah, it's a magazine that has all new recipes in it and it's just one of my favorite things to do. And I really like that it's a short-form publishing model, so I can write it in the summer and it comes out a couple months later. It's in people's hands, it's in people's kitchens and I just love that.
Jessie Sheehan:
So it's not the kind of thing where you're writing it like what we do with cookbooks where you write it one year and then maybe in a couple years you're going to see that book come out. It must be nice to ...
Joy Wilson:
I know.
Jessie Sheehan:
... make something and then see it in people's hands.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, I feel like that's what I want to do now. I'm not saying I won't ever write another cookbook, but that length of time, those years, I changed so much. I feel like my work changes, my style changes. I don't want to work that far out anymore.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yup, I totally hear you. I totally hear you. Could you tell us also a little bit about being a baking instructor and about The Bakehouse in New Orleans?
Joy Wilson:
Yeah. Oh my gosh, The Bakehouse, my pride and joy, I bought a double shotgun house in New Orleans in 2016 after living there for a couple years. And one side of the house is just like a giant dining room, big open kitchen and then a little entertaining area. No walls in between, just a giant hallway. And I turned that space into my dream space that I called The Bakehouse where I do all of my cooking and shooting for Joy the Baker, but it was also at a time before the pandemic and after I had been a person of the internet for a while where I was like, "I want people near me. How could we do that again?"
I built a small team and a website and I was like, "We're going to have classes. We're going to have 12 to 16 people around this very kitchen island and I'm going to teach them how to bake out of this kitchen oven. I'm just going to buy a bunch of rolling pins, bunch of bowls. This is it. Let's do it." And I ran The Bakehouse in New Orleans until the pandemic, until 2020. We would have at least two classes a month on the weekends. We would sell out. People would come from far away to take classes in my little kitchen. Tron was there. It was like, dare I say, a little hodgepodge, but also super elite. Somehow I pulled it off and it was just a dream.
Jessie Sheehan:
That sounds amazing. I always wanted to visit. And then finally, I just wanted you to tell us a teeny bit about Drake on Cake which is so awesome and it needs more explanation, at least for me, because I just look at it and I'm like, "This is amazing, but what am I looking at?" And for people that don't know, that's like an Instagram handle of Joy.
Joy Wilson:
Yes, yes. @drakeoncake is an Instagram handle. It's entirely ridiculous. I think I started it, I don't know, 2014 or '15 and I thought to myself one day, "Drake rhymes with cake. Why aren't we doing something with that? Why aren't we doing something?" And so I started piping Drake lyrics onto cake for no other reason that it was completely ridiculous ...
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Joy Wilson:
... and funny to me.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Joy Wilson:
And I would style the cakes pretty simply in the beginning, but then the styling started to get more storytelling, more elaborate and it's completely over the top.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. Thank you to California Prunes for sponsoring this episode of She's My Cherry Pie. What do California Prunes have to do with baking, you might ask? The answer is everything. First, prunes are a great ingredient on their own when it comes to baking. Imagine a California Prune bread with pecans and cardamom or a ginger prune snacking cake or thumbprint cookies with a jammy prune filling. I'd love one of those right now.
Second, if you're looking to make some healthy baking ingredient swaps, you can use prune purée as a replacement for sugar, oil or even eggs in certain baked goods. Homemade prune purée is so simple. It's prunes and water blended together and the purée keeps in your fridge for up to four weeks. And third, snacking, California Prunes are a super snack because they're loaded with nutrients like vitamin K, dietary fiber, potassium and antioxidants, all of which are good for your heart, gut and bones. And you know how important that is. California Prunes are portable, delicious and have just the right level of sweetness. You can find California Prunes at your favorite grocery store or specialty shop. To learn more and snag some great recipes, head over to California Prunes.org. Now back to our guest.
All right, let's jump into birthday cake, which I'm extremely, as I said before, excited to talk about with you. You have this great post on your blog, which is basically where you pull out 12 of your best birthday cakes, although I notice that you can also Google birthday cake on your blog and you'll even come up with more like the funfetti birthday bundt and the big berry birthday cake. So just note to listeners, there are so many awesome birthday cakes and cakes on Joy's site that you need to see. But the one we're going to talk about today, tan-ta-da-da, is everybody's favorite chocolate birthday cake. And can you tell us a little bit about this cake?
