♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - I'm here in Paris, which is, of course, known for its great baking-- the baguette, the croissant, the macaron.

You can find a boulangerie every five or six blocks.

But we're not going to bake here in Paris.

We're going to take the Eurostar to London tomorrow morning, because we have a date with Claire Ptak.

She owns the Violet Bakery in East London.

In fact, she did the royal wedding cake back in 2018.

And she has three simple but great recipes to show us.

One, a simple seed cake, a chocolate cake-- these are loaf cakes-- and then a fig cake with a caramel topping.

So let's get on the train, let's go to London and let's start cooking with Claire Ptak.

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♪ ♪ - Probably because I like to eat so much cake, great to be in England, where they love cake a lot.

(chuckles) So we have a great... a great following.

I never studied at culinary school, but I worked, you know, with great chefs, and you really need to trust your instincts.

And for me, I'm a really instinctual baker.

I love working with seasonal fruits.

Right now, we have these beautiful figs.

So I thought, let's do a fig upside down cake.

Put some rye flour in there, brown sugar.

It's a really simple caramel base, which is just butter and brown sugar.

Pour that into the bottom of the paper-lined loaf tin.

Then you can arrange your sliced figs.

You beat the butter and sugar together until it's nice and fluffy, and then you can go ahead and add all of your dry, which is like your rye flour and your ground almonds and leavening.

I also put some cardamom, because I feel like cardamom and fig have a really nice affinity for one another.

And then add your crème fraîche just to bring it all together.

And then that can just be smoothed over the top of the fruit.

♪ ♪ Voilà.

♪ ♪ - American cakes-- I love American cakes-- but the cake itself is bland, right?

It's a white cake, it's a yellow cake.

Almost all the flavor is in the filling and the frosting, which means you have to make filling and frosting.

At Claire Ptak's bakery, and in many other places in Europe, they're one loaf, a single layer cake.

In other words, the cake is full of flavor, so you don't have to do multiple layers and there's no frosting and no filling.

So, one thing Claire does I love is doing upside down cakes.

And she starts with sugar.

This is two-thirds a cup of light brown sugar and three tablespoons of butter.

And we'll add a little salt to that, too, and we'll melt that just for a couple minutes to combine.

Now we're going to deal with the fruit.

She used fresh figs, which were really terrific.

They're not always easy to get, they're not always in season.

So we're going to do this with plums.

We have two plums and we're just going to cut them into five slices like that.

So this is going to be at the bottom of the loaf pan, and obviously, with an upside down cake, when you turn it over, it's going to be on the top.

This doesn't look anything like what you'd expect with really melting sugar into a syrup.

It's going to be thick, it's going to be a little granular, so we'll turn that off.

Now we have the plums.

So the fruit's on top of the butter-sugar mixture, which is going to be the top of the cake when it's finished.

You know, before we start making the batter for this cake, let me just say a word about how Claire Ptak bakes.

The bakery's small, it's in East London and it's very casual.

The way she throws things together looks very offhand.

And this recipe is a little bit like that, so it's easy to do, so there should be no trepidation about doing it.

Now, she loves rye flour, and she also likes to use almond flour.

This is a cup-and-a-quarter of almond flour, and this is three-quarter cup of rye flour.

Now, she uses rye flour all the time-- why is that?

All-purpose white flour has zero flavor, really.

Rye flour has a tremendous amount of flavor.

You can't really use all rye flour because it's going to be a little bit heavy.

So this case, she uses almond flour.

Now, she also loves cardamom, which is two teaspoons here.

Baking powder, teaspoon; baking soda, half a teaspoon; a little bit of salt, maybe an eighth-teaspoon.

You have all the makings for flavor without all the stuff on top, which is really terrific.

So now we have our liquid ingredients-- two eggs.

Here's a little tip.

When recipes call for a teaspoon or two teaspoons of vanilla in a recipe, double it.

Just don't worry about it.

And so I'm not even going to measure it.

I'm just gonna put in a bunch of vanilla because I like vanilla, there you go.

Because actually, it's gonna taste great.

So, yeah, baking's a science, there's a lot to know about it.

But don't be overly concerned with it.

This is the kind of cake where not everything has to be perfect.

Okay.

A great tip in baking is to mix sugar with a zest, like a lime zest, a lemon zest, or an orange zest.

So we'll take a cup of light brown sugar, and we're now going to zest an orange over it to get a couple of teaspoons of zest.

It makes the zest come alive with the oils.

It also means that it's going to be nicely combined throughout.

Okay.

We'll just give this 20, 30 seconds.

So the temperature of the butter is important.

You don't want to just pull it out of the fridge when it's 40 degrees; it's just not going to whip up.

You want to incorporate air into it.

