Basket Weave cake
This is my first attempt at using a basket weave piping to decorate a cake, it was a lot of fun and more difficult then it appears.Mainly trying to keep the vertical piping straight and maintaining even spacing between the horizontal piping.
The reason for the cake is to bring one to our niece's home for thanksgiving dinner, with that in mind I chose to use the flavors of the holiday in the cake.
I made a sweet potato sponge cake baked in a 1/2 sheet pan which gave me 4 layers 12" x 4".
The filling is an apple pie filling (made small dice apple pieces) topped with a brown sugar vanilla pudding drizzled with caramel sauce.
The frosting is a Swiss meringue buttercream , since most are very sweet I used a minimum amount of sugar yielding a mildly sweet flavor.
The recipe for the cake the Swiss meringue buttercream and the apple pie filling are from Gretchen Price at woodland bakery in NJ. wood land bakery blog
Originally posted as a pumpkin sponge cake and since any pureed vegetable will work , I simply used roasted pureed strained sweet potato, using brown sugar in place of white.
The flavor was amazing even without embellishment!
For the final version I'll use whipped cream for the filling dam and to crumb coat as it was way too much buttercream . And more buttercream flowers on top!
For topping the cake I'll make sugar gumpaste flowers which are edible or may be removed before slicing
I did not do a photo process of the individual components since the recipes are easy enough to follow.
These are the photos of the assembly of the cake:
Thanks for visiting!! Enjoy! Jim
Brown sugar vanilla pudding:
1/3 cup brown sugar , you may use 1/2 for a less sweet taste
6 tablespoons cornstarch if making a filling 4 if for regular pudding
1/4 tsp salt
10 oz. whole milk
10 oz. heavy cream here you may alter the type of milk & cream ratio to suit
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract ....homemade vanilla extract ( you may also scrape seeds from 1 vanilla bean to add instead of extract, put scraped bean in milk/cream mix when warming for a fuller flavor, remove before adding milk/cream to saucepan)
In a large saucepan blend sugar, cornstarch , salt
Warm milk/cream mix till very warm almost hot ( this reduces cooking time, of course you may use cold)
on medium heat add milk/cream mix to saucepan, stirring constantly till it thickens.
When it comes to a boil cook 1 full minute to activate cornstarch.
Remove from heat stir in vanilla, pour into a heat proof bowl, place plastic wrap on surface to prevent a skin from forming.
When cool refrigerate 4 hours or over night.
