Donna Yen:
Hi everyone. I'm Donna Yen, Cherry Bombe's event director, and I want to welcome you all to "Every Woman Should Have a Blowtorch, a Baked Alaska and Butter Cake Demo." It's been so much fun putting together The Julia Jubilee where we celebrate the life and legacy of the one and only Julia Child. If you like today's event, we have more events all next week and they're free. So just make sure to RSVP and you can find the schedule and more on cherrybombe.com.
Donna Yen:
I'd like to take a moment to thank our amazing sponsor Kerrygold for making today's event and Julia Jubilee possible. Their butter and cheeses made with milk from grass-fed cows have truly been a baker's best friend in the kitchen. So big shout out to Kerrygold.
Donna Yen:
Some of you may have heard Julia say this famous phrase in interviews, "Every woman should have a blowtorch." And we couldn't think of a better person to demonstrate why this is true than Zoë François, host of Zoë Bakes on the Magnolia Network and author of this beautiful book, Zoë Bakes Cakes.
Donna Yen:
So without further ado, I'd like to bring Zoë up here. Zoë, are you out there?
Zoë François:
I'm here. I'm here.
Donna Yen:
Hi Zoë.
Zoë François:
Don't know if you can see me. Hi.
Donna Yen:
How can we see you here? I'm going to ask. There we go.
Zoë François:
Can you ... Hello.
Donna Yen:
Hi.
Zoë François:
Hi. Hi. How are you?
Donna Yen:
Good. I'm really excited, and I have a big confession to make. I do not own a blowtorch.
Zoë François:
Wait a minute, what? Say it again.
Donna Yen:
I don't own a blowtorch. Do you all? People in the chat, do you all own this blow torch? Please tell me if you do. I see that you have two behind you Zoë.
Zoë François:
Oh, no, no, no, no. There's four, four back there. I wish I could give you one. No, no, by the end of this you have to have. I mean, it's no joke. You absolutely have to have one.
Donna Yen:
No joke, you must. I mean everyone in the chat is saying like yes, you must have one. Everyone loves the blowtorch. So tell us a little bit about the recipe you're making today.
Zoë François:
Well, okay, so I'm doing a baked Alaska, and it's sort of a roundabout way to be connected to Julia because I just had a very similar recipe appear in The New York Times Magazine written by Dorie Greenspan who is ... I first was introduced-
Donna Yen:
Oh my god-
Zoë François:
... to Dorie through this brilliant book. And I got this book on my way to culinary school in New York. And it was sort of like the Instagram of its day because there was ... It was 1996. There was no computers. Everything was done in books. And this book introduced me to all of the amazing bakers around the country, and Dorie Greenspan wrote this with Julia. And then to come full circle, I just get to do this mind-blowing project with her for The New York Times Magazine and it was a baked Alaska, and I got to use a blowtorch. So it's like all of my favorite things came together in one place, and then now I get to do it with you.
Donna Yen:
Oh, we cannot wait.
Zoë François:
So we're going to do a chocolate cake base, a butter chocolate cake base from my book using Kerrygold. Now in the book I've adapted it slightly for this, one, because I'm going to bake it a little bit differently than I do in the book, and also, in the book I use part butter because butter is awesome. It's probably my favorite ingredient. I mean the flavor is ... I could just eat like a stick of butter dipped in sugar and call that good. But in the book the recipe has a tiny bit of oil. The brilliant thing about Kerrygold is that it's such a high fat content, it's much higher fat content than most American butters. And so I get the same results by using Kerrygold.
Zoë François:
So we're using Kerrygold butter to make a chocolate cake and then we're going to mold some ice cream. We're going to put those two things together and then slather it in with meringue, which I'll also show you how to make. And then of course what we're all here for is the blowtorch.
Donna Yen:
Oh my gosh. There's this video. I'm not sure if any of you have seen it, of Zoë with a serious blowtorch on her Instagram, which Catherine, if you can find it, put in the chat because it blew my mind. I'm like, "Oh." I mean as soon as I follow her, we need Zoë to show us how to use this thing. Yeah, it's like flame thrower [crosstalk 00:05:16]
Zoë François:
It's actually a flame thrower. So the next time we ... It is actually a flame thrower, that the flame goes like five or six feet. So next time we do this, we have to do it outside because today I only have like kitchen certified torches which are I'm sure that's sort of a letdown for everybody.
Donna Yen:
Well, I hope you have a fire extinguisher as well. I think-
Zoë François:
Yeah, I do, I do. Yeah. Yeah. And my husband's ready with like the baking soda and all that, so we're good.
Donna Yen:
Thank you Graeme out there. Well, Zoë, I'm going to let you to it. I'll be back at the end with some questions. I'm sure folks have a lot of questions. So we'll do Q&A later. Folks, if you can use the Q&A function, you can put your questions in there and I'll do my best to try to get through them at the very end. But Zoë, take it away.