It doesn't have to be perfect, but you want it in between warm and cold.

So now we're going to beat it for three minutes, three to four minutes.

You want to see the color lighten, and you want to see a lot of air incorporated into it.

The volume should go up.

And now we're going to add the eggs and the vanilla.

I'm going to do just half.

So now the dry ingredients go in, and you don't want to overmix at this point, but we'll put the mixer on very low.

Okay.

Now, most bakers would tell you, you really want to finish mixing by hand.

The reason is, sometimes in these bowls... ...at the center, the mixer or the paddle doesn't actually get to the center bottom.

Which means you might have a pocket of flour there.

And so you can really get a few swipes with your spatula.

And you can also make sure that everything is mixed in.

Okay, now the batter goes in the pan.

It's a pretty thick batter, so you do want to smooth it out.

So we're going to put this in a 375 oven for about an hour.

Deeply browned on top.

What I do is use a fork or my finger, and I press at the top in the middle.

Should bounce back, not leave an impression.

So it's been out of the oven for 15 minutes, so it's still pretty warm, but you need to unmold it now.

And because of the sugar, the sugar syrup at the bottom, it can be sticky.

So you definitely want to run your knife around it.

Okay.

Oh, look, I got lucky.

(chuckles) I got really lucky.

You know, when you have to turn a cake upside down, you never know what's going to happen.

We're going to let this sit for about an hour because the cake really needs to firm up, because when you slice into it, it's going to start to fall apart, so we'll be back when it's cool.

And then we'll take a taste.

So now the slicing, a serrated knife's great, by the way.

There we go.

Take a bite.

Oh.

I mean, the plums are great, but what really makes this is you're using almond flour and you're using rye flour.

The cake itself is contributing a lot of flavor.

This is Claire Ptak's upside down cardamom spice plum cake or fig cake, the way she makes it, Great flavor all in one pan.

This is baking at its best.

One layer cake, tons of flavor and lots of lessons about using different kinds of flour.

- So this is what I think of as like a pound cake, but it's a little different than American pound cake.

It's got this butter and the sugar that you want to whip really nice and fluffy in the beginning, get a lot of air in there and then add your eggs one by one.

And then you're going to add your flour and your baking powder, um, and then I do add a little bit of milk, because the milk kind of lightens this batter a little bit, which is super nice.

A typical seed cake would just be the caraway seeds, but I also like to add a little lemon zest just to brighten it up a little.

So you've got the zest and the seeds added at the very end.

♪ ♪ Put it in the tin, put it in the pan.

♪ ♪ When you take the caraway seeds and put them in the sweet, buttery pound cake, they just, they seem like a totally different ingredient.

So I really, really love that.

It's one of my preferred breakfast cakes.

(chuckles) Because I love cake for breakfast.

♪ ♪ - This lemon caraway cake that Claire Ptak taught us is delicious, and that is reason enough to make it.

But I'm the Director of Education at Milk Street, and it's also sort of a baking 101 tutorial, which is another reason that I love to make this in our cooking school.

So one thing we teach our students is, think about what you want to make, and then you figure out the ingredients and techniques to get there.

Claire wanted to make a breakfast snacking cake, and that's exactly what we're going to make today.

And as we make it, we'll talk about why these ingredients and techniques are the right route to that goal.

So first we're going to start with our dry ingredients.

Like most cakes, you want to do dry and wet separately.

So we're starting with two-and a-third cups of cake flour.

So cake flour has lower protein than all-purpose flour, so it won't develop as much gluten.

It's going to make a tender cake.

We're adding two teaspoons of baking powder and a quarter-teaspoon of salt.

We're just going to whisk these together so they're evenly incorporated when we add them later; we don't get a pocket of baking powder or something like that.

We're also going to add two teaspoons of caraway seeds.

Caraway is a savory spice, it has a little bit of a licorice note that pairs really well with the lemon zest we'll add later, but gives it less of a dessert, more of a breakfast feel when you eat it.

All right, we don't need our dry ingredients for a little while.

We can focus on wet.

And yes, sugar is a wet ingredient.

We have a cup of regular white sugar, and we're going to add to that the zest of a lemon, or about a tablespoon of lemon zest.

We're going to beat them together first before we add the butter, and that will make sure that we really bruise the lemon zest.

We get maximum flavor.

So another thing about the sugar, in terms of the results we want to get, is that sugar is going to help keep this cake tender.

We're going to mix this together until it's really aromatic.

So now that we have the lemon and the sugar all mixed together, now we're going to add the butter.

We're not going to skimp on the butter.

It has 18 tablespoons, which is two sticks, plus two tablespoons of butter, which is another reason that it has such a beautiful, tender texture.

Now, baking recipes often say beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

Those aren't random words.

