The Whiteout Cake

A vanilla butter cake with a whipped, white chocolate buttercream.

I decided to bake this recipe as confetti cupcakes, adding multi-coloured jimmies to the batter. A sidebar in the recipe suggests adding an extra egg yolk to give the cupcakes more structure so I did that. The method used is the standard creaming of fat and sugar with the addition of dry alternating with wet ingredients after the eggs are beaten in. But there is one big difference with this recipe and I don’t quite understand the science/purpose of it: the egg whites are whipped separately with cream of tartar and folded into the batter at the end. The batter is so thick, that whatever air has been beaten into the whites is lost during folding. I’m not sure this step is necessary, especially since there is leavening included in the recipe.

The finished cake had good vanilla flavour and a nice, fine crumb but was a little dry and crumbly. There was no baking time given for cupcakes so I may have over baked by a minute or 2. The recipe made 24 cupcakes and baked in 22 minutes.

The buttercream is a cooked frosting made with flour, sugar, milk and cream with butter and melted white chocolate beaten in. The texture is light, airy and creamy and not as buttery as Swiss or Italian meringue type buttercreams. With the addition of white chocolate, I found it to be a little too sweet “ I would reduce the sugar by ~1/3 cup next time “ but it did work well with the cake.

Though the cupcakes were a resounding success with the under-8 set, I’m not sure I’ll make this white cake again as I prefer Rose Levy Beranbaum’s white velvet cake, but the frosting is definitely a keeper.