Joy Wilson:
Yes, so I feel like everyone should have a birthday cake repertoire and this should include a vanilla birthday cake that you like, tried and true, and a chocolate birthday cake, again, tried and true. Because when you want to make someone a chocolate birthday cake, the most important cake of the year, you don't want to go searching Google, "What is the best chocolate ..." No, you need to know and I figured it out for you. It is this cake. So it's everybody's chocolate birthday cake made for everybody. And thing is I didn't invent chocolate cake. I don't claim to have invented chocolate cake. I found the best chocolate cake, made it from scratch and paired it with the best chocolate frosting.
So the best chocolate cake in my opinion is Hershey's black magic cake. It is magic. You'll find it on the Hershey's box, on the Hershey's website. It is a combination of cocoa, not chocolate, just cocoa powder, oil, key for a chocolate cake, butter not today, I love butter, but not today in a chocolate cake, buttermilk, coffee and then you have a high proportion of sugar as to the flour ratio. So it is perfectly like spongy, soft really gives to a fork when you slice a fork through it, but it's sturdy at the same time. So sturdy enough to stack to make a layer cake. And it has this really beautiful dark chocolate color. To make it even darker, sometimes I add a couple tablespoons of black cocoa to make it super dark, but that's optional. It is just a pantry staple, perfect chocolate cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
So I want to just say a couple of things that you mentioned in this blogpost generally about cake, as we dive into this about birthday cake. What I love is you say, "Always serve a birthday cake with a greeting card," which I just thought that was so nice and sweet, but I loved this idea that you're giving people tips and one of them is a greeting card and that you say sprinkles because sprinkles are great. I also love that you say you love sheet cakes for birthday cakes because that is so nostalgic for me and I just love that. And when we talk, we're going to be talking about this cake as a layer cake, but just quickly, will you shout out, you mentioned you have a pan you love and you said it has tight corners, which also I think is a sexy way to ... I'm always going to be talking about my pans, "She's got tight corners." So will you tell us what the brand is because I know I'm always in search of a perfect sheet pan for a birthday cake and I wanted you to share your fave?
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, gosh, it's so funny to be picky about sheet pans, but I like the Williams Sonoma Goldtouch 9 x 13 Rectangular Sheet Pan. It's just a perfect pan. The pan itself is nonstick, so you don't have to ... You might want to grease it some, but you don't have to line it with parchment paper for extra insurance. You don't need the insurance, which is what you want for a sheet cake, because if you're serving it from the pan, like we do with sheet cakes, you don't want the parchment paper underneath of there. No, thank you.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, 100%. It gets wrinkly and weird.
Joy Wilson:
Kills the vibe. So yeah, the Goldtouch pan is a perfect pan. All of their bakeware is great, but I really love that square and rectangular pan.
Jessie Sheehan:
So one of the ingredients in the cake, important ingredient is buttermilk, and I love that you give us a couple of substitutes for buttermilk, one of which I'd never even heard of, which is milk and cream of tartar. Could you tell us if somebody doesn't have buttermilk around and it's great in this cake, what do you suggest? How do you make your own buttermilk at home?
Joy Wilson:
So if you don't have buttermilk, that's fine. What you want to mimic from buttermilk is the acidic element and also some of the viscosity, some of the thickness of that buttermilk that you're missing. So I like to take a whole milk, if I have it, and mix it with an acid. So either cream of tartar or a little bit of lemon juice, not my favorite, or a little bit of vinegar, also not my favorite because while those do curdle the milk some, it's not going to give us that viscosity, that thickness of buttermilk. My actual favorite thing to do if I have it is to take either sour cream or yogurt and mix it in with whole milk until I get a little bit more of a buttermilk thickness to the liquid. Those are my tricks.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love it. I love that. The cocoa powder, this is interesting because in the recipe you say you like Hershey's Natural for this. I just have recently become obsessed with Hershey's Special Dark. That is-
Joy Wilson:
I know, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
I was just going to use an expletive, that is the bomb. It reminds me of a very expensive cocoa powder that I love that's Dutch processed, but that is expensive and I feel like the Special Dark is pretty great. Joy, are you agreeing with me on that?
Joy Wilson:
I'm fully with you.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, good.
