The 2* Michelin Cake With Only 2 Elements

追加: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]The desserts at H's restaurants are famously difficult and intricate. All that is except one. This dessert is a great one to have in your repertoire because you can prepare it months in advance, have it in your back pocket, ready to go. This little dessert also teaches great lessons in cooking and in flavor. But before we start, a little warning. It is when finished about 50% butter. This is a stunner.

[00:00:27]Now, even though this dessert has just two elements, it requires a little bit of skill, but it is achievable by anyone at home. This is boozy. It's brilliant.

[00:00:35]The recipe is in the description. Today, we're making tipsy cake. For the bri itself, we have salt, milk, whole eggs, sugar, fresh yeast, butter, and flour.

[00:00:49]So, I'm just going to take a bit of the milk and break up the yeast in it. So, you kind of have a yeast slurry. It's much easier to do it this way. If you mix it all together, you're just going to get lumps and it's not going to break apart as well. There you go. Mix in the rest of the milk into the eggs. And then we're just going to mix that together.

[00:01:03]Now, we're going to sift our flour. You don't have to do this, but it's just good practice to do so. And you'll often end up with a lighter, smoother dough, even though by the end, you're probably going to mix it all in anyway. And to this flour, we're going to add our salt and sugar. You do have to use a stand mixer for this recipe because, as will become clear, with the amount of butter in it, if you try and use your hands, you're going to end up with a warm, slippery, oily mess, and that's not going to be any good for anything. So, use a stand mixer, do it quickly, and we'll be in good hands. Our flour, salt, and sugar in here. And then what we need to do is add our egg mixture into this and knead it until we get a lovely stretchable dough. So when you're starting out, just put it on a slow speed just so nothing's kind of flying everywhere. So this is on five or six out of 10. You probably go to seven. And you want to leave that to knead for up to 10 minutes. But if you're doing this for the first time, keep an eye on it cuz you just want to make sure you don't go too far. But the most likely thing is that we're going to need to knead it a little bit more than what the first 10 minutes is going to give us. So the butter will need to be at room temperature, which will help it to emulsify into the dough when we get to that step. We can see the dough starting to get a bit of structure, but that's nowhere near where it needs to be. So it just kind of separates and falls apart quite easily. So we need to keep that going for a little bit longer. This is probably the only step that can actually trip us up. So all we need to make sure is that the dough has the correct structure and then we're going to have lovely fluffy dough balls in the finished dessert. So we'll show you how it should look before you start with the rest of it. You're looking for that nice window pane. So it's almost stretching so you can start to see through it. Just like that. We've got 60 g of egg left from our original amount and that's going to go into this next. I'm not entirely clear why you don't just add it all at the start, but the recipe is the recipe. I'm going to question nothing.

[00:02:49]Be patient and let it do its thing.

[00:02:51]Right, this dough has now come together with the extra egg. So, now we can start to emulsify in the butter. This butter is at room temperature. And that's quite important because you want it to really slowly melt and emulsify into the dough.

[00:03:02]And you just want to add this in a cube at a time until all of the butter is incorporated. So, this is what it starts to look like when it's all emulsified in. It's really soft, pillowy, buttery, shiny, and gorgeous. All right, so that's the dough finished. All we need to do now is put it in the fridge overnight. Part of the reason we need to cool it down is that this is impossible to work with. Like, if you try to roll that into 12 g balls, which is what we're going to do, it's going to stick to your hands. You're not going to be able to shape it, and it's going to be an absolute mess. So, in the fridge.

[00:03:33]Now, unusually, this step is probably not that necessary given the huge amount of butter in basically everything else, but I don't like to take chances. All right, so when the dough has been in the fridge overnight, cut it into bat-ons.

[00:03:43]Now, it's very important that you keep this cold when you're working with it.

[00:03:47]Otherwise, the butter will melt and it will just get stuck in your hands. So, the reason why it's good to do that is because you can almost cut them to 12 g by eye, so you're not like messing around trying to work out how much you need. Just quickly roll them into a ball shape. Just put them on a tray and we'll cool them down a bit more before the next step. So for a little pot of 10 cm, we need seven balls of 12 g. These have just come out of the freezer, so they're much easier to work with. I can hold them, roll them a little bit. These are just going to go into the butter and then into the sugar and then into the pots. We can do this in a batch, so we can just like put them in here, roll them around, roll these. Similarly, when you get them to this stage, so we've got a dough ball at 12 g rolled in butter and then rolled in sugar. You can freeze this. So, put them in a little box layer by layer, separate them out, and have these balls frozen ready for that night where you've got some friends coming around with a short relatively short notice. So, you will take these out of the freezer, assemble them in your cacot or your ramkin, and then you leave them to prove and then bake them off and they will come to life and they'll be as if you never froze them. So, this is a great great dessert to get ahead on. Put one in the middle and put these around the edge like so. Just going to make two more cuz we're going to do a little experiment with the cream. So, these are just going to stay out at room temperature to prove. Now, you can't speed these up really because if you try and heat these above room temperature, you're in danger of melting the butter on the surface. And if you do that, the sugar and the crust is just going to kind of melt away into the bottom of the bowl, which is not what you want. You want to wait for them to double in size and for the sugar to crack. So, that's the first element, and now we need to make the second element. And it's really, really easy. Literally, all we're doing is mixing some ingredients.

[00:05:28]But a lot of the magic for this dessert comes from this cream. So, we're going to break that down in a minute after we've made this. The recipe asked for golden and dera sugar. I haven't got golden caster sugar, so I'm just going to use normal caster sugar. Some vanilla brandy, and some sorts, which is a dessert wine. And we're just going to gently heat this mixture to dissolve all the sugar. Now, when I'm making this myself, I love to use a bit of citrus.

