Part B on the Bee!

Once my kitchen (and my nerves) recovered from the Opera Cake Bomb that went off last week, I felt up to attempting an allergen-free replica of the Bee Cake for my kids.  I can't tell you how excited they were to try it.  So excited that I had to give up any thoughts of feeding them a real lunch with Bee Cake for dessert.  Bee Cake was the lunch today.  Oh well.

For the joconde, I used the Rustic Coconut Cake batter from MadCapCupcake.   I just poured it on to a parchment lined jelly roll pan and baked it at 350 for 20 minutes.  In  retrospect, I should have poured 3/4 of the batter in and saved the rest for cupcakes.  The cake layer ended out being a bit thick and the finished cake was really tall, but the texture and taste were similar to the nuttiness of the almond joconde.

I made a vanilla bean syrup to soak the joconde.  The first try at buttercream was hilarious.  I seriously created a non-Newtonian fluid.  The original buttercream was so cool.  Hot sugar syrup was whipped into pasteurized eggs until fluffy, then butter was slowly whipped in.  I had the really dumb idea of substituting plain gelatin for the eggs and shortening for the butter.  The stuff whipped up so high and fluffy and looked cool, but tasted like a weird greasy marshmallow.  I whipped some strawberry jam into it and used it as the mousse layer, it was so bizarre, but the kids liked it.  My redo on the buttercream stayed with the basics.  Shortening, vanilla, soymilk and powdered sugar.  Why mess with it!

     Instead of marzipan, I used marshmallow fondant for the bees and honeycomb top.  It was a lot easier to work with than marzipan, tasted better and was cheaper.  For the wings, I made burnt caramel disks (1/2 cup sugar, 2 T. corn syrup, 2 T. water....heat until boiling and golden, then spoon out disks on a Silpat to cool).  

The Judge (And Her Jury!)

My Muse is Pleased

Happy Mom, Happy Kids, Happy Bee