Joy Wilson:
I'm fully with you. The Special Dark is the sleeper hit of the chocolate aisle.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Joy Wilson:
And it's really great in this cake. And so yes, I like to use the Special Dark. I usually have the regular cocoa powder on hand. I can always have the Special Dark, but it's the move for this cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, good, just checking. And then oil, you were saying that this is just not a time for butter. What I love about chocolate cake is that you can use oil in it. I assume though, if you wanted melted butter is still going to work here.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, it's absolutely going to work and it's going to taste delicious. There's not a thing wrong with it, but something about the oil, I think because oil is pure fat, 100% fat, as opposed to milk solids and water, there's something about that pure unadulterated fat that really lends itself to the texture of the cake that help makes it bouncy. It helps make it moist. Butter has the taste, but the taste of this cake is chocolate. Let's not be confused. So you really do want oil because of its unadulterated fattiness.
Jessie Sheehan:
This recipe calls for a couple of eggs. I know sometimes when I'm making a chocolate cake or even a regular cake, I'll throw in a yolk for more moisture or more fattiness, more unctuousness. Are you ever throwing in yolks when you're making cakes?
Joy Wilson:
You're a wild one. Just throwing in yolks. I don't usually throw in a yolk if I'm making a cake. I like a whole egg in a cake because I think that the egg whites add the lightness, the yolks add the richness. And so I think I can see if I were making an olive oil cake or something like that, I can see how an extra yolk might be nice, but for this cake, it's just straight down the line.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yup. The granulated sugar, sometimes I'll put brown sugar in a chocolate cake. What do you think, or talk to me about your choice of the white sugar here?
Joy Wilson:
I think the brown sugar would add a different level of richness to it. If I were to substitute brown sugar in this cake, I would substitute half of it in one cup, brown sugar. But again, this is one of those best-ever use-what's-in-the-pantry kind of chocolate cakes. So sometimes you don't have both kinds of sugar. And granulated, I always have granulated because I can make brown sugar if I have granulated sugar usually, so yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then flour. First, is there a favorite brand that you love? And second, do you have a preference like bleached flour, not bleached flour? For this cake, are we just talking unbleached all-purpose or don't even overthink it because the cake can handle anything?
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, the cake can handle anything. You don't have to overthink it. Just all-purpose flour, just whatever. I have my favorites. I love King Arthur Flour. I love the Whole Foods brand Organic Flour, also quality.
Jessie Sheehan:
Awesome.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, those are the two I use ...
Jessie Sheehan:
Awesome.
Joy Wilson:
... most often.
Jessie Sheehan:
The coffee in this cake, love this. I often realize in chocolate cakes when I'm adding some kind of coffee element, sometimes I don't have the cup of coffee, so I'll just do the hot water and I usually have espresso powder on hand to always be able to add it to a cake. Do you think it matters whether you're using espresso powder and a cup of water versus a cup of actual coffee?
Joy Wilson:
No, I have the espresso powder for the same reason because usually I drink all the coffee and I don't want to make another pot. So yeah, espresso powder, Folgers Granulated Coffee Powder, I have that a lot in my house because it's nice in everything. Yeah, so coffee powder and hot water is perfectly perfect.
Jessie Sheehan:
And a lot of people know who bake and who bake with chocolate, but can you tell people just why we're adding a little bit of coffee to this cake because it's not really for coffee flavor?
Joy Wilson:
No, it's not for the coffee flavor. You won't taste coffee, but you will taste more chocolate. It just enhances the flavor of chocolate really nicely.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. This cake calls for two leavenings, both baking soda and baking powder. And sometimes I don't think people understand exactly why that is. I'm imagining the sodas here because of the buttermilk and the cocoa powder, but maybe just tell us a little bit without getting too much in the weeds of leavening, but why you'll sometimes see ... Because I think it's probably confusing. Chocolate chip cookies is just soda and then some cakes it's just powder, but-
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, so when you see baking soda, there's often an acidic element. So the acidic element on our cake here is the buttermilk. So the baking soda and the buttermilk will work together. Baking powder, a little bit of a different vibe, it works right when it hits liquid, so it's working in the batter before you even put it in the oven and then it does some other work once it's in the oven. So we have a lot of different layers of rise that we want from this cake. Also, the eggs will help the cake rise. Every ingredient has its work to do.
Jessie Sheehan:
Just quickly, salt and vanilla, I'm really into using kosher salt in everything lately, but are you more of a fine sea salt kind of gal or just table salt, "Whatever you got, go for it"?
