Thursday, February 10, 2011

coffee chiffon cake


I've been wanting to try making a chiffon cake for a while now, so when we found out it was our our friend K's birthday last week, I thought it would be the perfect time to try making one.  I decided to try this recipe for coffee chiffon cake.

It took me three tries to get a decent chiffon cake.  The recipe called for an angel food cake tube pan, but I wanted to make a layer cake with two 8" pans instead.  I knew that I'd have to change the baking time, but I just didn't know by how much.  I ended up underestimating the baking time for my first batch - I had never made chiffon cake before and didn't know what to look for to tell if it was done.  But the toothpick came out clean so I assumed it was done!  I was wrong.  A few minutes after being taken out of the oven, my cakes started deflating ... and pulling away from the sides of the pan ... and eventually collapsed into a sad, lumpy mess.

So I made a second batch.  This time I almost doubled the baking time, still not knowing how to tell if it was done or not.  But when I pulled it out of the oven, it was already collapsed!  What was I doing wrong?


After a couple of searches on the internet (thanks Google!) I discovered that I was preparing the pans wrong.  Angel food and chiffon cakes rely on the whipped egg whites for their height, and if you grease the pans (which I was doing, like I normally do for regular cakes), the cake has nothing to grip onto for stability while rising.  And so it will collapse.  Aha!


So I had to make a third batch.  This time I didn't grease the pans at all, but still kept a piece of parchment paper on the bottom of the pan.  When I took the cakes out of the oven, I set them upside-down to cool (as Google instructed me to do), to help keep the cakes from deflating.  After they had cooled, I turned them right-side-up and was happy to see that they didn't deflate at all!  But ... as soon as I used my offset spatula to release the edges of the cake from the cake pans, they deflated.  But only a little bit.  So I was still happy.

To go with the lightness of the chiffon cake, I filled it and covered it with cream that I whipped up with cocoa powder and sugar.  Then I dusted the top with more cocoa powder, and decorated it with some whole coffee beans.  Hope you enjoyed it K and C!


7 comments:

  1. Such a lovelly cake!!!Loved...

    Kiss
    Rita
    http://bembons.blogspot.com

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  2. Oh it looks so yummy...
    sometimes it is really hard to adjust the recipe to make it fit at our specific baking pan, but as we can see you did a great baking job:)

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  3. hi dear, how big is your pan and do you mind sharing how u did the frosting?

    Cause i really wanna try this for my anniversary :D

    Here's my email:
    smudgedcircles@hotmail.com

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  4. @genevieve - i used two 8" pans. also the frosting is just whipped cream with a little sugar and cocoa powder, and then i dusted the top with more cocoa powder. let me know how it turns out!

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  5. Hi Michele,

    Thank you for such an inspiring blog. I've been looking for a chiffon cake recipe that uses 8" cake pan instead of angel food pan. Would you mind sharing the tempurature and time you'd used for this recipe. Thank you :)

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  6. @Jen - i just checked my notes and i had written that i ended up baking it at 350F for 25-30 minutes. good thing i wrote it down because i wouldn't have remembered! let me know how it turns out! :)

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  7. Hi, your cake looks so tempting. I have done many version of chiffon but used a tube pan. Would love to try with 8in pan but i fell off the pan as I cooled it and also was sticky on the top. Would you have any idea what went wrong. Thank you. You can email me geetsel@yahoo.com

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