**The Art of Cake Soaking: A Game-Changer for Layer Cakes**

When it comes to layer cakes, soaking is often an overlooked step that can make or break the final product. In this article, we'll delve into the world of cake soaking and explore the basics, benefits, and techniques involved in achieving perfectly soaked layers.

**Minimal Ingredients, Maximum Impact**

The beauty of cake soaking lies in its simplicity. With just a few basic ingredients, you can transform your layer cake from bland to grand. For our vanilla milk soak, we require only three ingredients: whole milk, granulated sugar, and vanilla extract. The process is straightforward – combine the ingredients in a small saucepan and heat it gently until the sugar dissolves. This creates a sweet, creamy liquid that will infuse your white cake with a subtle flavor and moisture.

**Inspired by Sweetened Milk Drinks**

Our vanilla milk soak takes inspiration from popular sweetened milk drinks, like strawberry or chocolate milk. We're not trying to recreate an exact replica, but rather add our own twist to create something unique. The result is a liquid that's both familiar and exciting, making it perfect for adding flavor to your white cake.

**A Second Soak: Coconut Milk Magic**

For our second soak, we're introducing coconut milk into the mix. This dairy-free alternative brings its own set of benefits, including added moisture, richness, and a hint of tropical flavor. We combine one can of unsweetened coconut milk with granulated sugar, kosher salt, and vanilla extract in a small saucepan. Warming it over low heat dissolves the sugar, creating a velvety-smooth liquid that's perfect for soaking our white cake layers.

**The Art of Applying Soak: A Delicate Touch**

Applying soak to your layer cake is an art form that requires finesse and patience. Using a pastry brush, we gently dab the liquid onto the surface of each layer, working in sections to ensure even coverage. The key is not to overdo it – one gentle pass around the surface should be sufficient. Over-soaking can lead to a weak, soggy cake that's prone to breaking apart.

**The Consequences of Over-Soaking**

Over-soaking is a common mistake that can have disastrous consequences. When too much liquid is applied, the sponge becomes weighed down and loses its structural integrity. This leads to a broken or disintegrating cake, making it impossible to stack or decorate. By gauging your soak carefully and applying just the right amount of pressure, you'll achieve perfectly soaked layers that are both tender and cohesive.

**Frosting: The Final Touch**

With our layer cakes now soaked and filled, it's time to move on to the final stage – frosting. Stay tuned for our upcoming article where we'll explore three different types of frosting perfect for layer cakes. From classic buttercream to creamy cream cheese, we'll cover it all, so you can create the ultimate show-stopping dessert.

By mastering the art of cake soaking, you'll take your layer cakes from bland to grand, adding a level of complexity and sophistication that's sure to impress. With just a few simple ingredients and a delicate touch, you can transform your baking skills and become a master cake artist. So go ahead, give it a try – your next layer cake will thank you!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmoistness sounds like a scary movie yeah i know from listening like the happening we were supposed to believe that mark wahlberg was a science teacher welcome to episode 2 of ba's baking school layer cake edition today we're focusing on fillings and soaks those components that are in the interior of the cake so you see this beautiful layer cake you slice into it and there's kind of a surprise inside if you think you don't need a soak or a filling in your cake i'm going to show you why actually you do why do we need layer cake fillings and what is a filling so this is a slice of our white cake with no filling at all you can see it is cake on cake on cake on cake it's boring it's just all one texture and the amount of cake is just kind of overwhelming i don't really want to eat this see how i get a bite with all six layers oh good cake i don't not like it but i would much rather have this same cake but this time with our toasted coconut caramel filling cause there's so much more going on even after the cake kind of disappears you're still kind of chewing on the caramel so much more interesting you get lots of textural variation in every bite all these different flavors cake needs this accompaniment i really like cake but i don't want to eat this much of it each one of our layer cakes has its own distinct filling so here's what those fillings are the filling in our birthday cake is whipped milk chocolate ganache we have two layers of it in between the three cakes the reason i like using the whipped milk chocolate ganache is because it's a nice counterpoint to everything else going on in the cake the filling inside of our coconut cake is a toasted coconut caramel it has such a great chewy texture and this is the component that packs a lot of the coconut flavor the filling in our carrot cake is a vanilla pineapple compote with rum you can barely even see it because i've spread it in such a thin layer it's very intense in flavor and i don't want to overpower the cake so even though you can't