Guiness chocolate princess cake

Tips on making a princess cake + a pop up announcement!

Hello NYC! I will be doing a very rare (my first ever NYC-based) pop up

TOMORROW and I would love to see you!

• Where: Asano’s UES location at Sandro’s (322 E 86th)

• When: I’ll be there from ~8am-11:30am unless I sell out earlier.

• What: I’ll be baking and selling slices of olive oil pistachio yuzu cake, miso chocolate chip cookies and rosemary honey butter sourdough focaccia.

And if you can’t make it tomorrow, I’m doing another pop up at Asano’s West Village location next Friday 3/13 (at The Noortwyck, 289 Bleecker), same time but with a completely different menu. I would absolutely love to see you! I’m lowkey nervous no one will show up so please tell your friends 😅

And now onto the princess cake recipe. This is my first ever princess cake, an item that’s lived on my bucket list to make for years. I love princess cake (Schubert’s has my favorite slice in SF) not only because it feels tied to my namesake but the layers! I love marzipan, I love jam and I love lots of cake layers so this cake speaks to me on a spiritual level.

I do also love chocolate cake. And there’s nothing like a brand partnership deadline to bring a bucket list concept into reality (the upcoming video is sponsored, but this post is not). So! My first princess cake turned out to be an unexpectedly untraditional Guinness chocolate princess cake. And it turned out SO DELICIOUS; I was really thrilled with the final result.

I had a lot of questions throughout the process of making this, so I thought I’d document the process for anyone attempting a princess cake in the future.

Picking the Cake

To me, a green princess cake around St. Paddy’s made with a Guinness chocolate cake just makes sense. But if you don’t like Guinness, you can also use any chocolate cake recipe you like—Ina Garten was the winner of my chocolate cake bake off and is an easy and reliable base.

After reviewing the options in the Guinness chocolate cake bake off, I chose to use The Rose Wife’s recipe as the base for a few reasons:

• The winner (Sally’s Baking Addiction) calls for reducing Guinness and I simply didn’t have the patience.

• One of my favorites (Inquiring Chef) is eggless and thus extremely tender and less structurally stable.

I thought The Rose Wife would be the best balance of delicious and tender but also structurally sound, so I halved the recipe to make a single 8” layer.

It’s a bit of a fussy recipe, so here a few substitution options:

• Cake flour: I think you can definitely use all all-purpose flour instead of all-purpose + cake if you don’t already have cake flour on hand. You can swap 3 tbsp of AP flour to mimic cake flour.

• Half and half: You can definitely sub in half cream, half water if you have that on hand. Or simply use whole milk—it will be fine!

• 1.5 eggs (for a half recipe): You can use 1.5 eggs (for the 1/2 egg, measure out 25g of egg into the recipe and use the other half in another recipe or in an egg wash). OR you can use 1 egg and 1 egg yolk, as I’ve written the recipe below.

The Fillings

• Pastry cream: I used Nea’s recipe but added 1/2 tsp clear pandan extract. Very straightforward!

• Jam: I used a storebought raspberry jam. Even more straightforward!

• Whipped cream: A conundrum. I simply could not believe that softly whipped cream would stand up to the weight of a marzipan blanket (as seen in Nea’s and Cecilia’s recipes). Or rather, I didn’t trust myself to sense when the whipped cream was sturdy enough.
  
  So I studied up on how to stabilize whipped cream (the food processor method, who knew?) and while I originally planned to do a mascarpone whipped cream for stability, I ran out of time to actually procure said mascarpone. So I just added a few tbsp of Greek yogurt to the whipped cream and it worked well! The cream was soft, but definitely stable enough to hold up the marzipan.

The Marzipan

I love to make homemade almond paste instead of buying expensive storebought marzipan, but I wasn’t sure if it would work in this application. I was happy to see Cecilia used a similar recipe to my method, and I just swapped in water instead of egg whites. I used Cecilia’s ratios, but scaled down 25% (and still ended up with a decent amount of excess marzipan).

This method definitely worked, but I think my handiwork needs some refining (there were lots of folds and cracks). As I mention below, storebought almond paste might be better for your first time making princess cake.

Her original recipe:

• 400g almond flour

• 300g powdered sugar

• 2 egg whites

• Green and red food coloring

What I used:

• 300g almond flour

• 225g powdered sugar

• ~3 tbsp water

• 1/2 tsp almond extract

• 1/2 tsp colored pandan extract

• 1/4 tsp clear pandan extract

I had two types of pandan extract on hand and thought it would be fun to use them for both coloring the marzipan and flavoring it. I used about 1/2 tsp of colored pandan extract and 1/4 tsp of clear pandan extract—but next time, I’d reverse the ratios for a lighter green color.

If you don’t have pandan extract, you can simply omit it and use almond or vanilla extract instead along with green food coloring!

Method

As far as I can tell, there are two main ways of assembling princess cake:

• Free form assembly (used by Nea and Cecilia): You build the cake from the base up and then drape marzipan over the domed shape.

• Bowl flipping method (as seen by Ryan Nordheimer): You build the cake upside down in a bowl, then flip it.

I texted Ryan to ask how his method went and he said his first cake stuck so much that he had to redo it (note that he used a mascarpone whipped cream which should be more stable than Nea and Cecilia’s plain whipped cream):

I also had my misgivings that my whipped cream would be strong enough to withstand an entire cake being stacked on top before being flipped. So in the end I went with the free form assembly method and I feel like this was the right choice.

My cake looked a little sloppy, but that was mostly due to cracks in the marzipan. Stability-wise, it held up perfectly.

Learnings for Next Time

• Marzipan: I talked to Nea right after making this cake and she said she highly recommends using storebought marzipan because it’s somehow stretchier whereas homemade versions tend to crack. Next time, I’d either opt for storebought OR try the more complicated homemade marzipan linked in King Arthur’s princess cake recipe because I suspect this cooking process introduces more stretch.

• Coloring the marzipan: Start with adding less food coloring rather than more! There’s no gluten in the marzipan so you can’t overwork it.

• Rolling out the marzipan: It’s a tricky balance between rolling it out thin enough so that it tastes nice but thick enough so that it doesn’t rip. I think my layer was a bit thick—I’d aim for about 3/8” unless you feel confident working with an even thinner layer. Use plenty of powdered sugar to prevent it from sticking! An offset spatula works well to help lift up any areas that do stick to your work counter.

• Whipped cream: In retrospect, the stability of the whipped cream doesn’t matter as much if you’re planning to consume the cake right away. But for next time, I’d still plan to stabilize it with a few tbsp of mascarpone or creme fraiche, ideally

• Dust the top with powdered sugar: I forgot this step! Don’t forget it—it looks so cute.

Okay, the world is now our oyster when it comes to princess cakes! I have so many ideas for different cake/pastry cream/jam/whipped cream flavors now. Let me know if you give this a try 👑