Zoë François:
Okay, great. I'm going to go through the cake recipe pretty quickly because I want to get to the assembly of the baked Alaska and get to play with the blowtorch as much as possible. This is, like I said, it's a butter cake. So we're going to use Kerrygold butter. The key here is the temperature. So you want it to be room temperature. That way it's going to cream really, really well with the sugar. And the nice thing about room temperature butter is that when you're whipping it, it's going to create air bubbles, and that's going to help the rise of your cake. So you want to have nice, creamy room temperature butter. And then we're going to throw ... I just do it a couple whirls, just to make sure that it's nice and smooth. And then I'm going to just put my sugar in with it and cream that.
Zoë François:
This is a half batch from my book because we're going to be baking it in a sheet as opposed to cake pans. So we don't need as much batter. I want this cake layer to be really thin. It's just basically the canvas for the ice cream to sit on. One, it's delicious, and two, it keeps the ice cream from melting on the plate, so it won't slide around on the plate. The cake is sort of the anchor, it's the nice little surprise at the end.
Zoë François:
So we're just going to whip some air into our butter. You want to go ... It's such a small amount right now that I can go a little bit less, but like three to five minutes so it's really nice and airy and it turns light in color and light in texture. One of the things is that I'm using a beater, the paddle attachment, and this one has a rubber edge. I love these because it does some of the scraping for you. If you have my book, if you've ever seen any of my videos, you know that I'm like mad about scraping down the bowl because you have to make sure that all of the ingredients are getting combined together equally, so you don't have like some butter hanging out at the bottom of the bowl and you don't have butter sticking to the paddle. You need to scrape down, but these rubber edge paddles save you so much work.
Zoë François:
So let that go. I'm going to pretend that we've done this for five minutes because I want to move on. It's going to be great. Okay. So that looks pretty good. I will show you. I have the glass bowl but I'm saving that for the meringue. I don't know if you can see in there, but see how nice and light color that butter is. That's what you're going for. You want it to be light and airy and light in color too. So scrape it down one more time.
Zoë François:
Then I'm going to add my eggs to this. The thing about eggs is that those two need to be at room temperature because you want everything to sort of blend together, emulsify together. And if I add cold eggs to my warm butter, I'm just going to seize that butter and it's all going to look almost like it's curdling. So you want to have your eggs and your butter all of it at room temperature. So one at a time. I have eggs and I have yolks. I'm pretty sure they put the recipe up so you have all of this, you'll have all the amounts and everything. I do one at a time because I need this mixture to get really nice and smooth. And if I dump a bunch of liquid in the form of these eggs into my butter, it's going to take a lot of whipping together to get this to emulsify. If I do it a little bit at a time, it's just easier. It stays creamy and soft and smooth.
Zoë François:
So once the first one is thoroughly mixed in, I'll add another one. And then I have a couple of yolks that are going to go in. So I have the sort of stability and the protein from a full egg, and then I have the extra luscious fat from a couple extra yolks. So it's a really nice, beautiful, rich cake. And then you have all that Kerrygold butter and the yolks and it's just great. Okay. So my yolks now. Those combine pretty easily.
Zoë François:
Next I want to deal with ... I'm just going to bring this up. Next I need to deal with my dry ingredients. Whenever I'm adding cocoa powder, I usually sift it first because cocoa powder has a tendency to be lumpy. And you don't want to have like a lump of cocoa powder in your batter. You want everything to be nice and smooth and distributed really well. So I just put it through a sifter before I then whisk it. Oh, that's a Breville mixer. And I really, I love this mixer a lot. I'm not ... I will put a link to it. It's not crazy easy to find these days. I have a feeling most mixers aren't because there was sort of a run on mixers, but I've been having sort of a challenge finding them. But I will find it and I'll put a link.
Zoë François:
The next thing that I always do is I whisk my dry ingredients before I add it. So I don't sift all of the ingredients together. I whisk them together because I want to make sure that the leaveners, the salt, the cocoa powder is all equally distributed before I add it into my cake mix. And that's because I want that leavener to be equally distributed. Again, just like the cocoa powder, I don't want to bite into a bite of baking soda. It's really jarring. And the other thing is that I want it to distribute evenly so that the cake rises evenly.
Zoë François:
Okay, so that's ready to go in. I just need ... Okay, I'm just going to mix in because that's what I've got. I'm going to start with a third of my dry ingredients and I'm just going to mix that in with my creamed butter and sugar and eggs on low, because you don't want that to fly all over the kitchen, just until it's incorporated. [inaudible 00:13:36] beat it more in there. Okay.