really see the vanilla pineapple filling what you are seeing is an extra layer of our classic cream cheese frosting which you'll see in the next episode so to make all the fillings you're going to need a few tools mixing bowls different sizes heat proof various size saucepans very nice and small cutting board some heat proof spatulas small offset spatula my favorite tool a whisk a blender a hand mixer this house is not a blender it's not a blender it's a hand mixer we're making ganache oh excellent do you do you know is that the definition of ganache ganache uh no why don't you just tell them melted chocolate with milk in it or something this is pretty close just cream and chocolate basically an equal weight we're going to whip this and have it be a filling for our yellow cake since you're doing cakes uh-huh can you do the one where they make the cupcake in the ice cream cone oh my god i love those i made those for my birthday when i turned 28. yeah perfect it was 20 years after the last time i had them should make that yeah and put some ganache in it there you go so what is ganache again you said the definition equal weights chocolate and heavy cream melted together equal weights uh-huh okay that's it and then sometimes you add a little butter it's a great filling because it's soft at room temperature but it also is whippable so today we're gonna whip it and then it sets up a little bit well with it good clear here are the ingredients that you need to make the milk chocolate ganache heavy cream kosher salt milk chocolate discs and unsalted butter i'm not heating up the ingredients together i'm only heating the cream if i did it together chocolate's very temperature sensitive and i risk scorching it or burning it also add my little bit of salt all right bringing this over to the stove so i'm going to take this off once i start to see little bubbles around the sides cream will also boil over you don't want that to happen see it's starting to bubble up just a little bit around the edges okay so i'm going to use the heat from the cream to gently melt the chocolate and i am going to let this sit for several minutes okay i'm going to start stirring i think everything's had a chance to melt so this will all come together into a beautiful sort of like semi-liquid mixture with a really glossy smooth consistency i love chocolate milk the mixture is completely smooth but it's still warm only once it's room temperature i'm going to incorporate my butter which is also room temperature so a good rule of thumb for a lot of pastry kind of preparations is you want things to either be exactly the same temperature or vastly different temperatures it's important that for these things to incorporate evenly that they're both thoroughly room temp the ganache has cooled down a lot you can see it's starting to thicken a lot i'm at that stage where i want to whip in the butter i don't want to put this in a blender or even in a stand mixer i like the control of the hand mixer so i can really keep an eye on it because there's a very specific end point that i want to take this too i know that i'm done not only when it's a bit thicker but the surface texture will turn a little bit so that shine will go away and it'll turn matte it's quite a dramatic transformation from that very liquidy ganache that we formed in the beginning so good so this came together really quickly with very few ingredients we had our chocolate in a bowl and poured the hot cream over top let everything sit until the chocolate was melted i stirred it until smooth and then let everything come up to room temperature then i added the butter and whipped it together until it held soft piece okay now i'm going to move on to my other two fillings for the white cake and the carrot cake so the white cake is going to transform into a coconut layer cake and so for that one we're making a coconut caramel it's a very very tight solid caramel that i make with coconut oil to give it extra coconut flavor here are the ingredients you need to make the coconut caramel filling granulated sugar heavy cream virgin coconut oil kosher salt and toasted finely shredded coconut okay so all the ingredients here i'm going to build the caramel on the stove and it's a dry caramel which means i'm cooking just sugar in the pot with no water so i'm going to take my heavy cream and sugar over there and then i'll come back and stir everything else together can you define caramel as caramelized sugar if caramelized comes from the word caramel i don't think so so caramel is essentially sugar cooked to the point where all of the water has been driven off i'm waiting for the first little bits of sugar to start to melt so it'll go from white to sort of a clear liquid focus right where the end of the spatula is and it's going to start to go clear and then i'm going to progressively add more sugar on top of the melted sugar starting to incorporate i have a couple layers of sugar in here and it's melting faster around the sides so i'm going to start to bring the melted sugar into the middle you can see it's also taking on a little bit of color red eyes smell the heavy cream sorry i didn't use the little i didn't use the dish which i should have used sorry i'll clean it up i'm still working to dissolve some of the larger pieces of sugar but it's taking on nice color