Rouxbe’s Cake Baking and Decorating Course
Golden Kiwi Snack Cake
My Grade: 100%. I was so EXCITED!
Excerpts from the grading chef:
Hi, Marjorie! You’ve done well with this assignment. . .After reading your description of flavors, I am actually very curious to try it myself! Such creativity and thought went into this! I appreciate that you are realizing some mistakes as you go. . .Your last photo is gorgeous as it shows the side of the cake as well as the entire cake. Quite lovely! Keep up the hard work,
This first baking assignment was to just bake a cake – any cake – in that way the Chefs are introduced to us through our baking.
I based my recipe on an old favorite, Lemon Cupcakes with Citrus Icing, in Rodale’s Flat Belly Diet Cookbook. However, my recipe for this assignment varies significantly from the Rodale recipe. Basically, I replaced Safflower Oil with Avocado Oil, fat-free milk with grass-fed whole milk, and all of the lemon ingredients – juice, zest, and extract – with a puree of the juice and pulp of two medium sized golden kiwis.
TASTE: I recently discovered these kiwis and prefer them to very acidic green kiwis. I find golden kiwis to be mellow with a mild acidic signature while still very high in vitamin C and many other nutrients. Lemon is a fine old flavor, but it’s so familiar – I wanted to try something new and golden kiwi provided an unexpected new flavor that was a delightful surprise.
FLAVOR, AROMA & TEXTURE: The cake’s flavor is mildly sweet without the acidic “burn” of sharply citrus fruits. Near the end of baking, the aroma is lightly sweet and fragrant. Delightful really.
I found the texture to be light and moist with a firm, fresh, and tender mouthfeel. The thin slice of kiwi atop each piece of cake provides a bit of freshness to help counter the sweetness of the cake. Blueberries are weakly acidic so they contrast nicely with the kiwi while still providing a burst of tartness that also helps balance the sweetness of the cake.
Visually, I like the dark blue color of the blueberries against the white powdered sugar. I decided to use powdered sugar after seeing the cakes in the lesson with this “frosting.” I’ve not done that before and I expected it to be very sweet. I was pleasantly surprised that it was not too sweet and complemented the lightness of the cake. A glaze, such as the citrus glaze in the original recipe, would have been too heavy and too sweet here.
The most frustrating part of this assignment was taking cool photos only to realize that my name was not in the photo or the card was there but my name was not visible. DRAT. I had to retake so many photos.
NOTE: In the photo of the finished product, there is a stemmed blueberry on the raised piece of cake. Of course, I would remove the stem before serving it to someone – and in fact removed it before I ate this piece – but I liked it for the photo so I left it.
Marjorie's Writings 