I can’t believe I’m writing this, but for the fourth week in a row, I’ve been having health problems. This time it was COVID, and I’m on the mend now, but I just wanted to apologize as I want to be putting out more recipes than I’m able to at the moment! Okay, onward!
Hey, let’s celebrate that!
We tripled (TRIPLED) the amount of subscribers on this newsletter thanks to this wildly popular black sesame & earl grey cookie recipe. If you’re new here, I’m so glad to have you and I hope you stick around.
I try to send out this little love letter three times a month with a new recipe. Some of the recipes are free ninety-nine and some of them are for our wonderful growing community of paid subscribers who make this whole enterprise possible. (Great thing about being a paid subscriber is you get access to the whole archive of paid recipes, which grows every month!) I like to give culture or product recommendations every week, and I’d also like to start doing more informative, tip-focused articles or even an occasional interview, so maybe expect those, too.
Allow me to reintroduce myself (skip if you’ve heard it, lol):
A little bit about me: I created easygayoven in 2019, just a couple years out of college, while also starting my career working in entertainment news and social media. During the day, I was posting away on the profiles TED Conferences, while building my skills in baking and food photography on nights and weekends. Then I took the leap to go full-time with this at the start of 2022. At the time, I had 10,000 followers on Instagram. Let’s just say I might not do that again, but that’s the delusion (combined with privilege and luck) that made this possible! Two years have zoomed by, and in some ways, they haven’t. It was slow-going to start (I didn’t make a dime for … 6 months?). I did some freelance writing work for Serious Eats, which I really liked, to supplement my income when the brand deals weren’t exactly pouring in. And then, as a way to keep writing while also making a little money, I sent out the first email on this Substack exactly one year ago on April 7. Happy birthday, newsletter! I’m sorry you still don’t have a name!
If you don’t know, I’m also on Instagram and TikTok — though I post more daily updates on Instagram.
Recommendations
TV Show 📺 : Turning Point: The Bomb and The Cold War
This got me through like a day and a half of COVID isolation, even though usually my documentary preferences fall more along true crime lines. But if you think about it, history and war are filled with true crime. This sweeping series of nine (well-over 60-minute) episodes takes the viewer from World War II and the creation of the atomic bomb all the way through the Cold War. But it doesn’t stop there — since, as it argues, the Cold War never really stopped, either. It seamlessly shows how world events haven fallen like dominos in the intervening years, all leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The series also puts into sharp relief how unchecked capitalism, the military industrial complex and the threat of nuclear war underpins almost all global conflict since the bomb’s creation. Now let’s talk about rainbow sprinkles!
This Week’s Recipe
A confetti cake is perfect for almost any occasion — maybe don’t show up with one to a wake. It’s impossible to not experience a zing of cheer when eating and looking them, and feel super special when receiving one for a birthday or other celebration. And with this snacking cake size, you can get the effect of a huge, bold birthday layer cake without actually doing all the constructing and scraping and chilling etc.
Cream cheese buttercream is simple but deceptively tricky — which might be redundant, but it’s true! The key to success is getting the butter and cream cheese to combine as quickly as possible, and to do that, they have to be at the same temperature. Otherwise, you’ll end up with chunks of cream cheese floating around in your buttercream. This type of buttercream is super susceptible to over-mixing because, unlike regular buttercream which you can beat and beat and beat forever and it will be fine, as cream cheese is mixed, it releases more and more water, which breaks the emulsion and causes it to curdle or become soupy. So you want to be able to mix it until it’s combined and, ideally, not a second more. Use high quality cream cheese and *not* cream cheese “spread”.
If your frosting mixture is beginning separate, and you suspect one of the ingredients is too cold, try microwaving a half-cup of the frosting just until it melts and loosens up a bit. Pour it back and mix to see if it all comes back together. On the other end, some time in the fridge can also help a frosting that isn’t coming together — just stir it occasionally and don’t let it firm up too much. Adding more powdered sugar can be a Hail Mary as some the corn starch in the sugar can help absorb some of that added moisture released by the cream cheese.
Let’s talk sprinkles. Rainbow nonpareils are not a good candidate for mixing into confetti cakes, as they shed their colorful coatings which then mixes into a spectrum of sludge in the dough. The waxiness of rainbow sprinkles mean they hold onto their color and don’t evaporate into the dough when baked. I also recommend choosing a sprinkle mix with the primary colors of the rainbow and avoiding any pastel mixes as they don’t show up well.
Confetti Snacking Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
Makes one 8-inch cake
Ingredients
Cake
1 cup cake flour (129 grams)
½ cup all-purpose flour (67 grams)
¾ cup granulated sugar (158 grams)
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon Diamond Crystal Kosher salt (1/4 teaspoon for regular table salt)
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature, cut into half inch cubes
1 large egg and 1 large egg white, at room temperature
½ cup buttermilk, at room temperature (113 grams)
1/3 cup vegetable oil (69 grams)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup rainbow sprinkles (about 3 ounces)
Buttercream:
3/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature (12 tablespoons, 170 grams)
4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
3/4 cup powdered sugar (90 grams)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease one 8-inch round cake tin and line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper. Dust with flour, tapping out any excess.
In a medium mixing bowl, whisk cake flour, all-purpose flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
In the bowl of a stand mixer with fitted with a whisk attachment, add one cube of butter to the dry ingredients and beat on medium speed. Repeat until all the butter is added, the mixture looks sandy, and there are no lumps.
In a liquid measuring cup, whisk egg, egg white, buttermilk, oil, and vanilla extract.
Switch the mixer to the beater attachment and, mixing on low speed, slowly pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl and keep beating on medium for another 15 seconds to incorporate the entire mixture. Mix in sprinkles until evenly distributed.
Fill the prepared tin with the batter. Bake on the middle rack for about 38-40 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and springs back when lightly pressed. A wooden skewer should come out clean (or with just a few moist crumbs) and the internal temperature should read about 195-200°F on a digital instant-read thermometer.
Transfer the tin to a wire rack and allow to cool for 5 minutes before loosening the cake from the sides of the tin with a mini offset spatula or a butter knife and turn out onto the wire rack to cool completely.
Once the cake has cooled, make the frosting. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the beater attachment or in a medium mixing bowl with a hand mixer, beat the butter until lightened in color and fluffy. Add in vanilla and cream cheese and beat on low just until combined.
Frost the cake and top with rainbow sprinkles and enjoy!
Note: This cake will cook faster and brown more on the edges if baked in a dark or nonstick pan. I recommend using light-colored aluminum pans — on which I did a whole review/test for Serious Eats. Spoiler, I like the ones from NordicWare. You can also bake this in a 9-inch tin, but it will take less time, so just pay attention to the visual cues.
Congratulations 🎉 One year is a huge milestone, fitting for this wonderful celebration cake!