i'm gonna take it pretty far in terms of the color because the darker you go the more you develop some of those bitter notes which i really like so it'll add i think a lot of complexity and now i'm going to kill the heat slowly add my heavy cream so there's my caramel normally with caramel i would add butter in addition to my heavy cream but instead of butter i'm adding coconut oil so this is going to give i think a really nice coconut flavor to the caramel and it will also help it solidify room temp this will tighten up quite a bit as it cools i don't want a thin filling because that creates all kinds of issues when you go to construct the final cake what would happen if the filling that you made is too thin i made this batch of caramel a little bit differently more like a caramel sauce rather than a filling so it's pretty liquid and a little runny so we want to see what happens when we use a filling with this consistency in between the layers i'll put it on not a whole lot i'm spreading it around not even to the very edge and now here's the problem when more layers go on top and everything compresses there's some ooze when you go to frost it the filling mixes into the frosting thins out the frosting make sure that you can't get any coverage around the layers and it basically turns into a very huge frustrating mess so if you think your filling is too thin or you're not sure don't just plow ahead and hope for the best you have to kind of course correct and maybe start over with your filling but if you're going for a naked cake that could be kind of cool so all depends on what you're going for all right this is looking very beautiful and now i'm ready to add my last ingredient which is this finely shredded toasted coconut if i were to add big coconut flakes then those would get in the way again i want to keep the texture of the fillings pretty fine kind of has a samoa vibe the the girl scout cookie it sets up so solid that it might be necessary for me to rewarm it but i'd rather have a filling that was solid at room temp rather than liquid okay i should taste it though right it's so good i love the texture of the coconut it makes it a little bit chewy i think it's really the perfect kind of balance of salty sweet kind of bittersweet delicious so for the coconut caramel i cooked the sugar in a large saucepan over medium-high heat using the dry caramel method then i took it off the heat and stirred in heavy cream little by little until smooth then i brought it back over to the workstation stirred in kosher salt followed by merging coconut oil a tablespoon at a time then i folded in the toasted finely shredded coconut now i'm going to move on to the filling for the carrot cake which is going to be a pineapple vanilla compost some people put crushed pineapple from a can in their carrot cake i am not a fan of that but i like the idea of incorporating kind of a fresh acidic fruit element the compound is basically a very reduced thick like cooked fruit mixture and not overly sweet so it's a really nice sort of bright complement to the cake here's what you need to make the vanilla pineapple compote filling chopped fresh pineapple dark rum a pinch kosher salt sugar and the seeds from one scraped vanilla bean i need a pound of chopped pineapple flesh you know what pineapple has like with a papillae the enzyme that breaks down meat and i've definitely eaten so much pineapple in one sitting that like it because i took off the skin on my tongue anyway just slice out the core which then i like to snack on even though it's kind of tough a little fiber i have a blender here i'm going to blend everything together so you don't have to make perfect slices and it doesn't really matter how big they are the reason that we're blending it is because i don't want to put really large pieces of a filling inside the cake because when you go to slice the cake it's going to be hard to cut through if i have big pieces of it in between the layers spice rum alcoholic beverage halfway to a pina colada it's a little frothy now but the idea is that the whole thing is going to cook down into kind of a thick almost like apple butter consistency and i'm not adding sugar yet because it really depends on the sweetness of your pineapple how much sugar you want to add now i'm going to go over to the stove and start to reduce it of all the fillings that we're using this one is definitely the loosest in consistency we all remember what happens when your filling is a little too thin so this has to come up it'll start bubbling and boiling and then i'll turn it down the water goes away everything thickens the flavors concentrate the sugars concentrate i'm going to skim some of the foam off which can make the mixture a little bit cloudy all the foam has come off the surface now and i'm going to go ahead and add my sugar and also my vanilla bean a vanilla bean is very it packs a lot of punch i try not to cut all the way through both sides but i kind of did and then use the back of the knife to scrape these are all the seeds that are going to go in and i'm also going to add the whole bean because there's still flavor in the pod you can get great flavor from pure vanilla extract but there's really no replacement for the seeds which have just the most incredible like floral vanilla flavor so sugar the pot and the seeds i