Hidden Superhero Chiffon Cake

Finally back after a few weeks away! Here's my belated Father's day post!
There's a Mighty Superhero inside every Dad! Happy Father's Day!❤️
With lots of love,
Susanne

 

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Superhero Themed Vanilla Macarons (Tips on how to colour shells deep red and black)

I have a request for superhero themed macarons for a little boy!

He loves vanilla so I filled the shells with vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream

The purpose of this blog post is to share how I achieve a deep shade of black and red when making black and red macaron shells. Certain shades of colour may be difficult to achieve if you don't know how to and these two colours are examples. I will also share how I decorated the shells with adequate precision by hand.

I used the reduced sugar recipe for the macaron shells here. Both regular and reduced sugar recipes can be found here. You may refer to my Creative Baking: Macarons book for a systematic presentation of the basics and complex shaped macarons. You may refer to my video tutorials for macaron basics and piping of complex shapes on the blog too.

Although I used the Italian method, the ratios specified here should be applicable for French and Swiss methods as well.

For black colour, add 1g of charcoal powder for every 10g of almond meal along with an additional generous chopstick dip of black gel food colouring for every 30g of almond meal.

For red colour, use 1/2 tsp red yeast powder* for every 45g almond meal, and 1/8-1/4 tsp red powder colouring for every 90g almond meal. I use the red powder colouring easily available from supermarkets that is more for local desserts such as Ang Ku Kuih as a little bit goes a long way. I use in combination with gel as I find powder alone tends to stain my fingers and baking paper. This is more of personal preference so you may stick with just powder colouring. I add a drop of red gel colouring for every 30g almond meal.

*Red yeast powder doesn't colour the batter much but serves to dull down the brightness of super red artificial colouring and give it a more earthy tone. Note that too much red yeast powder will cause meringue to deflate and results in denser macaron shells. Omit this if you are unable to obtain it. I prefer using natural sources wherever possible.

Just to share some photos of the process...

Piping the various shapes

Freshly baked shells. Check out the feet!

In order to get nice identical logo prints on the shells, I made stencils out of paper by cutting out the shapes with a craft knife. I traced the outlines using edible marker (yellow colour to match the royal icing colour), and then decorate with royal icing. Feel free to use a toothpick to nudge the icing where necessary. To give it a slightly glittery effect, I brushed on a little gold dust on the yellow icing after it is dried.

Decorating Superman shells

Decorating Batman shells

The fine webbing of Spiderman was done using a fine tipped edible marker.

Really tedious to draw by freehand. I took on an average of 8-10 minutes for each one!

Keep a picture of Spiderman's head right next to your macaron shell so that you can copy each line as accurately as possible. I treated the web pattern like a complicated Chinese character and "wrote" it as such :p. After a couple of heads, I get the hang of it and memorized the steps to "write" the web pattern.

Spiderman's eyes were added on with royal icing.

I filled the shells with reduced-sugar vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream.

With love,
Phay Shing

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Ultraman (vs Dino-Monster!) Vanilla-Chocolate Chiffon Cake

I’m just back from the Land of the Rising Sun! Such a coincidence that the cake I made before leaving for Japan was also inspired from there. How many of you remember the popular Japanese superhero Ultraman? He was super popular in his hayday, where he defended the Earth against aliens and monsters. At that time, the technology wasn’t that good so all monsters looked like Godzilla or dinosaurs LOL. This cake depicts the numerous battles he had with the monsters. The cake is made of vanilla and chocolate chiffon cake, the cream coloured portions being vanilla, and the brown (including the dinosaur) being chocolate. The ultraman was made by pre-piping on the features and baking in a mold like in Hello kitty chiffon cake pops, likewise for the dinosaur with chocolate chiffon batter. A whimsical creation made with love, Susanne.

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'Super granny!' Chiffon Cake

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Super grannies and Super mummies!! I’ve never been confident in making more mature cakes for the elderly :p, so this is my humble attempt at making a cake for my friend’s grandma! She was super cute and said her ‘Popo’ (grandma in Chinese) is a ‘Super-Popo!’ =). So this cake is inspired by a picture of a ‘Super granny’ she sent me. I think many of us feel our grandmothers and mothers are Superwomen (I feel that way)!

