Caramel Cake
The recipe for this butter cake draped in caramel fudge icing is based on a cake originally made by Louise Hodges, a home cook from Carmack, Mississippi. This recipe first appeared in our March 2012 issue, with Ben Mims' story Sweet Southern Dreams.
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Credit: Todd Coleman
Ingredients
FOR THE CAKE:16 tbsp. unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pans
3 cups cake flour, plus more for pans, sifted
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 cup milk
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs
FOR THE ICING:
3 1/2 cups sugar
12 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
2 (15-oz.) cans evaporated milk
1 egg
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. baking soda
Instructions
1. Make the cake: Heat oven to 350°. Butter and flour three 9″ cake pans, and set aside. Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl; set aside. Whisk together milk and vanilla in a bowl; set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, cream butter and sugar on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. On low speed, alternately add dry ingredients in 3 batches and wet ingredients in 2 batches. Increase speed to high and beat until batter is smooth, about 5 seconds. Divide batter among prepared pans, and smooth top with a rubber spatula; drop pans lightly on a counter to expel any large air bubbles. Bake cakes until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Let cakes cool for 20 minutes in pans; invert onto wire racks, and let cool.2. Make the icing and assemble the cake: Whisk together 3 cups sugar, butter, milk, and egg in a 6-qt. copper saucepan or Dutch oven; set aside. Heat remaining sugar in a small skillet over high heat, and cook, swirling pan, until sugar melts into an amber caramel, about 2 minutes. Immediately pour caramel into milk mixture, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat; attach a candy thermometer to side of pan, and cook, stirring bottom constantly with a wooden spoon, until thermometer reads 232°, about 40 minutes. Remove from heat and immediately stir in vanilla and baking soda; let sit for 1 minute. Using a hand mixer, beat caramel mixture on medium-low speed until the consistency of loose pudding, about 1 minute. Immediately place one cake on a cake stand and pour over 1/2 cup caramel icing; top with second cake and pour over 1/2 cup icing. Top with third cake and pour remaining icing around the top edge of cake and then over the center. Quickly spread icing over sides of cake; let icing cool completely before serving. Store at room temperature.
i ended up making a yellow cake, a simple caramel sauce and whipped some cream, using it as filling and spreading some caramel sauce in between.
The cake turned out fine and tastes pretty good, but is a little dense and not light and fluffy.
As for the icing, it was a flop. It tasted absolutely delicious, but never firmed up enough to ice anything. First off, they don't make 15 ounce cans of evaporated milk, just 12 oz. and 5 oz. I bought one 12 oz. can and two 5 oz. cans, just to make sure I had some of both sizes, as I initially thought I'd written down the can size incorrectly when making my shopping list. I used all three of my evaporated milk cans (totaling 22 oz.). I brought the liquid up to a nice simmer before adding my caramelized sugar, and while it did harden up when I added it to the warmed liquid, it did melt faster. I stirred this concoction for the recommended 40 minutes, basically waiting on it to become thick like custard. When beating into icing, it never firmed up enough, even after having been refrigerated overnight. It becomes like a runny pudding, as the recipe states, but you can't ice anything with that (good on icecream). Delicious, but a waste. Go with a simple caramel/brown sugar recipe (chill overnight) and you're good to go! (I ended up using the one in _Joy of Cooking_.)
There is nothing special about any of these. We're not talking about ganache, or genoise, or an angel food cake that can be a bit tricky to bake without collapsing or having it stick like a devil to the pan. They're just regular butter cake bases with not particularly astounding frostings. Honestly folks, when professionals and experienced bakers tell you these recipes are no good, they're no good.
Look elsewhere for a good cake recipe, because they are not to be found on this site. It's pretty clear that whoever was responsible for these disasters is not going to own up to it. These cakes don't even LOOK good - you can clearly see in the pictures how wrong these recipes have gone. The RVC cake picture in particular shows tunneling and an overly dense crumb. Properly made cake does NOT look like that. I see moderate to severe tunneling and an overly dense and uneven crumb in every picture posted on the site.
Maybe other recipes on this site are OK, but go elsewhere for your cake. You can have it here, but you can't eat it.
The cake is too dry because there is too much fat and not enough moisture in the recipe as written. To try to "fix" this recipe to approximate a milk-and-butter sponge:
Reduce butter to 6 T
increase sugar to 2c
increase whole eggs to 5
add 4 egg yolks
reduce milk to 3/4c
Butter is difficult to emulsify in a cake batter. The additional eggs, particularly the yolks, provide additional lecithin (an emulsifier which also assists leavening action) as well as more moisture. They also provide more structure to the cake, more foaming ability, to allow for a lighter, airier structure. There is just way too much butter in the original recipe.
But honestly rather than trying to fix this recipe I'd strongly suggest you just go out and find a halfway decent basic yellow cake recipe from a reliable source and use that for your base.
30 oz is 3 3/4c.
24 oz is 3 cups
There's a big difference there. Not your fault, it's theirs for providing an unclear or incorrect measurement. BTW, I have to wonder why every single cake recipe I've seen measures butter in T - that's a pretty unwieldy way to measure, but anyway.
As for the sugar not browning - make sure you get cane sugar for this sort of use. For some reason beet sugar doesn't carmelize properly and you'll never get the proper color out of it. A lot of sugar is beet sugar, check the label to be sure.