love when you can see all the little speckles from the vanilla bean in the mixture so i'm just going to let this continue to reduce i basically want all the water gone so here is this pineapple mixture that's been fully reduced you can see that it has kind of the texture of like a thick apple sauce and all of the alcohol in the rum has burned off so what we have is just sort of a nice like rum essence that's perfuming the mixture so this looks good i'm ready to take it off the heat i'm just gonna put some plastic over it and let it cool for the pineapple vanilla compote in a blender i combined the pineapple rum and a pinch of salt blended that until completely smooth then i transferred it to a medium saucepan and cooked it over high skimming the foam until reduced then i added the seeds from one scraped vanilla bean plus the pod and sugar to sweeten and cooked it until thick like apple butter so here are all the fillings so even though it's on top of these slices they are really going to be in between the layers on the final cake now we're ready to move on to soaks right now i want to illustrate why we use a soap when we build our layer cake so i have two pieces of cake here side by side this is cake that's a couple days old so it's dried out quite a bit we're gonna keep one slice plain and one slice i'm going to saturate the top with some soap that we have right here oh a meal yes claire do you know what a soak is i mean i think in the cup in the context of a layer cake no no i don't i don't yeah you do can you come up with a definition that doesn't use the word in the definition to submerge something in a liquid such that it absorbs a certain amount of said liquid that's mostly true although it's not really this emerging part we more like douse so anyway so it's really more of a douse it's more of a douse or a drench you ever call it a dress yeah but we don't want it to be saturated we want to lightly moisturize the cake the moistening the moistening yeah you can call it a moisten okay really you want to let the soap actually like absorb through the cake but we don't have time for that so just carry on better the moistening to you thanks a meal you can go away now fortunately of all the many components in a layer cake the soaks are kind of the easiest part to assemble so i'm going to put together two different kinds and show you how and we're going to use one for the yellow cake one for the white cake here's what you need to make your soaks it's pretty minimal a spatula and a small saucepan sorry here's what you need to make the vanilla milk soak whole milk granulated sugar vanilla extract and kosher salt the process for the soaks couldn't be simpler i'm just combining all the ingredients and heating it gently until i dissolve the sugar so again i'm doing vanilla milk kind of inspired by like the sweetened milk drinks that are popular with kids i don't know if that is that a thing do kids drink sweetened milk like strawberry milk was a thing when i was a kid strawberry milk obviously chocolate milk is my favorite vanilla milk is a thing right so this is already done that's it so this came together really fast all it was was milk sugar vanilla and a pinch of salt brought together so that the sugar dissolved and now i'm gonna move on to my second soak for the white cake so here's what you'll need to make the coconut milk soak one can coconut milk granulated sugar kosher salt and vanilla extract i'm gonna use the opportunity of the soak which will permeate the layers to introduce some coconut flavor into the white cake so it's very similar to the silk for the yellow cake but using coconut milk instead everybody into the pool so i like the coconut milk for a couple reasons one there's a lot of fat in it so it's adding moisture and richness to the cake and also because i want a coconut cake to have lots of different kinds of coconut so we have it in the filling and in the soak and we're going to incorporate it into the decorations as well and we're done so it has a nice sort of viscosity this is actually it for the soaks we're not gonna do a third soak for the carrot cake because the cake is oil based it's already super moist and it just doesn't need it so to make the coconut milk soap we combined one can of unsweetened coconut milk vanilla and sugar and a pinch of kosher salt and a small saucepan warmed it over the stove just to dissolve the sugar and then let it cool so now i'm going to demo the best technique for applying the soap to the top of the cake here's what i'll need to soak the cakes one pastry brush okay so this is a yellow cake from i don't really know when it's from because frankly there's been so much cake around i've lost track but i'm going to show you kind of the proper technique for soaking a layer you really only want to soak layers that are cut so if i were to try to soak the cake without having trimmed the top like this the soap will not penetrate as easily in to the crumb and that's what i want i think the key here is not dragging the brush over the cake because that kind of makes crumbs so i'm just going to do a dabbing motion and i want to be generous but really only kind of go once around the reason i'm only going once around and not re-soaking any areas that i previously soaked is because it's possible to over soak which has some pretty negative