The Super granny is made entirely of chiffon cake :). I’ve tried different ways of making faces, including piping (like Hello Kitty) and joining (like Super Mario). Here, I used the joining method, meaning I baked a reduced egg-white vanilla chiffon cream cake and a light grey charcoal chiffon cake in two oval bowls, and used a huge hearts cutter to make the same cut and join the two together to form the face with the grey hair. I baked the grey hair bun and fist in round Iwaki bowls and cut them out. For the fist punch, I further used the back of a butter knife to make indents like the fingers. The body and cape are strawberry chiffon cake baked in an oval bowl (body) and layer tray (cape). I used a bit of melted marshmallows to glue the cakes together. The base is a pandan chiffon cake which many elderly love, colored with pandan juice and pandan paste. I learnt more about the properties of cream of tartar, it being acidic. My friend’s grandma had an impeccable palate and managed to taste and guess it (wow). The cake was made with lots of love for the Super-Popo :).

I shall take this chance too to thank my own mum for being a Super mummy and Super granny to my children. Thank you so much!!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Super mummies!

With lots of love,
Susanne

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Superheroes 3-Tier Chiffon Cake

This is a Superheroes 3-Tier Chiffon Cake for my friend’s 3 fabulous boys celebrating birthday together! The 3 tiers represent different superheroes: top is Captain America, middle is Superman and the bottom is Batman! It’s somewhat like the coming together of my previous chiffon cakes (Navy Stripes Gun, Superman Boxers and Spiderman). I wanted the cake to have some sort of a "super" old-school Hollywood glamour feel hee. Really thankful my friends shared the cake was super yummy and well-received!

Happy birthday to the boys and happy new year everyone!! Hope everyone is having a SUPER (huat) new year!

With love,
Susanne

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Superman Boxers Orange Chiffon Cake

This is a tongue-in-cheek creation I made for a friend (she's a v talented singer btw!) who requested this cake for her hubby's birthday! :D What does it look like? Her son picked out the boxers for his dad during their shopping trip together LOL!

I piped the Superman 'S' using the method similar to Spiderman chiffon cake but using an orange chiffon cake recipe. In addition, I have replaced additional cake flour with red yeast powder which acts both to colour the batter as well as to make it less runny for piping. Remember to invert the template for the Superman 'S'! You can do this easily in a program like Paint. Thank God for the timely reminder.

Orange Chiffon Cake for Superman Boxers (for 6-inch tray or bowl)
2 egg yolks
13g sugar
26g vegetable oil
27 ml orange juice
40g cake flour
Red yeast powder

Meringue for piping:
1 egg white
10g sugar
1/6 tsp cream of tartar

Meringue for cake
3 egg whites
30g sugar/ 30
1/4 tsp cream of tartar

1. Preheat oven to 160°C.
2. Beat egg yolks with sugar with whisk till pale yellow before stirring in oil, water and orange juice (I omitted orange zest here so that the patterns will not be patchy).
3. Next add in sieved flour and whisk till no trace of flour is found. Scoop out 4 tsp for piping red and add 1/3-1/2 tsp of red yeast powder. Divide the remaining batter 2:1 for blue:yellow cake.
4: Whip up the meringue for piping and egg white. Scoop over 9 tbsp to red batter. Fold in gently, pipe superman 'S' and bake for 1.5 min.
5. Whip up the meringue for cake. Divide 2:1 for the blue:yellow batter. Gently fold in 1/3 at a time respectively.
6. Fill the spaces in between the red 'S' with yellow batter and the space outside the red diamond with blue batter. Fill the rest of the space with more red batter.
7. Gently tap the tray on table 3x to remove air bubbles.
8. Bake the layer cake for 15 min at 160°C.
9. Unmould after the cake is cool.

I outlined the Superman logo using a toothpick dipped in charcoal powder in water. This is the tedious part of the bake! Orange chiffon cake was used as the base chiffon cake so as to resemble skin colour. I have shared the orange chiffon cake recipe for 17 cm tin previously. It is still one of my favorites because of the orange zest! In addition, I baked another red layer chiffon cake (2 egg recipe like above) to make the lining of the boxers as well as a Superman belt at the bottom of the cake. All these were joined to the cake using melted marshmallows, including the boxers :). Ahh.. and I hid some marshmallows inside for the kids!

Thank God celebration was great though the waitress mistook the birthday "boy" for the little boy because it was Superman :p.

With love,
Susanne

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