American Baker in Germany

Nice easy one today. To make a double boiler, you need a small pot about a third of the way filled with water.  Then you need a metal or glass bowl that you can place on top of the pot without it falling into the pot and without touching the water below.  Then, you put your ingredients into the bowl, not the pot.  The heats your ingredients very gently and doesn't cook eggs or burn chocolate. At least not nearly as quickly as on a stove.  It should be a nice, snug fit.  The water below will eventually boil, but the contents of your bowl will take much longer to. Watch us talk about this on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/3PCcOtpWX3Q Schaut zu wie wir darüber reden auf YouTube hier: https://youtu.be/OkEqtUc8qG8

I was shocked to discover that Cinnamon Sugar is something that some people actually buy. Wow. Seriously? It's so easy to make! Cinnamon Sugar: 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp cinnamon Mix. That's all there is to it. It's super easy. No need to buy cinnamon sugar ever. Watch us make cinnamon sugar on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/30Oi6YQRPaM Schaut zu wie wir Zimt-Zucker auf YouTube machen hier: https://youtu.be/1qK3uj71Va0

If you're like me, you never have buttermilk in the fridge just waiting to be used in a recipe. But it turns out it's quite easy to make with ingredients you probably do already have in the kitchen. All you need is milk and lemon juice or clear vinegar. The advantage of using this method is that it's easy to make lactose free. Just substitute lactose free milk for the regular milk, as we have done.  If you need measurements, I use about a tablespoon of lemon juice to about a cup of milk.  The lemon juice makes the milk curdle a bit and start to separate. However, since it's not actually gone bad, it's still safe to drink and tastes good.  Buttermilk is thicker and creamier than regular milk and that's why it's preferred in some recipes.  Hope this tutorial is helpful for you to make buttermilk at home. Watch us make this on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/88FeGL96LmQ Schaut zu wie wir das auf YouTube machen hier: https://youtu.be/zpQnI40xN04

In this post we are going to go into detail on how to prepare a piping bag to pipe buttercream with. First off, it's helpful to have piping bags around if you're planning on piping. They're not that expensive. I buy them by the hundred. However, if you've never piped before and don't happen to have any piping bags, you can use a regular plastic freezer bag. Just make sure that they are as heavy duty as possible. The one I show here didn't last long.  In order to use a piping bag, you need a hole in the end. It doesn't actually come with a hole. You have to cut one with a pair of scissors. Just snip off an end that is large enough for whatever you want to get through to peek it's tip out without falling out of the bag completely. Here you can see a coupler. That's an adapter that allows you to use more than one piping tip with the same piping bag. That's helpful if you want to use the same color buttercream with more than one tip. However, ...

I decided I needed to address an issue. My YouTube videos are in both English and German. But my blog posts are only in English. Some people wonder why that is. Well... there is a reason. I started American Baker in Germany as a blog. But my written German is a point where every little flaw is painfully obvious. I make a lot of mistakes when writing, particularly in the arena of der/die/das. Which article is correct? Nominative, accusative, dative, genetive? Which case? Did I use that word correctly, or does that sound antiquated? How should I know? Basically because German is not my first language I don't feel confident enough to communicate how I made the cakes in the written word. That being said, I actually speak the language pretty well. Most people don't even hear my accent, or if they do, they don't mention it. I've lived in the country for ten years now. I didn't want to have a YouTube channel I couldn't have my neighbors watch. I mean, how awkwar...

While planning for my next commission, the possibility of making the cake be a surprise inside came up. My friend I'm making the cake for was excited about the possibility. So, I thought I'd go over the surprise inside process. It's kind of fun, I think, especially since it's a change to the standards. And it can have a very dramatic effect. So just in case you didn't know what a surprise inside is, it's a shape that is a contrasting color to most of the cake that you can't see from the outside that surprises you when you cut into the cake. This is what we were going for.  I started off with two recipes of my vanilla cake.  I wanted both cakes to be the same bright, stunning green, so I dyed both recipes together with lots of green food coloring.  I baked both recipes in a ten inch round cake pan until they were done. True confessions: I actually overbaked the second and slightly deeper one. See below for how bad it was. But I knew I was mainly in...