consequences what would happen if you over soaked a cake layer so instead of just going around the surface with the brush one time i'm gonna go over it several times and we'll see what happens just like start pouring it all over the whole thing i should just do that it's faster you have to sort of know how many times you've been over because it's not going to stop absorbing once it has enough soak in it okay see what happens i try to lift it up all right okay the whole thing just comes apart the soap weakens the sponge and weighs it down and then you basically get this kind of breaking apart mess and there's no structural integrity so you can't stack it or put anything else on top of it so don't do that you'd have to obviously add quite a bit of soak to get to that point but rule of thumb one time across the surface that's it and also you can gauge the absorption a two day old cake could use a little more soak than a fresh cake it's just it's just wet i don't like it what sponge cake makes me think of wet sponge which is gross like a dish sponge okay too much soak means you end up with a cake that basically disintegrates don't do this so hopefully this opened your eyes to the possibilities for soaks when you're making your layer cake it can be a great opportunity to introduce new flavor and also be a real life saver if you accidentally over bake your layers and they're kind of dried out from the start so we've done our layers we did soaks and fillings there's one thing missing arguably the most important thing and that's frosting so keep watching for the next episode when we tackle three different kinds of frosting for our three layer cakes youmoistness sounds like a scary movie yeah i know from listening like the happening we were supposed to believe that mark wahlberg was a science teacher welcome to episode 2 of ba's baking school layer cake edition today we're focusing on fillings and soaks those components that are in the interior of the cake so you see this beautiful layer cake you slice into it and there's kind of a surprise inside if you think you don't need a soak or a filling in your cake i'm going to show you why actually you do why do we need layer cake fillings and what is a filling so this is a slice of our white cake with no filling at all you can see it is cake on cake on cake on cake it's boring it's just all one texture and the amount of cake is just kind of overwhelming i don't really want to eat this see how i get a bite with all six layers oh good cake i don't not like it but i would much rather have this same cake but this time with our toasted coconut caramel filling cause there's so much more going on even after the cake kind of disappears you're still kind of chewing on the caramel so much more interesting you get lots of textural variation in every bite all these different flavors cake needs this accompaniment i really like cake but i don't want to eat this much of it each one of our layer cakes has its own distinct filling so here's what those fillings are the filling in our birthday cake is whipped milk chocolate ganache we have two layers of it in between the three cakes the reason i like using the whipped milk chocolate ganache is because it's a nice counterpoint to everything else going on in the cake the filling inside of our coconut cake is a toasted coconut caramel it has such a great chewy texture and this is the component that packs a lot of the coconut flavor the filling in our carrot cake is a vanilla pineapple compote with rum you can barely even see it because i've spread it in such a thin layer it's very intense in flavor and i don't want to overpower the cake so even though you can't really see the vanilla pineapple filling what you are seeing is an extra layer of our classic cream cheese frosting which you'll see in the next episode so to make all the fillings you're going to need a few tools mixing bowls different sizes heat proof various size saucepans very nice and small cutting board some heat proof spatulas small offset spatula my favorite tool a whisk a blender a hand mixer this house is not a blender it's not a blender it's a hand mixer we're making ganache oh excellent do you do you know is that the definition of ganache ganache uh no why don't you just tell them melted chocolate with milk in it or something this is pretty close just cream and chocolate basically an equal weight we're going to whip this and have it be a filling for our yellow cake since you're doing cakes uh-huh can you do the one where they make the cupcake in the ice cream cone oh my god i love those i made those for my birthday when i turned 28. yeah perfect it was 20 years after the last time i had them should make that yeah and put some ganache in it there you go so what is ganache again you said the definition equal weights chocolate and heavy cream melted together equal weights uh-huh okay that's it and then sometimes you add a little butter it's a great filling because it's soft at room temperature but it also is whippable so today we're gonna whip it and then it sets up a little bit well with it good clear here are the ingredients that you need to make the milk chocolate ganache heavy cream kosher salt milk chocolate discs and unsalted butter i'm not heating up the ingredients together i'm only heating the cream if i did it together chocolate's