Joy Wilson:
Whatever you got, go for it. That's the answer, but I write my recipes to either kosher salt or a fine sea salt because that's what I always have. And I also think that is a reasonable thing to expect people to have in their kitchens. Kosher salt is super affordable. It's great for baked goods, it's great for pasta water. It is the salt. I've had the fancy Maldon Sea Salt. That's the salt I have here in Houston for some reason, so I'm crumbling that up with my fingers and putting that in my baked goods, "Hey, we're fancy. We're doing that until the box runs out and then we'll figure out."
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, it's a Texas thing. It's a Texas thing. And then finally, vanilla. I won't lie, sometimes I'm just using McCormick's. Sometimes I'm using something a little fancier. Are you similar-ish or do you have a go-to brand?
Joy Wilson:
I have different. I have different vanilla extracts for different purposes. It's bizarre. If we're going for a chocolate cake that's going in the oven, I'm using my McCormick, not even measuring it, splashing it in. I also ask myself, "Does this really matter? I don't know. I don't know, but we're putting it in. Sure, new layer, great." But if I'm doing something like panna cotta or a cream cheese frosting, that's when I take out my little bottle of vanilla bean paste, not vanilla beans, vanilla bean paste and that is beautiful. It's like a really viscous vanilla extract with loads of vanilla bean pods in it and so that's really nice. I don't put that in my baked goods because it would disappear, but I put that in stuff that doesn't get baked very much and that you can visually see a cream cheese frosting.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. All right, now I want to talk about this epic chocolate frosting that goes on top. There are two secret ingredients. The first one being some Ovaltine. Can you tell peeps a little bit about Ovaltine? And here's my question, I think I know the answer. I like to use malt powder a lot. Is Ovaltine the same as malt powder?
Joy Wilson:
I don't know what they did or why they did it, but Ovaltine is like a healthier hot chocolate mix. They're like, "It has vitamins in it," and you're like, "Okay, cool." And they have a rich chocolate Ovaltine, and then they have a malted chocolate Ovaltine. So one Ovaltine has malt powder in it. It's delicious. Go for it. And the other does not. It's totally your preference. But Ovaltine, I mix Ovaltine with heavy cream for this chocolate frosting recipe and it adds the most fluffy, smooth chocolate flavor. It just is the best chocolate frosting you'll ever have.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, it sounds incredible. And then you add a little bit of peanut butter that you say cuts the sweetness. Obviously, it gives peanut butter vibes, but also cuts the sweetness because of the saltiness?
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, so obviously if you're not a fan of or allergic to peanuts, you would not use this trick and you might add an extra pinch of salt. But I like to add peanut butter to this chocolate frosting, because number one, I like peanut butter and chocolate. Number two, peanut butter has this nutty, salty flavor. Obviously, it's peanut butter and it just lends itself really nicely to a sweet chocolate frosting.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yum, yes. And then the other ingredients are powdered sugar, a teeny bit of milk, cocoa powder and butter and then the heavy cream, you mentioned. And I wondered about that tiny bit of milk. I assume it's there because you're adding it. You're adding a little bit of sugar, a little bit of milk, a little bit of sugar, a little bit of milk. So you're using the milk, even though there's heavy cream in this recipe to help smooth out the integration of the sugar into the rest of the ingredients.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, I think that how this chocolate frosting comes together lends itself to how good the chocolate frosting is. So you will beat together butter and cocoa powder to start and that is the gnarly process. It's a very thick mixture because there's virtually no liquid. And then we'll add vanilla, salt, powdered sugar and ask that to come together. So because we're adding more dryness to this mixture, we want to add a couple tablespoons of milk just to loosen it up, just a little bit to incorporate the powdered sugar. And then the grand finale is that you turn the mixer up and you add this heavy cream and Ovaltine mixture.
What you're doing with the heavy cream while you whip it is that you're aerating the cream within the buttercream frosting and so it makes it just so fluffy. Whereas I've seen some chocolate frostings that can really be pretty thick and hard to spread, but that heavy cream will make it really nice, fluffy, spreadable.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I have to say I always, just when I make an American buttercream, my go-to recipe is, of course, butter, confectioners sugar, vanilla, salt, but rather than use a little bit of milk or whatever else people ... I always put heavy cream in my American buttercream just for that reason. And then if you whip it extra long, you are actually adding some lightness from that whipped cream which cuts the sweetness a teeny bit and also just adds incredible texture.