The fluffy is the most important.

This is helping the cake rise.

When we cut the butter and sugar together appropriately, we trap little air bubbles that expand in the oven.

So take your time; it takes about three minutes to get light and fluffy.

All right, this looks great.

Now we can start adding our eggs.

So we have three full eggs and one egg yolk.

And we want to add them sort of in additions, roughly half at a time.

The amount of fat in a recipe also determines how tender or chewy it is.

So this recipe has plenty of fat, which means it will be way on the tender scale, which is what we're looking for.

If you think about a baguette, super chewy, doesn't have any added fat.

Now we're going to add in our flour.

And we spent all this time, we've made all these thoughtful baking decisions to make sure we don't get a tough cake.

One of the most important ones is not to over mix our batter.

We're just going to mix this for about 45 seconds until it's mostly incorporated.

Now we're going to add the final ingredient, which is a quarter-cup of whole milk.

This will add flavor and help with a wonderful texture.

All right, once it's just combined, we're actually going to finish mixing this by hand.

And then you just want to stir gently, getting any flour that's trapped on the bottom, just enough so that everything's incorporated.

Now all we have to do is fill the pan and bake it.

You want to spread it evenly, gently, and then, as you can tell, it's a really voluminous batter.

So we're going to do one little trick to make sure it settles evenly.

We're just going to gently tap it on the counter.

And then just fill out those corners.

We're going to bake this at 350 degrees for about an hour.

♪ ♪ All right, so we've let our cooked cake cool for 20 minutes.

And now we're going to use our handy dandy little parchment wings here to just lift it out of its loaf pan and put it on a wire rack.

And we want to let this cool completely.

So you want to make this the night before so you can have it for breakfast when you're ready to eat.

So Claire recommends serving this in the afternoon with a glass of madeira, which is delicious.

But for breakfast, I like having it with a glass of black tea or some espresso.

I like that bitter complement to the sweet cake.

It's also great plain, which is how I'm going to enjoy it right now.

This lemon caraway butter cake is amazing.

The lemon and the caraway play really nicely together, so it's just savory enough for breakfast.

If that's the only reason you make it, because it's delicious, that is reason enough.

But it is also a great tutorial on how to bake a great cake.

♪ ♪ - The final cake is a chocolate loaf cake.

So this is like a chocolate and cocoa, so it's like a double chocolate sponge loaf cake.

Delish.

The chocolate loaf cake is super easy, because you don't actually need a mixer for this, so this is a great one if you're at home, and you just have a whisk.

You want to melt the butter and the chocolate over a bain-marie, and then I would let it cool a little bit because you're going to add your eggs right into the melted chocolate.

So you're going to add your dry, which is your flour, your cocoa, your leavener, a little bit of salt, and then whisk the chocolate, the melted chocolate mixture into that.

It gets a bit stiff, but don't worry, because then you're going to take boiling water straight from the kettle, whisk that in and it becomes a really nice, smooth, emulsified batter.

It's one of those things, like, I've been doing forever.

And I think that it's because the heat activates the cocoa and it makes the flavor stronger.

But it also makes the mixture come together really nicely.

So it's a bit of a dry mixture.

And then you add the boiling water, and then it becomes this, like, really silky smooth batter, and it bakes beautifully.

It releases this incredible chocolate smell, which is, yeah, pretty exciting.

This is nice, right?

Yeah, it's satisfying.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The last loaf cake from Claire Ptak is this double chocolate loaf cake, which is kind of a triple threat because first, it's cake, second, it's chocolate, and third, it's mixed entirely by hand.

It's a style of loaf cake that has a dense crumb and it's not too sweet, so it's perfect for tea time or an afternoon cup of coffee.

The first thing we'll do is get the oven to 350, and then we'll prepare our loaf pan.

You want a nine-by-five inch loaf pan.

This is a standard size.

We spray a little cooking oil in it, and then we line it with parchment so the sides are overlapping.

This cake is called double chocolate because it has both bittersweet chocolate in it from a bar and cocoa powder.

We'll start with the bittersweet chocolate.

We have seven ounces here.

Now, the type of bittersweet chocolate you choose depends on you, but look for one that has 70% cocoa solids in it, and if it tastes good to eat it, it's going to taste good in the cake.

We'll just chop it into somewhat small pieces.

They don't have to be too fine.

You know, I mentioned this cake is not too sweet, and that's why it uses bittersweet chocolate over semisweet.

You could certainly substitute with semisweet chocolate, but the bittersweet is going to be your least sweet of the chocolates, other than unsweetened, of course.

And it has the highest percentage of cocoa solid, therefore a lower percentage of sugar in it as well.

Okay, we have a nice coarse chop on this, and then we're going to combine the chocolate with 14 tablespoons of salted butter.