very temperature sensitive and i risk scorching it or burning it also add my little bit of salt all right bringing this over to the stove so i'm going to take this off once i start to see little bubbles around the sides cream will also boil over you don't want that to happen see it's starting to bubble up just a little bit around the edges okay so i'm going to use the heat from the cream to gently melt the chocolate and i am going to let this sit for several minutes okay i'm going to start stirring i think everything's had a chance to melt so this will all come together into a beautiful sort of like semi-liquid mixture with a really glossy smooth consistency i love chocolate milk the mixture is completely smooth but it's still warm only once it's room temperature i'm going to incorporate my butter which is also room temperature so a good rule of thumb for a lot of pastry kind of preparations is you want things to either be exactly the same temperature or vastly different temperatures it's important that for these things to incorporate evenly that they're both thoroughly room temp the ganache has cooled down a lot you can see it's starting to thicken a lot i'm at that stage where i want to whip in the butter i don't want to put this in a blender or even in a stand mixer i like the control of the hand mixer so i can really keep an eye on it because there's a very specific end point that i want to take this too i know that i'm done not only when it's a bit thicker but the surface texture will turn a little bit so that shine will go away and it'll turn matte it's quite a dramatic transformation from that very liquidy ganache that we formed in the beginning so good so this came together really quickly with very few ingredients we had our chocolate in a bowl and poured the hot cream over top let everything sit until the chocolate was melted i stirred it until smooth and then let everything come up to room temperature then i added the butter and whipped it together until it held soft piece okay now i'm going to move on to my other two fillings for the white cake and the carrot cake so the white cake is going to transform into a coconut layer cake and so for that one we're making a coconut caramel it's a very very tight solid caramel that i make with coconut oil to give it extra coconut flavor here are the ingredients you need to make the coconut caramel filling granulated sugar heavy cream virgin coconut oil kosher salt and toasted finely shredded coconut okay so all the ingredients here i'm going to build the caramel on the stove and it's a dry caramel which means i'm cooking just sugar in the pot with no water so i'm going to take my heavy cream and sugar over there and then i'll come back and stir everything else together can you define caramel as caramelized sugar if caramelized comes from the word caramel i don't think so so caramel is essentially sugar cooked to the point where all of the water has been driven off i'm waiting for the first little bits of sugar to start to melt so it'll go from white to sort of a clear liquid focus right where the end of the spatula is and it's going to start to go clear and then i'm going to progressively add more sugar on top of the melted sugar starting to incorporate i have a couple layers of sugar in here and it's melting faster around the sides so i'm going to start to bring the melted sugar into the middle you can see it's also taking on a little bit of color red eyes smell the heavy cream sorry i didn't use the little i didn't use the dish which i should have used sorry i'll clean it up i'm still working to dissolve some of the larger pieces of sugar but it's taking on nice color i'm gonna take it pretty far in terms of the color because the darker you go the more you develop some of those bitter notes which i really like so it'll add i think a lot of complexity and now i'm going to kill the heat slowly add my heavy cream so there's my caramel normally with caramel i would add butter in addition to my heavy cream but instead of butter i'm adding coconut oil so this is going to give i think a really nice coconut flavor to the caramel and it will also help it solidify room temp this will tighten up quite a bit as it cools i don't want a thin filling because that creates all kinds of issues when you go to construct the final cake what would happen if the filling that you made is too thin i made this batch of caramel a little bit differently more like a caramel sauce rather than a filling so it's pretty liquid and a little runny so we want to see what happens when we use a filling with this consistency in between the layers i'll put it on not a whole lot i'm spreading it around not even to the very edge and now here's the problem when more layers go on top and everything compresses there's some ooze when you go to frost it the filling mixes into the frosting thins out the frosting make sure that you can't get any coverage around the layers and it basically turns into a very huge frustrating mess so if you think your filling is too thin or you're not sure don't just plow ahead and hope for the best you have to kind of course correct and maybe start over with your filling but if you're going for a naked cake that could be kind of cool so all depends on what you're going for all right this is looking very beautiful and now i'm ready