Joy Wilson:
It adds volume in a surprising way. And it shouldn't be too surprising because we whip cream and it is incredibly voluminous.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Joy Wilson:
But it even a small amount in something like an American buttercream can really make a big difference to people.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, so yummy. So I wanted to talk a little bit about just assembling our cake. First things first, I noticed that you have people grab their pants because this is a layer cake, so a couple of nine inch rounds, let's say, and you say to grease and flour, so no parchment.
Joy Wilson:
If you want to use parchment and you are fully invested in cutting out parchment circles, I respect it. There is a part of me that is incredibly lazy in the kitchen and I know you understand.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Joy Wilson:
I don't know if it's lazy or just realism and I feel like people aren't going ... People don't want to do that. People don't want to. No. And I don't blame them because I don't want to do it. No, this cake does not need parchment paper rounds. It just needs to be greased and floured well and that's it.
Jessie Sheehan:
How do you feel about those sprays? I use Pam and then if I was going to flour, I would just do flour on top of the Pam. Sorry, haters if there's anyone who's not into Pam, but I really like it. But would you use a spray or are you buttering and then flouring? What does Joy the Baker do? That's what we want to know it.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, it depends on what I have. So for this recipe, sometimes if a cake calls for butter, I'll put out a little bit of extra butter to grease the pan. This cake does not call for butter. So we're not buttering a pan. Come on. So I will use the spray and the spray is called Baker's Joy. That's great because then you don't have to flour the pan. Pam's great too. My dad makes this mixture of oil and vegetable shortening and flour that he has in this designated container with a brush. He is committed to the process. He's a Virgo, so it makes sense. That's how he greases every pan, but he makes a lot of bundt cakes. Bundt cakes are a different story. You need to be committed to greasing that pan super well.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we got our pans greased. I love that. This recipe, as we discussed, is one bowl. So basically all you're asking peeps to pull out in terms of tools is a whisk, a bowl and a measuring cup, because we're going to do some measuring in that cup. I love that there's no ... This sounds dumb, but maybe you can relate because we both do not like doing dishes. I love that. There's no spatula, that you're just going to whisk in the dry ingredients. There's no gentle folding. And I was practicing this, I won't lie, last night when I was making a cake for something, seeing if you could avoid the spatula altogether, because I think you might need it to scrape the bowl to get the batter, but I was like, "I'm going to scrape with my frigging whisk."
Joy Wilson:
You’re such a rebel.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm a crazy gal in the kitchen.
Joy Wilson:
Well, you can. You can. It depends on what kind of scraper you are. I'll get most of it out of the bowl. Most of it is out of the bowl in the pan. My mom is a ... She wants every last drop. You could put the bowl back in the cupboard when she's done scraping it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my God.
Joy Wilson:
I've moved on. I've moved on from that bowl. So yeah, you could scrape with a whisk. It's enough. It's good. Let's go.
Jessie Sheehan:
So basically, peeps, with this recipe, they're whisking dry and then you have people ... You measure everything in the wet ingredients in the measuring cup, and then just pour it in and you whisk and you're done.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, that's it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Your recipes on the site, have both grams and cup and volume. When you're at home, are you just using your scale?
Joy Wilson:
Yes, I usually just use my scale.
Jessie Sheehan:
You mentioned the batter is thin, which I know it is because I've made versions of this cake before. And then once it's in the oven and it's baked, etcetera and it's time for testing, here's the million-dollar question, do you like a long skewer to test, a paring knife to test, a toothpick? How are you going to test?
Joy Wilson:
My gosh.
Jessie Sheehan:
And do you like some moist crumbs?
Joy Wilson:
Oh my gosh. Here's the thing, I don't puncture the cake to test it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Holy moly, Joy. You're blowing my mind.
Joy Wilson:
I don't like to. I don't like to do that. Uh-uh. So maybe ... I've been baking for a long time. So what I do is I have one pot holder on my left hand, pull the racks out. You can tell just by how the cakes act when they get pulled out, if they have any jiggle to them, they're not done, but I just give it the top of the cake a little tap. And if it feels like it's wet under there, if it feels like if it's batter-y, I leave it in for a few more minutes, but I don't really use a tool to test the cake aside from my finger ...
Jessie Sheehan:
Honey ...
Joy Wilson:
... tapping on top.
Jessie Sheehan:
... you're blowing my mind. I'm not sure I can follow suit, I'm too anxious, but I love this. I love the idea of not puncturing my cakes top because I do hate all the punctures. And sometimes if I can't get it right, there're a lot because I put it back in for a minute and I test again. But if it's something I've never made when you're a little bit, "Just a minute," but I love that.
