Purple Blueberry Ombre Cake..

BAHAN CAKE :
350 g of softened salted butter (I used SCS. It's tad bit expensive but it's the best one I can find) ( I always  use salted butter in the cake because somehow it stabilises the sweetness of the cake I think)
350 g of caster sugar
4 eggs
350 g of plain flour/self raising flour
2 tsp of baking powder
100 ml of milk
Vanilla beans from one Vanilla pod (you can use vanilla essence)
Zest of 1 lemon (optional)
125 g fresh blueberries
Purple food Coloring
Blueberry pie filling / blueberry jam ( I use Comstock's Blueberry pie filling)

BAHAN FROSTING:
Ingredient A :
500 ml of milk
2 vanilla pods
100 g of caster sugar
50 grams of corn starch / custard powder
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
Vanilla beans from 1 vanilla pod / vanilla essence
Juice of one lemon

Ingredient B :
500 g of pure unsalted butter (I used SCS for the frosting as well)
500 g Cream cheese (I used philadelphia)
200-350 g of icing sugar
Purple Coloring

CARANYA

The Cake
First preheat your oven to 175 Degrees Celsius, grease and line four 9 inch cake tins. (I made half the cakes twice because I only have two 9 inch cake tins :p)

Cut the butter in cubes and beat it in your stand mixer or with your hand mixer or if you're real hardcore you can even beat it with your hands! lol jk. Beat it until the color turns paler than it's original color.

Pour in the caster sugar. Cream the butter and sugar together until they're nice and fluffy or until well incorporated. Crack in one egg at a time, beating it together with the butter and sugar mixture well each time. Add in the vanilla beans / vanilla essence.

Then, sift in the flour and baking powder. Pour in the milk and by using a scraper, fold the batter until it comes to a dropping consistency. You can beat it if you want. Either way works fine Put in the zest of the lemon and the blueberries and mix well.

Divide the batter evenly to four separate containers. (or two if you're making two halves of the ingredients separately like I did) Add in different amount of purple food coloring to each parts. Until you have them going from bright purple to light purple. Make sure there is a noticeable difference of hues.

Pop them in the oven for 23-27 minutes.

The frosting
Moving on to the frosting. First, scrape out the vanilla beans from the vanilla pod. Put it aside. Pour the milk in a small pot / non stick saucepan and throw all the vanilla pods in the milk. Put it on the stove until it boils. Remove the vanilla pods from the milk.

Place the sugar, custard powder/corn starch, eggs and egg yolks into a bowl and mix them well.

When the milk is still pretty hot (not immediately after it just boiled. Wait until it cools off a bit) add in small amounts of milk, little by little to the custard mixture to temper the eggs. This way the eggs won't be shocked by the sudden heat and cooks itself into an omelette or sth. Put in the milk until you feel the custard mixture and the milk is starting to unite, then pour the custard mixture in the rest of the milk. Take it to the stove and first put it on low heat. Slowly build up the heat to maximum heat. Whisking it the entire time it is on the stove. Once it's starting to thicken up, pour in the lemon juice. You know it's ready when the mixture turns into thick, creamy, pale yellowy cream.

Let it cool. When it cools, the color should be brighter and it should be thick almost to a pudding-like consistency. Once they're cooled. Take 3 quarters of the custard mixture and put it in the bowl where all the beating takes place. Beat it. Incorporate little amounts of butter at a time to it until you're finished with the butter. Beat in the cream cheese and then the icing sugar. Feel free to adjust the amount of icing sugar to your hearts content. To me putting sugar in your desserts is just like putting salt in your cooking. You just have to follow your instinct and give it a taste! I ended up putting 300 g of icing sugar. Because that's a whole lot of frosting 0.0 Add in the vanilla beans and the frosting is good to go.

Building the cake
As you can see from the photo, the frosting between the layers are quite thick. And they too play a part in the whole ombre mission unlike most other ombre cakes. To achieve that, I used an adjustable cake ring. You can use spring form pans or push cake tins. Or you can just stack it slowly by putting thick layer of frosting to the first layer of the cake, refrigerate for a couple of hours, put another layer of cake and frosting and then refrigerate it again and continue until you're finished with all the layers. Tapi leceh la mcm tu. If you have RM9 and you bake often, just buy a cake ring.

 So first put in the darkest layer of the cake on a cake board, spread the blueberry filling on top of it. Take about 7-15 heapful tbsp of the frosting and color it so that it is lighter than the color of the cake it is sitting on, but darker than the color of the cake that is going on top of it. The trick in coloring is to add little by little until you're happy with the color, if it's too dark, then just add the uncolored frosting to lighten it. And just repeat the same steps until you are finished with all the layers.

I made a little twist to the second layer of frosting because I want some distinction of flavors between the layers. Just to give it different depths of flavor. What I did was I combined the quarter of the custard mixture with a couple tbsp of the buttercream. (Probably around 5 tbsp I think) They will look pretty lumpy but it turns out fine when the cake is finished.

Refrigerate for 5-12 hours. Take it out, frost it with the remaining buttercream. The texture of the buttercream is a tad runny for a buttercream. You definitely wouldn't be able to pull off a rosette or a ruffle cake with the buttercream. But it's okay. Because the buttercream is so delicious you wouldn't even care.

I put a moderate amount of buttercream to frost the cake. Just enough to cover it. I think the buttercream between the layers have done enough justice for the cake really. The way I frosted the cake is, I place the cake on a turntable, and place a palette knife at an angle and just spin the turn table.

Oleh:Khodijah Mohamed Amin
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