to add my last ingredient which is this finely shredded toasted coconut if i were to add big coconut flakes then those would get in the way again i want to keep the texture of the fillings pretty fine kind of has a samoa vibe the the girl scout cookie it sets up so solid that it might be necessary for me to rewarm it but i'd rather have a filling that was solid at room temp rather than liquid okay i should taste it though right it's so good i love the texture of the coconut it makes it a little bit chewy i think it's really the perfect kind of balance of salty sweet kind of bittersweet delicious so for the coconut caramel i cooked the sugar in a large saucepan over medium-high heat using the dry caramel method then i took it off the heat and stirred in heavy cream little by little until smooth then i brought it back over to the workstation stirred in kosher salt followed by merging coconut oil a tablespoon at a time then i folded in the toasted finely shredded coconut now i'm going to move on to the filling for the carrot cake which is going to be a pineapple vanilla compost some people put crushed pineapple from a can in their carrot cake i am not a fan of that but i like the idea of incorporating kind of a fresh acidic fruit element the compound is basically a very reduced thick like cooked fruit mixture and not overly sweet so it's a really nice sort of bright complement to the cake here's what you need to make the vanilla pineapple compote filling chopped fresh pineapple dark rum a pinch kosher salt sugar and the seeds from one scraped vanilla bean i need a pound of chopped pineapple flesh you know what pineapple has like with a papillae the enzyme that breaks down meat and i've definitely eaten so much pineapple in one sitting that like it because i took off the skin on my tongue anyway just slice out the core which then i like to snack on even though it's kind of tough a little fiber i have a blender here i'm going to blend everything together so you don't have to make perfect slices and it doesn't really matter how big they are the reason that we're blending it is because i don't want to put really large pieces of a filling inside the cake because when you go to slice the cake it's going to be hard to cut through if i have big pieces of it in between the layers spice rum alcoholic beverage halfway to a pina colada it's a little frothy now but the idea is that the whole thing is going to cook down into kind of a thick almost like apple butter consistency and i'm not adding sugar yet because it really depends on the sweetness of your pineapple how much sugar you want to add now i'm going to go over to the stove and start to reduce it of all the fillings that we're using this one is definitely the loosest in consistency we all remember what happens when your filling is a little too thin so this has to come up it'll start bubbling and boiling and then i'll turn it down the water goes away everything thickens the flavors concentrate the sugars concentrate i'm going to skim some of the foam off which can make the mixture a little bit cloudy all the foam has come off the surface now and i'm going to go ahead and add my sugar and also my vanilla bean a vanilla bean is very it packs a lot of punch i try not to cut all the way through both sides but i kind of did and then use the back of the knife to scrape these are all the seeds that are going to go in and i'm also going to add the whole bean because there's still flavor in the pod you can get great flavor from pure vanilla extract but there's really no replacement for the seeds which have just the most incredible like floral vanilla flavor so sugar the pot and the seeds i love when you can see all the little speckles from the vanilla bean in the mixture so i'm just going to let this continue to reduce i basically want all the water gone so here is this pineapple mixture that's been fully reduced you can see that it has kind of the texture of like a thick apple sauce and all of the alcohol in the rum has burned off so what we have is just sort of a nice like rum essence that's perfuming the mixture so this looks good i'm ready to take it off the heat i'm just gonna put some plastic over it and let it cool for the pineapple vanilla compote in a blender i combined the pineapple rum and a pinch of salt blended that until completely smooth then i transferred it to a medium saucepan and cooked it over high skimming the foam until reduced then i added the seeds from one scraped vanilla bean plus the pod and sugar to sweeten and cooked it until thick like apple butter so here are all the fillings so even though it's on top of these slices they are really going to be in between the layers on the final cake now we're ready to move on to soaks right now i want to illustrate why we use a soap when we build our layer cake so i have two pieces of cake here side by side this is cake that's a couple days old so it's dried out quite a bit we're gonna keep one slice plain and one slice i'm going to saturate the top with some soap that we have right here oh a meal yes claire do you know what a soak is i mean i think in the cup in the context of a layer cake no no i don't i don't yeah you do can you come up with a definition that doesn't use the word in the definition to submerge something in a liquid such that it absorbs a certain amount