Joy Wilson:
There are so many characteristics of a cake being done aside from inside. The outside ring will be pretty dry. The top of the crust will be look dry and not wet. It won't have a jiggle to it. There are other signs that I look for aside from what's inside.
Jessie Sheehan:
And it starts to come away from the side slightly. Yeah.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, yeah. This is controversial though, but also there is that very fragile time in the cake baking process where the cake can fall. And so I've had that happen to me enough times to leave the cake alone until about five minutes before the timer goes off and I want to check it. It really just needs some alone time in the oven.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you're not a rotator? I rotate halfway through. No?
Joy Wilson:
Oh, I don't rotate halfway through. Maybe in the last third of the baking process, but I feel like halfway through, the cake is still trying to build its structure that I don't want to jostle it and have it fall.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yup. So the cake is going to cool for about 10 minutes in the pan and then you have us invert it. Two queries, one, could it just cool in the pan? And then two, any tips for inverting cakes because that can be tricky for peeps?
Joy Wilson:
I think if you are going to commit to lining the bottom of the pan with parchment paper, you can let the cake cool in the pan. But as the cake cools in the pan, it will start to bond with the pan and want to stay in the pan. And so a completely cool cake is more likely to stick to the bottom of a pan than one that is still just slightly warm. You want the pan, the metal part of the pan to be warm, but you can still handle it without pot holders. That's how I gauge when I can invert the cake safely. And I take my cooling rack like a wire cooling rack, put it on top of my cake in the pan, and just take a deep breath and just give a little flip.
And my mom takes a butter knife and taps the top of the pan. I don't know. I do it too, just because it's like a superstition thing. So I don't know if it is helpful or not. Just do it, some things you just do. And then gently lift the pan. You can sometimes feel the cake release things to gravity if it hasn't already. Just listen, it's a time, it's a time. Every baker, every time they pull a cake pan off of a cake, there is, I would say 35%, "Oh, I hope this works."
Jessie Sheehan:
And then do you then flip it back so it cools right side up or do you not worry about if it's cooling upside down since it's going into your cake anyway?
Joy Wilson:
I don't worry about if it's cooling upside down because I like to frost. I like the bottoms of my cakes to be the top of the layer cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yup, makes sense, makes sense. And now our delicious frosting. You talked already a teeny bit about how this one's assembled. This one definitely is, you're going to use a stand mixer, a hand mixer and you're going to use spatula, but you talked about how we're getting all of our ingredients together. Is there a time during the mixing of this where you'd like to just let it go for a couple of minutes and really incorporate or is it a minute here and then you're done?
Joy Wilson:
It's more like a minute here, a minute at the end or 30 seconds or so at the end and you're done. You don't want to overbeat the frosting too much because the batter can break. That means the water has separated from the fat solids. There's really just no coming back from that and it's not the end of the world. It still tastes good. It just looks a little-
Jessie Sheehan:
Curdle-y.
Joy Wilson:
Curdle-y, and gosh, it's a faux. It is a faux of mine, but not a big deal.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then time for frosting the cake. First of all, I wanted to ask, are you putting a plate on top of your rotating cake stand?
Joy Wilson:
I do that. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's brilliant.
Joy Wilson:
I do that.
Jessie Sheehan:
So that's like your serving plate that's going to go on top, mind blown again, that's going to go on top of the stand and then tell people about the parchment diamond.
Joy Wilson:
A parchment diamond is three paper-size sheets of parchment paper that I make a triangle out of on my plate. And then I put the first cake layer on top and build the cake and frost. It helps so that I'm not making a mess of the sides of the plate or the cardboard, whenever I have the cake on, while I frost it. So when I'm done frosting the cake, I can gently pull the parchment paper from under the cake and do any touchups, so on the side that the cake may need and you're ready to go.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love it. And then for this, for the frosting part, in terms of tools, you like people to use a bench scraper, and then I love this, a piping bag. Even for just a cake that you're going to be smoothing frosting, I noticed you're piping the frosting onto the sides of the cake on the layers. Can you walk us through using the piping bag for this?