Zoë François:
So once that's together, I'm going to again scrape the bowl, always scraping the bowl because look at this. I've got like ... Can you see that? I've got butter on my paddle, I've got dry ingredients on my paddle, I've got like a whole bunch of stuff that's not equally mixed together. And I want to make sure that it is because if I were to put this in the oven with all these sort of lumps of butter, they would just melt in the pan but not be part of the batter. And that's not what I'm going for. I adore butter and in some cases I even have recipes in the book where I add dollops of butter to the top of a cake to create like a crispy crust on it. So I love that, but that's not what I'm going for this time. Okay, so into the bowl, scrape it all down.
Zoë François:
I know people like to skip the scraping step, but it's really, it's so important. You just have to sort of like get into it. Put that there. All right. Let that mix for a second. Now I have my milk and sour cream. I want the richness of the sour cream, but I also like the tanginess of it. I think it's a really nice balance to the chocolate. So half of my milk and sour cream can go in. I mix that. Again, this mixture is at room temperature so that it won't seize all that up. I'm trying to incorporate air into my cake so it's nice and light, and then scrape it down, add another third of my flour. You always want to end with the flour. So it always goes flour, liquid, flour, liquid, flour. And that way you can get things nice and smooth and emulsified, and then end with the flour to bring it all together. This is awesome.
Zoë François:
Okay, scrape it down, here you go, off the beater, off the bowl into ... Okay, and this is looking awesome. I already prepared my pan. I'm going with a half sheet tray which is depending on who you ask like 11 by 16 size sheet pan. And that's what we're going to bake it in. I have greased it and then put a piece of parchment and greased that. Okay, so whisk this all together. This is my pan. I have the parchment. It's greased. It's all set and ready to go. Oven is preheated. And the last thing we have to do is add our last bit of the flour mixture and we're all set. Okay, one last twirl. And now I'm just going to mix this until it's all incorporated and then we're done. That's it. Super simple. And that's it.
Zoë François:
So it all looks good, it all looks creamy. I'm going to give it one last wipe down in here, one last twirl, make sure everything's in there, make sure I get all the way down to the bottom of that bowl so I make sure there's no butter down there or dry bits. Oh, it smells so good. I think butter and chocolate is just the perfect combination. Okay, so that's our cake. I'm just going to give this one tiny little spin, get this into the oven, and then move on to our ice cream. Great. Okay. So that's good. And then I have ... Can you see? I'm not sure where to put this so you can see. That's good? Okay.
Zoë François:
So make sure we get all this in here. Yes. Okay. So this is hilarious. I used to be very righteous about what you greased the pan with, because my philosophy, and I still believe this, my philosophy was that you should want to eat every thing that comes into contact with your cake. So I always, always grease the butter because I love butter and it makes a great release for the pan. And then I write a cake book and I'm making like 400 cakes a week and I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to try this play because it's super convenient," and yeah, it totally works. So I don't love the flavor of it. Like for a bundt pan and stuff like that I always use butter because I want a super thick coating of it, but yes, absolutely, spray will work on your pans, but butter is more delicious.
Zoë François:
Okay. So cake batter into our pan. Make sure you get it all in there. Save a little bit to snack on. And then we just want to make sure that we spread this really thin. So this is going to be the bottom layer of our baked Alaska. And the trick to getting this to bake evenly is to spread it out evenly. The reason that you spray the bottom of the pan and not just the top of the paper is to keep the paper from moving around. If you didn't grease the pan as well as the paper, this paper would just be sliding around in here. Okay. So a nice offset spatula will help with this task, as even as possible. And then into our oven.
Zoë François:
This bakes for ... I think it's about 20 minutes in this shape. If you have my book already, you will know about the diva cake which is kind of like an Opera torte which is layers of cake and ganache and buttercream. And you could totally do it with a very thin layer of this chocolate butter cake as well.
Zoë François:
Okay. So that goes into the oven. Yes, I'll show you. Okay. This is thin and even. How's that look? I don't want to tip it too much. Okay. Okay. So that's going to go into the oven. While that's baking, I'm going to deal with my ice cream.
Zoë François:
So I have these silicone molds, and this is what I'm going to build my ice cream in so that they're individually sized. You can absolutely do this in like a bowl like this, and just line it with plastic and then press the ice cream in just the way I'm about to, and just do one big dome or bomb. And that's great. But I wanted to do individual ones so it's a little bit different. So these little silicone molds are just excellent for ... They're super easy to get out. If you don't have them and you want to just use like a ramekin, just line it with plastic first, and that way the ice cream will just pop out. With the silicone because it's flexible you can get it out super easy. Okay.
Zoë François:
So first ... I'm coming back. Okay, I have everything set up, and now I need to grab my ice cream. And you can make homemade ice cream or you can use store-bought. The thing that you want to do when you're putting it into a mold like this is make sure that the ice cream is what we call the plastic stage, so that it's malleable and it's soft enough that it will go into your mold, whatever that may be. And you can work with it. If it's too hard, you're not going to get a nice, smooth finish out of it. So my spoon went somewhere. Okay. So this looks great. Look at that. So nice and soft. I can get this into the mold. You want to do this quickly because you don't want all of your ice cream to totally melt before you get it into the freezer.
