Baking Adventure 8: Mango Cream Cake

As a followup to my last entry, I decided to make and bake a mango cream cake. I wasn't able to get very good shots from my results, but I managed to get a few. I will be making this cake again, in the future, so no worries. I always want to use my camera for food shots.

Food photography is something I am also very fascinated by and I marvel at all of the amazing photo sets and collections I see on sites like Flickr.com and specific baking and food websites.

Anyway, I've never made a mango cake before but I wanted to give this a try. I snapped a few shots of some slices I cut from the cake. The cake went really fast, so by the time I got around to snapping, not much of the cake was left. Great statement about the results, but bad for photo-taking. lol

I decided to make a white cake batter by scratch. I used mango extract, as well as pulp and juice from 2 fresh medium-sized mangoes. I think in the end, I could have used included far more mango. But the mango could still be tasted well once the cake was done (next time I will include photos of the process) because the cake layers came out beautifully and perfect in exactly 35 minutes in the oven.

I created a buttercream frosting and added both mango extract and mango pulp. Once I beat all of the ingredients together for the frosting, the mango pulp was barely noticeable, but it did give the icing a nice orange-yellowish tint and if one looked carefully, you could see a small amount of mango pulp nicely dispersed throughout the icing.

I also added vanilla bean paste in the cake batter. Some of the vanilla bean seeds can be seen in the batter during and after baking, which is something I enjoy in the texture. It provides more of an intense flavor over the extract.

I made some whipped cream from scratch for eating with the cake. I also used whipped cream (in addition to the usual meringue in white cake) in the cake batter, which is why I call it mango cream cake. The homemade whipped cream was gone very quickly. It will ALWAYS be better than anything you can get from the supermarket.

---Make your own. It is very easy to do. ---

To make whipped cream from scratch, I use this personal recipe:

Recipe: Vanilla Whipped Cream

1 cup of heavy whipping cream (make sure the cream is cold)
1/4 cup of sugar (some people add more of less per cup of heavy cream)
1 teaspoon of vanilla bean paste (or vanilla extract)

• Place heavy whipping cream in a cold bowl under a stand mixer. Or you can beat by using a hand mixer (make sure beaters are cold). I used the latter.

• Begin beating the cream, add in the vanilla extract or paste and gradually add in the sugar.

• Beat the cream mixture until it starts to thicken. Beat it until it gets to firm soft peaks. It should be firm enough to scoop out with a spoon, similar to the consistency of Cool Whip. You don't want to beat it any further than this because soon you'll start making butter, which yields butterfat (the butter part) and buttermilk (liquid left over).

• Keep the whipped cream refrigerated, of course. Especially if you are using it on or within cake layers. Because I used fruit in my cake batter and icing, I stored my cake in the fridge within a cake holder or cake keeper.

 I think next time I will make a mango curd and add that between the layers. Buttercream on the outside of the cake and mango curd within.

I love fruit curds...especially from scratch.