Joy Wilson:
I think this is a trick that I have taken from my bakery days. So we would have just giant piping bags filled with frosting and pipe our cakes that way, so you pipe ribbons, huge tubes of frosting around the sides of your cake and then smooth it with either a bench scraper or an offset spatula. And it just is a way to keep from dipping your offset spatula into a big bowl of frosting. It may have crumbs on it may have some residue on it that you don't want in your main frosting. And so piping, putting the frosting in a piping bag mitigates that. It's not the most friendly home baker technique, but some of those tricks that came from bakeries are for a very efficient reason, so that's carried over.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I thought that was brilliant. What's great about this blogpost for people that want to go look at this cake, Joy has pictures of every step, so piping, etcetera. I also loved this when you're, I think this is when ... Oh gosh, I wrote this and now I think it is when you're still frosting, but maybe it's when you're cutting the cake, you talked about dipping the knife into water and then just shaking it off. You don't actually even dry it. Talk to me about that.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah, again, a little lazy.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know, but honey, it's my lazy love language.
Joy Wilson:
Yes, so I think that a glass of warm water, like a pint glass of warm water is essential to frosting a cake. And I use an offset spatula. If you don't have an offset spatula, the dull side of a butter knife also works just fine. You just want a flat edge without any ridges in it. And I find that when people who haven't decorated or frosted cakes very often attempt to, they end up with a lot of gunk, a lot of frosting on their knife that they're just fighting with at this point. I teach people to clean off their knife, either scrape the excess frosting into the bowl and then put the knife in hot water. It won't completely clean the knife, but it will create a hot surface, a warm surface on that metal that'll easily glide over the frosting that's on the cake.
And I don't want to get chocolate frosting all over my kitchen towels, so I just take the knife out of the water, shake it over the sink and keep frosting. It's fine. We want to keep the knife warm and relatively clean and a little bit of water, a couple water drops on the cake. Totally fine, not a big deal.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love it. Love it. We've frosted the cake. It's beautiful and I think you recommend some sprinkles, which I love.
Joy Wilson:
It's not a birthday cake if it doesn't have sprinkles on it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Joy Wilson:
These are the rules.
Jessie Sheehan:
100%, 100%. But I thought I would also mention another birthday cake that's on your site that we could talk about maybe for a little bit. The cake is coconut and here's a quote, which I love because we're basically the same person. You write, "My favorite birthday cake is actually anything made with a cake mix." And I have to tell you that I ask my children who are not little anymore, they're like teenagers, but anyway, every year what I ask for my birthday is for them to make me a cake from a box, cake mix cake. That is what I want. Often, Joy, when I'm developing cake recipes, I'm always like, "God, it doesn't taste enough like it came from a box. I got to redo this." So that is definitely one of my faves.
And you have this great cake on the blog, your coconut cake that you make with a cake mix and you doctor it. And because you have this fabulous cake mix line at Williams Sonoma that's so beautiful and the cakes look amazing, I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about how you doctor this coconut cake and how we might be able to doctor some cakes at home.
Joy Wilson:
Oh my gosh. My favorite birthday cakes growing up was the funfetti cake mix that my grandmother would make me. I would still, and remember that frosting, it had these melty chocolate sprinkles inside. I don't know. It was just a magical time. And so cake mix holds a very strong place in my heart and I think people sleep on cake mixes because they're so good. They make the most nostalgic tasting cakes that you cannot really replicate. You cannot get that combination of sugar and chemical flavor in from scratch baking.
Jessie Sheehan:
You have your white cake or your yellow cake and you add sour cream. So there's water and eggs and oil, which most cake mixes asked for, but then you have us add sour cream and a cup of cream of coconut, which is brilliant and one of my fave ingredients. And this is maybe a little bit of a silly question, but can every cake mix handle that much more liquid and fat? I thought that was so smart.
Joy Wilson:
This cake, I test a lot of times because I was trying to replicate my friend, Suzonne’s [Stirling] perfect from-scratch coconut cake and I love this coconut cake, but I don't love making it. I love when she makes it for me. It just is very labor intensive and it's a coconut layer cake that, after it's baked, it's soaked with a sour cream and powdered sugar and coconut mixture. And I just thought, "What if I put that inside of a cake?" And also we know we have a history of sour cream being amazing in cakes because it's in so many cakes and pound cakes. It's just a very good sour element. And I think you could add sour cream to every cake mix with success.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yup. I just thought that was so brilliant. And then I also love in this cake, which it sounds like it's maybe from your friend Suzonne's cake, but it's almost like a simple syrup on steroids because you have sour cream, Coco López and sugar, almost like... You poke the cake like trilece style and then I also thought that was brilliant for elevating a cake mix cake, doing some poke cake situation with whatever flavor.