Zoë François:
This is one of those desserts where give yourself some time. You can set the mold. You can bake the cake. You can set up the molds like the day before and then unmold them and assemble them the day you want to serve them. The harder you can let this set in the freezer, the better off you're going to be. You don't want to be decorating with the meringue and using your blowtorch and having your ice cream be really soft. So give yourself some time with this one. And use one mold.
Zoë François:
So I have to say that I'm doing this and it's not looking entirely graceful. It's like I have ... I think that that's one of the things that was so endearing about Julia Child, is that she taught you so much and she made it look so accessible because she wasn't going for perfection. It was just you felt like you could actually do it in your house. And it's sort of the teaching style that I aspire to, that I'm ... She always was like teaching super complicated techniques and making it look like you could do it. And that is an art, seriously. I'm making this look more difficult than it is.
Zoë François:
Okay. So once you have your ice cream in the mold, I just use an offset spatula, a little offset spatula to smooth it out. I want these to be flat so that they'll sit on the cake layer nice and evenly and they won't be sort of different shapes. They're just going to be nice and flat. So just flatten this out, smoothing it as quickly as I can. You want to make sure that you have room in your freezer for this to come popping in. And it doesn't have to be perfect. We can always clean this up as we're unmolding them. But I'm trying to get some of the excess off here.
Zoë François:
Obviously this needs some time to set up because if in half an hour I came back and I tried to unmold this, it's still going to be really soft. So give yourself some time. Give yourself at least a couple of hours. And that will be even more time if you went with a larger mold. These little teeny ones and depends on your freezer. I have three different freezers and each one of them behaves differently. So off I go. I'll be right back with the actual frozen one.
Zoë François:
Okay. So here's my ice cream, all the way. Here are my molded ones that I did earlier. And I let them freeze up really hard. What I'm going to do is I'm going to unmold them onto foil. You don't want to unmold them onto parchment paper because we're going to use a blowtorch, and you can just imagine how paper and the torch go together. So these can just unmold like this. Before I do that, what I want to do is deal with my cake.
Zoë François:
So I have my cake that I had baked already. So you can see that. I've already stamped them out for later. But it baked up nice and smooth and flat. And then what I'll do is I'll measure the size of the mold. So it doesn't matter what size mold you use. You just want to have ... I don't know if you can see that very well, a round cutter that fits the diameter of the bottom of your ice cream. So whatever size that is, you want to have the cutter to match it. And then I'm just going to ... let me see. Can you see this? There? Nope. Closer to me. Okay. Okay. Here we go. So I'm just going to stamp this out and get as many as I have ice cream, like so. And then I will use my offset spatula to get under them and pick them up, and that's the perfect thickness for my baked Alaska. And now I can place my discs of cake onto my foil.
Zoë François:
Give yourself some room. I'm not on this one because I've already done some and I've given myself more room on the other ones. I'm just running out of space in my freezer, so I can't afford to space these out too much. But the reason you want to space them out is so that you can put the meringue on comfortably. So look at that. Can you see that, how they just sort of come up here. Hopefully it doesn't pop out of here and fly across the room. But they just pop right out of the mold, and then you can place them right onto the cake round and you're all set and ready to go.
Zoë François:
And then I will just put this right back into the freezer. So it's a lot of freeze, assemble, freeze. You want these to be nice and frozen when you go to put your meringue on. So I'm going to set them all up just like this, and then I'm going to pop that right back into the freezer, and then we'll make our meringue, our Swiss meringue. Okay. So give ourselves a little room. Back into the freezer so that they don't melt. And like I said, you can do this up to that point days ahead.
Zoë François:
Okay. So the final bit and this, if you follow me on Instagram, you know that my heart and passion and all of my soul goes into meringue. I love meringue. So I'm going to show you Swiss meringue which is really my go-to because you can use it for so many things. Because we're going to cook it over a stove, it's safe to eat like on this baked Alaska. You can put it on a pie. You can slather it all over cake. I think I have more pages dedicated to meringue in my book than just about anything else. If you have my book, you already know that there's a cake academy in the book so that I go through lots of technique if you want it, and there are pages on meringue. So I am doing a Swiss meringue. There are French meringue and Italian meringue, but Swiss meringue is just cooking together egg whites and sugar over a double boiler. Let me turn that on.