We have about an inch of water in the bottom of this pot, simmering, and then choose a large bowl that will fit on top of the pot, so that the bottom of the bowl doesn't touch down into the water.

You also want a large bowl because this is going to end up being our mixing bowl for the entire cake batter.

Add the butter in here.

And then all the chocolate.

This style of heating something gently, over water that is, is called a bain-marie.

It's a very classic method of melting chocolate and butter together.

You don't want the chocolate to get too hot, because it will burn if it gets too hot.

With this, you can actually see what's happening and you can control the heat level with the water.

That's why you want it simmering, not boiling.

The chocolate and butter are fully melted.

No little bits of chocolate left in there.

You want to remove the bowl from over the water, take the heat away and then let that cool down just a little bit.

Now the next thing, of course, is to mix all the dry ingredients together.

Here we have all-purpose flour.

We'll add the sugar directly to that.

A little bit of baking powder, little salt.

And then we have the cocoa powder.

This is Dutch-processed cocoa powder, which means it's been treated with an alkaline.

So it removes some of the acidity of the cocoa powder, and it also allows it to be used without adding an alkaline, like baking soda.

So we'll add that in.

And then we'll whisk it all together.

Okay, dry ingredients are mixed, chocolate is melted.

We're ready to move on to the next step.

Okay, our chocolate is cool enough now to add the eggs; you don't want it too hot for obvious reasons with eggs, but lukewarm is completely fine.

We'll crack the eggs in one at a time.

Okay.

All three eggs going right in.

Then we'll just whisk them into the chocolate and the butter.

Then we'll add all the dry ingredients that we mixed together, And we'll stir this in with a spatula.

You'll notice at this point when you're stirring, the batter gets very, very thick.

But we're going to add something to this batter now to thin it down a little bit, and bring up the heat just a little bit as well.

Now, the next thing we're going to do is a cup of boiling water.

This is an unusual technique for a dense loaf cake like this, that's almost pound cake style, but it's a very common technique used in some devil's food cakes.

Hot boiling water is added at the very end of the batter.

We'll stir in just half and give that a chance to incorporate and then we'll mix in the rest.

There are a couple of really great things that adding the boiling water does to this.

Claire Ptak loves it because it enhances the flavor of the cocoa powder, which makes a lot of sense; it blooms it and brings out those incredible flavors.

Also what it does, especially for a thick batter like this, is it warms up the entire batter a little bit.

So when you put it in the oven, the batter starts out at a warmer temperature, and it just helps it bake through more evenly.

Okay, now we'll add the second half of the boiling water and stir that in.

You know, when the batter was really thick, it had a little bit of a mottled surface.

As you add the water, you can see it start to get satiny smooth, gets a little bit shiny, and, of course, it gets thinner.

I switched to the whisk for incorporating the last of the water.

It's just a little more efficient.

Ah, there we go.

It's a beautiful, beautiful batter.

And we'll just pour the batter right in.

It's going to come very close to the top.

♪ ♪ We baked this cake in so many different ovens just to test it out, and every single time it rose the same.

You can see the cake didn't rise a lot, and that's why it's such a dense crumb.

But look at this rectangular plank that forms in the middle.

That happened every single time.

Sometimes it's bigger, sometimes it's smaller, but it's always shaped like that.

So we'll simply remove it.

We have our handy sling here.

Take it out, and then we'll transfer it to a wire rack to finish cooling completely.

Then we'll slice it and taste it.

Okay, this cake that takes 55 to 60 minutes to bake is now finally cool enough to slice and eat.

You'll see it's a really easy cake to slice.

It slices beautifully; look at that crumb, how even it is all the way through.

Just take a few slices off the end here and give myself this one.

Claire really likes serving this cake with crème fraîche, which is delicious.

But I kind of like whipped cream better than crème fraîche, so that's what I'm serving my cake with.

If you want to dress it up a little bit, you can add some fresh berries.

You could add a scoop of ice cream.

You could do anything you'd like, really.

Just give a nice big scoop of whipped cream right down the middle.

A few berries sprinkled over.

As you can see, this is a very casual cake.

Very easy to make, very easy to serve.

Beautiful cake for tea time or that afternoon cup of coffee, if you like.

Mm.

The combination of the bittersweet chocolate and the cocoa powder gives you a really dense, rich chocolate flavor, great for any time.

And because it's not so sweet, you could even eat this for breakfast.

But don't say I told you that.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season at MilkStreetTv.com.

- Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- Introducing Hestan ProBond.

Crafted from the resilience of cold-forged stainless steel, we collaborate with top chefs to redefine cookware and the kitchen experience.

Italian craftsmanship meets innovation with Hestan ProBond.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