Joy Wilson:
Yes, where it's not too much. It's not enough liquid to sink to the bottom of the cake and be muddy. There is room, I think, in every cake. If we did a strawberry sheet cake from a cake mix, a sour cream, strawberry puree, powdered sugar mixture over the top would be amazing, I think. It just softens that top layer and I think it helps the frosting meld to it better. It makes it more seamless.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, it almost reminds me of what we do with Texas sheet cakes where we have the hot cake and the hot frosting and we're trying to get that very tiny, almost fudgy layer in between the two, which is like heaven.
Joy Wilson:
That's exactly It.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, which is like heaven.
Joy Wilson:
You nailed it. You nailed it. We could talk about cake literally all day.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh.
Joy Wilson:
Because you get it. You get it.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know. I do get it. Just one more shout out for your delicious cake mixes at William Sonoma, I love. They're a little bit different I feel than the average cake mix. Obviously, I haven't made one yet, but I will be, but the idea that you have, I noticed in one of them, you keep the sugar separate from the other dry ingredients because you actually have people cream that sugar with butter. And I just think there's some very thoughtful tweaks that obviously make these. I'm sure I heard someone say recently they didn't like it when people use the word elevated with different food things, but I'm going to use it. I hope it's okay. But it makes them slightly elevated, but still in a very accessible way, so I'm really excited to bake them.
Joy Wilson:
Yeah. Oh, I can't wait for you to bake them. You have to tell me what you think.
Jessie Sheehan:
I will.
Joy Wilson:
I don't think elevated is a bad word.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, good.
Joy Wilson:
And I think that the idea behind them was to make the mixes like baking light. It's like your friend measured all the ingredients out for you, went to the store, got all the little things, measured them out and you just get to do the fun parts of baking and come out with a beautiful quarter sheet cake. They're fun and creative and meant to be playful.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, that's certainly how they seem to me. We've got our birthday cake. We've decorated. It looks beautiful. We put our sprinkles on. Now we put our candles on. In this age of COVID and germs and all of that, how are we blowing out our candles? Do you have any suggestions for us?
Joy Wilson:
That's such a good question. Okay, I had this come up recently and what I did was I sliced into the cake before the candles went in, sliced into the cake, put that cake on a beautiful plate with a beautiful candle in it, removed the other cake and we sang “Happy Birthday” with a single slice. They blew out the candle because they were blowing on their own cake and then we sliced ...
Jessie Sheehan:
Brilliant.
Joy Wilson:
... the rest of the cake and all of it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Brilliant.
Joy Wilson:
I think maybe that's how we do it. The waving, when people wave their hand back and forth across ... It is so sad that is like, "It brings a tear to my very soul that I made a cake for you to wave over. Get out of here. Insult the baker."
Jessie Sheehan:
I get it. And then I also wanted to know in the history of Joy's birthdays, is there a favorite cake that you remember?
Joy Wilson:
I think my favorite birthday cake was round cake that my mom made me for my fifth birthday. And I remember she woke me up from a nap, made me come in the kitchen, so she could trace my hand, all five fingers of my hand. And then she cut my little traced hand out of one of the cake rounds and put it on top of frosted it and put it on top of the cake. The cake said like, "My one hand birthday," because I was turning five. And I was like, "This is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me in five years. This is it." And that's my most memorable cake. I just love that.
Jessie Sheehan:
And your mom is some mad cake genius and so creative. I love that.
Joy Wilson:
That's so cute.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh.
Joy Wilson:
And I absolutely did make her make me a two hand birthday cake when I turned 10. My next fifth birthday is going to be 45. So how many hands is that? Nine hands.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's going to be a big ass cake.
Joy Wilson:
Nine hands. "It's going to be a big cake, mom."
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, thank you so much, Joy, for chatting with me and I just wanted you to know that you are my cherry pie.
Joy Wilson:
Oh, this has been so fun.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Joy Wilson. You can find the recipe for Joy's chocolate birthday cake on cherrybombe.com and the link is in our show notes. Thank you to Le Creuset and California Prunes for supporting our show. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Our show is recorded at CityVox Studios in Manhattan. Our executive producers are Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. Thank you for listening to She's My Cherry Pie and happy baking.