Zoë François:
So the first thing that you want to do is combine your egg whites and your sugar into a bowl that can go over a double boiler. Generally what I do is I just use the metal bowl from my stand mixer, but I'm using the glass bowl so you can see this come together. So I want to ... I'm just going to do it over the double boiler in this stainless steel bowl and then I'll transfer it to the mixer. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to stir this together. I have just egg whites and sugar. I'm just going to make sure that they're totally combined, because if the egg whites hit the heat without being in like combined with the sugar in like a syrup, the egg whites will cook fast. Once you have them combined with the sugar, you get a little bit more heat resistance and so it can tolerate more heat. So you don't want to just throw this on to your double boiler without really stirring it well.
Zoë François:
When you first make this, it looks like something that we don't talk about in the kitchen, but it's ... yeah it's like my kids would love that. So anyway. It's like grainy and not nice. So anyway. What the goal is, is to get this really nice and thin and cook out all of the crystals of sugar so that you have a smooth, smooth syrup. Until every crystal is cooked it's not ready. It will get grainy in your meringue. And you want your meringue to be velvety and smooth and pillowy and everything but grainy.
Zoë François:
So let's go over to the stove and I will cook this. It doesn't actually take that long. Let's see. I'm going to just crank this up so I get a ... I have this over high heat just because I'm trying to get this to boil, and then it's really just the residual steam. I'm going to just go ahead, I'll show you, but just so that we can get this moving. What you want to do is have it over the steam. If you notice, I only have like a half inch of water in there. I'm not ... I don't want the bowl to be rocking around in there like a boat. I just want the steam to heat this up. It's just the steam. It's not actually the water touching the bowl. You want to make sure that you're wiping down the sides of the bowl the whole time because those crystals of sugar that get up onto the sides of the bowl can then drop back down into your meringue, and you want to make sure that everything melts.
Zoë François:
It actually doesn't take that long to melt the sugar. All sugar is different. Each brand is different. So some of them have larger crystals. Some of them are tiny. You could totally start with super fine sugar and this will go even faster, but you have to be like in sort of a real lurch to need it to go that fast. Okay, let me turn this down a little bit. So I usually just do this over once it's steamy, I just do this over medium-low heat. You don't need to have this on high because you don't want the eggs to cook too fast, and you don't want to walk away from this. If you need to walk away, take the bowl off of the heat so that you don't inadvertently cook your eggs because you want a really nice, smooth, hot syrup. You're going to be cooking this until basically once it's hot enough to melt the sugar, you know that it's hot enough that it safe to eat.
Zoë François:
Okay. So the only way to know whether or not this is done is to get back in there and feel it between your fingers. Once you do that and you do not feel any crystals of sugar left, then you're good to go. And that's it. So that was ... I don't know. I wasn't paying attention, but just a few minutes, right? So we can come back to this one. Thank you.
Zoë François:
Okay. So our sugar and egg whites are all cooked together. They're totally smooth. Let me grab my spatula. I'm going to transfer it to my mixing bowl. Like I said, I usually just do this in the metal bowl, but I wanted you to be able to see as the magic of the meringue happens. I'm going to go into my mixer with my whisk attachment. And then this needs to go until it's nice and it's on high. That's going to be a little bit noisy so hopefully you can hear me. But this needs to whip up until it's nice and fluffy and sort of luxurious and also cool because don't forget, we're putting this on top of ice cream and so we don't want to put hot meringue on top of ice cream. Otherwise, it's just going to slide right off. So we need to whip this until it's cooled off and it's stiff peaks so that we can decorate with it.
Zoë François:
So that's going to go for a minute. I don't know. Are there any questions because maybe I can do that while ...
Donna Yen:
I can jump in with some questions Zoë if you want.
Zoë François:
Okay, okay.
Donna Yen:
All right. So we have a few folks asking. I mean ... I've been first of all blown away because you're such a pro at this, and oh my gosh, I've made cakes and I see a lot of the faults in my cake making and you're so precise and meticulous.
Zoë François:
Oh, really? Oh.
Donna Yen:
And I'm just blown away watching you do this. So this is a true delight. Okay, so a few questions. People want to know, and I think you answered this, is the Breville mixer versus the Kitchenaid, it was just because it was a clear glass, is that why?
Zoë François:
Yes. Okay. So the Breville I really love, but this Breville mixer I've had for a couple of years. It's held up beautifully. I mean I feel like any mixer that can survive my kitchen is awesome because I mean it is in constant use. I have at least two bowls, two with two paddles for every single machine because I'm just constantly, constantly using them. I have the Breville, I have a 36 year old Kitchenaid that I am hot mad in love with. I use this one a lot when I'm teaching because of the glass bowl, and you can see. Like look at that meringue. It's so pretty.
Donna Yen:
Oh, it's so beautiful. Oh my gosh, it looks amazing.
Zoë François:
I just get, I'm like fall in love with it every single time. And then I also have a Wolf mixer which is seven quarts, so it's very big. It's doing really big batches of things. It's awesome and it's a workhorse. But all three of those I can honestly say I'm in love with. Okay, let me show you.
