Caramel Cake. (For Realsies.)

I felt slightly betrayed.

Luckily, I went on a salted caramel kick a few weeks ago and made a plethora of things with caramel, so I had some methods (that’s Brit-speak for “recipe”, and it’s closer to what I actually mean anyway) on hand with which to play.

So, in case you feel like some culinary play this weekend, I have included my various “methods” to help you get better acquainted with caramel. ’Tis a delightful companion.

First, the caramel.

Confession: I have never made for-real-though caramel – not successfully, anyway. I found this recipe from Ree Drummond (the Pioneer Woman) for easy caramel sauce some time last year, and now I turn to it whenever I need a spot of caramel in anything. The only thing I do differently is to brown the butter first: just put the butter in a small saucepan and let it sit (stirring occasionally) on medium-low heat for a while, until the color changes to a warm, rich brown and stirring gives off a lovely, nutty aroma. THEN add all the other caramel ingredients – brown sugar, half & half, and vanilla – and stir, stir, stir for 5-7 minutes. Leave it to thicken while you work on the cake.

Back in December, I became enamored of eggnog cake. I even blogged about it and included the recipe here. That cake was so scrummy – such a perfect, moist, fluffy vanilla cake – that I decided to use that “method” as the base for my cake experiment. How to get the caramel in? Well, as the recipe calls for ¾ cup of eggnog, I mixed ¼ cup of Greek yogurt with ½ cup almond milk and then vigorously stirred in most of my well-cooled caramel sauce.

The result was caramel-milk, about the same consistency as eggnog and full of scrumptious caramel-flavor. (Taste-testing is always necessary in any culinary experimentation. This had several tests, just to be sure.)

I also got rather scientific this time and did some research on how to make cakes lighter and fluffier. Did you know that egg whites are a drying agent? I did not. Apparently, for super-moist cakes, you’re supposed to separate the eggs, put just the yolks in when the recipe calls for eggs, then whip up the whites and fold them softly into the batter right at the end.

The Great British Baking Show has taught me quite a bit about egg whites, so this made a surprising amount of sense to me.

Once the cakes are in the oven, make a second batch of caramel sauce and leave it to cool. You could probably take two 8-oz packages of cream cheese and one stick of butter out of the fridge as well, and leave them to soften.

The frosting was my classic cream cheese frosting, given in detail on the aforementioned eggnog cake blog. However, instead of adding eggnog, I added – you guessed it! – caramel. I also used about 12 oz of cream cheese, instead of 8. Birthdays require an extra dose of “exquisite”, and for me, that usually means “MORE FROSTING”.

One more confession: my egg white strategy failed me, or maybe caramel is just so heavy that no amount of whipping is going to make a caramel cake light (not a cake that has ACTUAL caramel INSIDE it, anyway). My cakes fell rather dramatically after being removed from the oven. Still, they were moist and surprisingly fluffy, in a dense sort of way. Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood would have sent me home in a second; but, as they were not invited to the birthday party, it didn’t really matter.

Still, I wanted this cake to have some height. So, I took another trick from Great British Baking Show and cut the cakes in half – lengthwise. Two of the four layers ended up being rather . . . thin (read: gaping hole in the middle where the knife’s aim went awry), but that, my friends, is why I made extra frosting.

Note on assembly: be generous with the frosting, friends. You’ll have enough. Pile it on each layer, in true extravagant birthday fashion!

I reserved some caramel sauce from both batches, and it was cool enough that I actually got to drizzle it on the frosted cake and wave a knife through it to create swirl-y designs. I’ve never gotten to do that before. I felt like a proper baker.

Maybe next time, I’ll actually be piping ganache on, writing messages and creating designs . . . stay tuned.