Baking the Terrazzo Cake

A few months ago, I got hooked on last year’s season of Great British Bake-off (GBB). They are amateur bakers, and no one has made everything before, but they must have exceptional skill and experience to pull off these creations, right?

Fake modesty is very British, but I wondered: how hard is this really?

What I think is hard

Yes, I have done a lot of baking in my life. I didn’t suddenly discover my oven. However, I was already impressed by two parts about GBB.

First, decoration. I rarely put much effort into the appearance of what I cook and bake. I know it matters, but it has never been an emphasis of mine to figure out.

Second, unique flavors. I can pick out a recipe that sounds good. I can follow instructions. I just don’t really know how to come up with something on my own.

In college, I took a class where I played in a jazz combo. I had years of experience playing an instrument and was technically solid. However, when I had to play without written sheet music in front of me, I completely froze. I needed to be told what to do.

I did eventually work through it. Okay, technically, I had practiced and worked out a solo so I didn’t have to improvise live at our performance. But still, I created it by myself, and that was the next big gap in my baking journey, too.

The Terrazzo Cake

All of this brought me to the Terrazzo Cake. Awhile back, I watched this video from King Arthur of Lasheeda Perry making this cake.

It looks great, and with the step-by-step explanation, I figured I could do it. I picked lemon and blueberry as my unique flavor combination, and went to the store that afternoon to stock up and start baking

Since I was following a King Arthur concept, I used their Chiffon Cake recipe. I had never made chiffon cake before, but apparently most of the fluff comes from whipping a meringue.

After that, even more eggs go into the batter along with oil.

And that all comes together into a voluminous batter.

The cake batter went fine, but I’m actually more proud of how much I accomplished in a short time. I started baking at 5PM, and I had it in the oven by 6PM.

Oh, and I also cooked carbonara at the same time for dinner at 6PM.

I figured it was a good use of extra egg yolks from the meringue, but really, I was just trying to prove my kitchen multitasking ability.

Back to baking: the cake came out of the oven very tall. The recipe instructed me to flip the pans upside down to cool, which I did without considering why. Later when I mentioned it to Julie, she correctly hypothesized it was to prevent the cake from squishing down again.

It did leave an unsightly gap in the top crust, but all of that was getting leveled and frosted anyways

I decided to make a Swiss buttercream as recommended. Unlike American buttercream, Swiss buttercream ispartially cooked in a double boiler setup before the butter is incorporated. At first, I tried it to make it during dinner, but that was too ambitious, so I continued after the children were in bed.

I ended up a little short on buttercream. I suspect I didn’t beat it long enough before incorporating the butter to get enough volume. However, the resulting product was quite nice.

Since I had baked the cakes before dinner, they were plenty cool to start assembling and frosting as soon as I finished the buttercream. There are many tricks for leveling cake layers, and I remember none of it now. I suspect that most tricks aren’t strictly necessary, but they make the entire process more foolproof.

For the lemon flavor, I incorporated lemon curd into the butter cream for filling. I considered making the lemon curd from scratch, but frankly, I wasn’t certain I could do it noticeably better, and it wasn’t the goal of this baking project.

For the blueberry, I used a store-bought blueberry jam. Again, I considered making the compote from scratch, but since blueberries weren’t in-season, I would need frozen berries, and at that point, I wasn’t sure if it was worth the effort at all.

Lasheeda did six layers of cake; I only did four because I had measured my buttercream volume and knew I was already short. More layers meant more buttercream inside instead of outside, so I saved myself the work.

When I first heard the term “crumb coat” a few years ago, I thought it meant a coat made of crumbs. And I just wondered why: wouldn’t it just make a mess? I later learned that a crumb coat is actually a thin layer of frosting to keep the crumbs in. That layer gets chilled before the actual decorating starts.

Afterwards, I scraped and scraped every dash of buttercream I had to try to cover the cake as much as possible. I really wish I had even half a cup more to really cover the imperfections. As I smoothed out a hole here, I exposed a gap there.

To get the terrazzo look, I had to take chunks out of the frosting and fill it with colored bits of frosting. Lasheeda used clay pottery tool. I certainly wasn’t going to buy one just for this, but it looked to me like a small wire loop. I went into my desk drawer and pulled out a paperclip instead. And it worked.

After that, I smoothed the outside with the bench scraper again.

It took about five hours start-to-finish, and I managed to make dinner, cleanup, do bath, put my children to bed, and cleanup again, too!

Final Thoughts

My goal for this project was to bake an original, actually decorated cake. And I am proud because it is by far the nicest thing I have ever baked. Other than fluffing the buttercream more, it all really well.

Would I do it again?

Probably not. I’m sure I could do it better a second time, but I should try something new next time.