Donna Yen:
Yes, show us, please.
Zoë François:
This because it doesn't take long. The nice thing about this Breville is I don't know. I have to find my other with attachment. Okay, so this is looking really just sexy.
Donna Yen:
I agree.
Zoë François:
I don't know if you can see it. There, I'll put it against my shirt and then you can see. Is it good? Can you see it? Okay. So that looks great. It's a little warm still and it's not quite ... This is what I would call medium stiff. So you have this, and I talk about this in the book and I give pictures of what soft peak medium peak and stiff peak look like because people always refer to that, but you never quite know what it means. And the fact that it's like standing up but it's sort of slooping over, it's not quite stiff enough and it's a little bit warm still. So a couple more minutes. While it's doing that, I wanted to show you the difference in the beater.
Zoë François:
Okay, so this ... This is the Kitchenaid one, and it looks more like an egg beater. So it doesn't have as many tines in it, and they're spread more apart. This is the one from the Wolf mixer. So I get a meringue whipped up with this in like three minutes because it's got so many tines, it's so big. It just works really, really well. And this one from Breville is now we've got a stiff meringue. But this one is more like a balloon whisk, and so you get a different ... It's funny because people always want to know how much time it takes to mix something, but it totally depends on your mixer. So I like to give a range of times because depending on which whisk I use, it takes a different amount of time.
Donna Yen:
Wow. And-
Zoë François:
So that was like a really long-winded response.
Donna Yen:
Well, one person had another question, and I love these long ones because I'm just learning so much because meringues is probably my weakness, and just seeing it-
Zoë François:
Oh really?
Donna Yen:
Just ... Yeah, I just learned so much. But someone did ask, and I'm curious too, do you ever freeze your egg whites? Gemma Stafford gave this tip and she really liked it. Have you done it?
Zoë François:
Okay. Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, let me ... We're almost ready with this. I'm going to answer your question.
Donna Yen:
Yeah, yeah, take your time.
Zoë François:
Once this is cooled off, I want to get my ice cream out. The nice thing about a Swiss meringue is that you can really whip it for a long time without it ... With a French meringue which is just raw egg white and drizzling sugar in, if you go too long, you can break them and they get almost like curdled looking. With a Swiss meringue, it's like almost impossible to do that. So people are always a little scared to over whip it, but with the Swiss meringue it's almost impossible. Okay, and I think we are done.
Zoë François:
Okay. To answer your question, you can absolutely freeze egg whites. In fact, they freeze beautifully. Oh, look at that. I got like the perfect little dairy queen swirl. It's like it's the first time I've ever made meringue.
Donna Yen:
I know. Bback to you. So much fun.
Zoë François:
It's hilarious. But you can freeze them. The problem with freezing egg whites and then using them in a meringue is that you break down the proteins when you're freezing them. And so they won't whip up as stiff. So they're just not as strong as a fresh egg. So absolutely you can do it, but just remember that if you're having issues with your meringue not being strong enough, that could be it if you're using frozen egg whites.
Zoë François:
Okay. Let's give me ... I'm going to just take one second to give myself some room here and then we are going to assemble these.
Donna Yen:
So Zoë, I'm going to go ... I'm going to come back a little bit later. I think we should give you the full screen so everyone can see everything that's happening. Okay?
Zoë François:
Okay. I'm going to go grab my ice cream and I'll be right back. Okay. I have ... I guess it works. I am coming back, I promise. Okay, here we go. Here I am. Okay. I just needed to make sure that I had space on my ... You want to do this in small batches because you don't want to go ... Like if you're doing individual ones, and this makes at least a baker's dozen, so 13. It could even make more than that depending on the size of your mold. So you don't want to take them all out of the freezer at the same time because obviously we're dealing with ice cream and they might melt. I usually do like three at a time. Can you see that comfortably? Okay.
Zoë François:
I'm going to take a little spatula because I'm dealing with a little thing and I'm just going to take my meringue here and I'm going to spread it all over. I'm not going to worry about it looking pretty. I just want to cover it up and get a nice coating on there so that it won't sort of drool off of my ice cream, and then I can decorate them. So I'm just covering it in a nice, smooth, and this is pretty too. I mean you could just stop right there and have it. I'll lift this up in a second. Can you see that pretty well, what I'm doing? And just smoothing it around.
Zoë François:
You do want to work kind of fast. Even though my meringue is nice and stiff and cool, anytime you're working with something frozen, time is the enemy. So you want to make sure that you're keeping it frozen. Having said that, if you have a super, duper cold freezer, you do want to temper the ice cream, meaning bring it out of the freezer like 15, 20 minutes before you serve it. Sometimes what I'll do because I have like a deep, deep freeze freezer in my basement and I will typically take something out of there and put it in the refrigerator so that it has some time, maybe 30, 40 minutes totally depending on the size of what you're doing. And that way the ice cream is tempered, meaning it's not going to be rock solid when you serve it. Because you want this to be frozen, but you want it to be cuttable and a beautiful texture.