of said liquid that's mostly true although it's not really this emerging part we more like douse so anyway so it's really more of a douse it's more of a douse or a drench you ever call it a dress yeah but we don't want it to be saturated we want to lightly moisturize the cake the moistening the moistening yeah you can call it a moisten okay really you want to let the soap actually like absorb through the cake but we don't have time for that so just carry on better the moistening to you thanks a meal you can go away now fortunately of all the many components in a layer cake the soaks are kind of the easiest part to assemble so i'm going to put together two different kinds and show you how and we're going to use one for the yellow cake one for the white cake here's what you need to make your soaks it's pretty minimal a spatula and a small saucepan sorry here's what you need to make the vanilla milk soak whole milk granulated sugar vanilla extract and kosher salt the process for the soaks couldn't be simpler i'm just combining all the ingredients and heating it gently until i dissolve the sugar so again i'm doing vanilla milk kind of inspired by like the sweetened milk drinks that are popular with kids i don't know if that is that a thing do kids drink sweetened milk like strawberry milk was a thing when i was a kid strawberry milk obviously chocolate milk is my favorite vanilla milk is a thing right so this is already done that's it so this came together really fast all it was was milk sugar vanilla and a pinch of salt brought together so that the sugar dissolved and now i'm gonna move on to my second soak for the white cake so here's what you'll need to make the coconut milk soak one can coconut milk granulated sugar kosher salt and vanilla extract i'm gonna use the opportunity of the soak which will permeate the layers to introduce some coconut flavor into the white cake so it's very similar to the silk for the yellow cake but using coconut milk instead everybody into the pool so i like the coconut milk for a couple reasons one there's a lot of fat in it so it's adding moisture and richness to the cake and also because i want a coconut cake to have lots of different kinds of coconut so we have it in the filling and in the soak and we're going to incorporate it into the decorations as well and we're done so it has a nice sort of viscosity this is actually it for the soaks we're not gonna do a third soak for the carrot cake because the cake is oil based it's already super moist and it just doesn't need it so to make the coconut milk soap we combined one can of unsweetened coconut milk vanilla and sugar and a pinch of kosher salt and a small saucepan warmed it over the stove just to dissolve the sugar and then let it cool so now i'm going to demo the best technique for applying the soap to the top of the cake here's what i'll need to soak the cakes one pastry brush okay so this is a yellow cake from i don't really know when it's from because frankly there's been so much cake around i've lost track but i'm going to show you kind of the proper technique for soaking a layer you really only want to soak layers that are cut so if i were to try to soak the cake without having trimmed the top like this the soap will not penetrate as easily in to the crumb and that's what i want i think the key here is not dragging the brush over the cake because that kind of makes crumbs so i'm just going to do a dabbing motion and i want to be generous but really only kind of go once around the reason i'm only going once around and not re-soaking any areas that i previously soaked is because it's possible to over soak which has some pretty negative consequences what would happen if you over soaked a cake layer so instead of just going around the surface with the brush one time i'm gonna go over it several times and we'll see what happens just like start pouring it all over the whole thing i should just do that it's faster you have to sort of know how many times you've been over because it's not going to stop absorbing once it has enough soak in it okay see what happens i try to lift it up all right okay the whole thing just comes apart the soap weakens the sponge and weighs it down and then you basically get this kind of breaking apart mess and there's no structural integrity so you can't stack it or put anything else on top of it so don't do that you'd have to obviously add quite a bit of soak to get to that point but rule of thumb one time across the surface that's it and also you can gauge the absorption a two day old cake could use a little more soak than a fresh cake it's just it's just wet i don't like it what sponge cake makes me think of wet sponge which is gross like a dish sponge okay too much soak means you end up with a cake that basically disintegrates don't do this so hopefully this opened your eyes to the possibilities for soaks when you're making your layer cake it can be a great opportunity to introduce new flavor and also be a real life saver if you accidentally over bake your layers and they're kind of dried out from the start so we've done our layers we did soaks and fillings there's one thing missing arguably the most important thing and that's frosting so keep watching for the next episode when we tackle three different kinds of frosting for our three layer cakes you\n"