Zoë François:
Okay. So I have my ... Covering. Oh, you know what? I cover almost down to the bottom. But you want to be able to get this off of the pan. So you can go a little bit farther down. You can cover the whole thing, but you just want to make sure that you're not gluing it to the pan below, otherwise, it's just harder to get it up and off and on to your plate because you're obviously not going to serve it on here.
Zoë François:
One thing that you can do if you have a tempered glass or some kind of plate that you trust is not going to be affected by the heat, is that you can serve these at the table and give each person the blowtorch and let them torch their own baked Alaska. No, no, this is, you have to do that. Now that I've said it, you kind of have to do that because this is the fun part. Now I have them smooth. Can you see that? It looks blown out to me, but maybe you can see it better. I don't know. Anyway, they're smooth. Does it look good to you Graeme? My husband is doing the camera for me.
Zoë François:
Okay, okay. Okay. So that's, they're just kind of smooth right now. And then what I'm going to do is I'm taking a glop. I know I look dark but I want you to be able to see the meringue. I have a glop of the meringue in my hand, and that is the technical term, and I'm just going to put it on there and lift it up. And that's how I get those little swirls. I'm going to take a really good picture of this and put it up on Instagram after so you can see exactly what this looks like, but can you see that technique pretty well? No?
Zoë François:
Should I go over to the other camera so I can get real close? Okay, that's what I'm going to do. Okay. So tell me when you're ... Is that better?
Zoë François:
Way better. Okay. Let me see. Tell me when you can see the pan because I don't want to put it ... Good? Okay. Great. Okay. So I have this blop in my hand and I just put it there. And then, can you see that, how it's very clean? And so I just, and then, as I'm running out, I go back to the bowl, I grab more. So this is just a fun way. I don't know. I call this the Phyllis Diller effect. I don't know if people even know who Phyllis Diller is, but she was a comedian and she had this crazy hair. Actually it looks like my hair, it might help you more. And that's it.
Zoë François:
So I just think this is super fun. You can do this with the meringue seriously the day before and freeze it. You don't have to do all of this the second you're going to serve it. You can do this the day ahead and then just relax and bring it to the table and let your guests torch it because that's where all the fun is. Okay. I could seriously do this all day. Okay. So that ... Look at them. They look cute, right? Okay. I'm going to go back into the freezer. Let's come back over here. I'm going to go back into the freezer with these. First, I have to get some of the meringue off my hands. And then you want to freeze them at least for a little bit before you blowtorch them so that they're nice and set. Make sure that your ice cream under there is set as well. So I'll be right back.
Zoë François:
Okay. This is one that I did earlier, and I'm pretty sure this is why you're all here, for the butter and the blowtorch. Okay. So let's talk about blowtorches. You have to have one. Donna I'm pretty sure you've ordered yours by now since we started this. I have ... These are my Bernzomatic ones. I've put a link in my Instagram Story to all the equipment that I've used. I have two of these. What you're looking for in a Bernzomatic blowtorch, you just get the top and then you buy the can of gas separately. But what you're looking for is a self-starting one because some of them you have to light it. I like the ones where you just twist it like this and then ... Do you see the flames? I don't know if you can see that. I'm like covered in meringue. So that's what you're looking for in one of these big ones. I don't like the kind that you have to light with a match or whatever.
Zoë François:
If you want to start somewhere a tiny bit smaller, you can go with a kitchen one. This one is from Culinary Joe Chef. Again, I have a link to it. Ops, there. Okay. And this one just it doesn't have some of the star power. I mean I feel like if you're going to go with ... You don't have to go with a flame thrower. I think maybe you should try it at some point, do it outside, but this is a really good place to start. It's just like one of these little ones. This one's Culinary Joe, I really like. This one which the brand I can't figure out and I also can't figure out how to turn it on. So this is the one I recommend. Okay. But I like the big ones. And they ... I mean it has that sound. I mean even the sound is cool.
Zoë François:
What you want to do is you can't really see it because you can't zoom in, but there's, see that blue bit of flame. I'm trying to put it against my shirt. You can see it, the blue bit of flame is super, super, super hot, too hot, and then the flame goes out to about here, and you just want the end of that flame on your dessert. Should I go back over to the other camera? Okay, here we go. Is that good? Okay, great.
Zoë François:
So just the end of the flame. And then if it actually ignites, just blow it out. That toasty bit, this is why you let your guests do their own because I like mine super dark and I'm the one that burns the marshmallow at the campfire. So it totally depends on how you like it. But each person can do their own. Look at that. It's so fun.
Zoë François:
All right. Okay. So that's that. And honestly, you can serve it now like this. You can even do this ahead and freeze it once it's toasted. Look at that. Pretty cool. Okay. Just to make sure it's not super hot. I have plates for this thing. I think I need to come back over here. You got to switch to ... There we go. We're back.
Zoë François:
Okay. And then, to serve them, like I said, you can freeze them already toasted. But I think toasting them in front of everybody is the fun part. And then the reason I didn't go all the way down to the pan with the meringue is so that I can get them up. This is the beauty of having that butter cake on the bottom, is that they lift up and slide super easily onto ... I don't know, is that blown out? I can't tell. Anyway, bon appetit. I can't believe I got to say that.
Zoë François:
Anyway, this was so much fun. I hope you'll make this. It's super easy, and you can do it in steps so you don't have to do it all at the same time. And every single one of those recipes is in my book, except for the ice cream. But there are lots and lots of great books on making your own ice cream or your favorite store bought. Let me know if you have questions. Here Graeme.
Donna Yen:
So Zoë, my mind was just blown. I mean, this is, I feel like that blob Phyllis Diller effect here is happening right before in this book.
Zoë François:
That's great.
Donna Yen:
There's a few who don't have it. I mean this was torched too, right?
Zoë François:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my god, everything in the book. I swear it. I swear it. There are some recipes you don't use a blowtorch. But I need a blowtorch. Every woman needs a blowtorch. Everyone needs one.
Donna Yen:
I need to go big. Now I need to get that, the bernzo, the bernzo one because I just ... Wow, that was so much fun to watch. I have just a few more questions that-
Zoë François:
Yeah, sure-
Donna Yen:
... folks were asking. One that kept coming up was the egg whites. Have you ever tried carton egg whites?
Zoë François:
Yes. Again, hard to do a really stiff meringue with pasteurized egg whites. Again, because of the pasteurization it just breaks down the proteins. The other thing that's hard because I just recently tried it is doing a really stiff meringue with a handheld mixer. This is one place where your stand mixer is going to make a big, big difference. I think it can happen, but I think it takes a really, really long time and you never will get it as stiff. I was working at it for a long time and I never got it as stiff as I wanted it.
Donna Yen:
A few folks and myself included, can we see you cut one of these?
Zoë François:
Oh yeah. No, this is going to be pretty ... Is it really frozen Graeme? Oh, it's good? Okay.
Donna Yen:
Because you mentioned that you wanted to temper or you wanted to come out for 15 minutes before you put them on and blow it.
Zoë François:
Yeah, yes, but because I just torched them, it's ... I don't know if you can hear my poodles. They're telling me my time's up.
Donna Yen:
Oh, it's so beautiful.
Zoë François:
They're so cute.
Donna Yen:
They're so cute and so small.
Zoë François:
Aren't they cute?
Donna Yen:
Here it is everybody.
Zoë François:
Can you see?
Donna Yen:
It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Oh my gosh-
Zoë François:
It's nice, right?
Donna Yen:
It's so-
Zoë François:
It's so much fun.
Donna Yen:
Oh, this was so much fun. I hope you all enjoyed, oh my gosh, watching Zoë. And Zoë has a new show, Zoë Bakes. It's on the Magnolia Network. So you can watch the first episode on Discovery Plus. And oh my gosh, that's so much fun. I mean, you're really just showing us like how to be confident cake makers and bakers, and I'm excited to really cook a few recipes in this book. So those of you who don't have it, Zoë Bakes Cakes, you must, you must snag your copy.
Donna Yen:
Zoë, thank you so much for joining us. This was so special.
Zoë François:
Oh, thank you so much for having. This event is so awesome. I mean, I love Julia. She was such a huge, huge mentor of mine. And if anybody makes this, please tag me on Instagram because I'd love to see what everybody's creating, so Zoë Bakes, and thank you. Thank you for coming and thank you for having me.
Donna Yen:
Oh, thank you Zoë. Thank you so much. We'll see you soon.
Zoë François:
And thank you Graeme for helping me.
Donna Yen:
Oh, thank you Graeme. I mean, Graeme was amazing in that other set up over there, really helped us really look at everything because all of us were just like, "What's happening?" But thank you Zoë, and I hope-
Zoë François:
Thank you-
Donna Yen:
... to see you again soon. Bye.
Zoë François:
You too. Thank you.
Donna Yen:
Well, guys, that was it. Thank you so much for coming. It was so much fun. If you really enjoyed our event today, we have a bunch of events next week. We'll put in the schedule. But yeah, thank you to Kerrygold for making today's event possible, a true baker's friend here. I mean, they've been so amazing and have been making our conference free for everyone. So please pick them up if you ever see them, and thank you all for coming and spending your Saturday with us, and we hope to see you again soon. Bye everyone.