[00:05:51]So, I always put in a bit of lemon, lime, and orange zest. Now, this cream by itself, as it is, is is drinkable in my opinion. It's absolutely delicious.

[00:05:59]What is it about this element that brings so much magic to the dessert?

[00:06:03]Well, let's talk about the chemistry of cooking, but at a level that we can all understand. So, in this cream are fats, proteins, and sugars. And when it reduces under heat, when the water evaporates and it starts to concentrate, proteins and sugars can react with each other. And in doing so, you get something that is toasty, is sweet, is caramelized, roasted, and nutty. It tastes a bit like burnt butter. We produce probably thousands of new aromomas in the cream. Now I believe that for us to find something delicious it has to be perceived as complex and that usually means it has to be chemically complex which by heating this cream and reducing it we achieve.

[00:06:51]Now this is already starting to smell quite nutty and I imagine so you can see on the base as I scrape it away there's some milk solids that are caramelizing on the base. Now, I've turned the power down so it's not such a hot temperature on the bottom. So, I don't want to burn it, but I still want to keep this cream reducing. And you can see how it's really starting to thicken. And there will be an enormous complexity of aromomas and flavors that are now produced in this cream because of how we've cooked it. And this is what happens in the bottom of the dessert.

[00:07:22]Now, this this is one of my favorite things because it tastes like burnt butter, but it's a lot more versatile.

[00:07:27]And you can put this into soup bases or into purees or even into sauces. Now, we've got a few other videos on the ideas around this that you can check out below. One is on flavor pairing and another is on how great chefs build flavor. And it's by doing things like this where we take an ingredient and we amp up its complexity and in doing so help us to make things with more flavor.

[00:07:48]But this cream also has alcohol in. And it's important that we talk about that and what these bring to the dish. So, you know, these two alcohols are already complex and delicious by themselves. And when we add that to the cream and cook it down, that's almost like layering flavors again where we're adding complexity at each stage where we can.

[00:08:06]And it just ends up with a dessert that is just for something that's so simple with just two elements. It's absolutely mind-blowing how delicious it is. And having cooked it in three restaurants that I've worked in, the response to it is so often just, "What the hell is this?" Like, I don't know what you've made. I don't know what it is, but it's absolutely delicious. And it's deceptively simple. There's not many elements, but there's a huge amount of complexity, and it's because of the way the cream cooks down and because of the alcohol that we put in it. At the restaurant, they'll cook these in a deck oven, which basically means that the surface that they're cooking on is incredibly hot. We can achieve a similar effect by either using a pizza stone or you can use any other pan that you've got at home because you're still going to get heat going into that base if you put this in the oven first. Right. So, these have been proving now for just over 4 hours. And the two things that you want to look for to know that they're ready to go in is that there's no space between the balls. So each one is kind of expanded to fill the space between the ones next to it. And also if you look on the surface of these, we've got cracks. All right. So the oven's preheated to 180. I'm going to put these in for 10 to 15 minutes. I'm going to show you the kind of color that you want to look for before you take them out for the first time cuz these are going to come out of the oven three times and then go back in as we put more and more cream on them and let it reduce and cook. This is a really special cake.

[00:09:26]So, this is the first 15 minutes and what we need to do now is to separate all of the little balls from each other cuz what we're going to do is pour the cream down the sides. So, you want to put about two teaspoons of cream over it. I'm just going to do it by eye.

[00:09:46]So, that's one. So, the first two had the brandy cream, and this one's just going to have the normal cream.

[00:09:53]All right. So, that's been the first 5 minutes. So, we're going to take them out and repeat the process. So, I like just to separate them again just to make sure that the cream's getting to everywhere it needs to go. So, it's a bit less cream for the next one. So you just want a tablespoon.

[00:10:08]So they're in for five more minutes.

[00:10:09]Then they're going to come out, have one last lot of cream, and then back in for the final 5 minutes. So if I was to do this at home for a dinner party or for friends or guests or whatever, I would cook it for 15 minutes, add the cream, put it in for another 5 minutes, add the cream, put it in for 5 minutes, and then I'd put it to one side. And when it came to kneading dessert, it would then get the final amount of cream, and then put in the oven probably for about 7 to 8 minutes. And by that time, you're going to be ready to go. It's going to be delicious. And that's it. In front of me in the middle is the one that was cooked with brandy, but was on the wire rack.

[00:10:44]This is the one that was cooked with brandy cream, but was on the stone. And this is the one cooked with cream, no brandy on the stone. So, these two are more heavily caramelized as we expected because they had more heat going into the base. The brandy one is a bit wetter. The extra wetness has just given it a really nice gloss. I think if I was to do it again, I would have gone for maybe a minute less on the cooking. But nevertheless, this is good for us to do a taste test. I'm going to try the cream one first because it should be straight laced. That is delicious. It's got a real deep caramelization, real creaminess, real richness, but there's not a lot going on. Sort of the top notes. Let's see if we get anything else from the others. This one is the brandy one cooked on the wire rack. That is simply beautiful. It's different. It's not as richly caramelized as that. It hasn't got quite the depth if you like, but what it does have is almost two other perceptions that I'm not getting in this one. So, this has got a nice freshness from the citrus zest that we've put in, but also it's got the aromatics from the alcohol that we've put in. And it just leads to a greater sense of complexity and deliciousness.

[00:11:51]Okay, so now let's try the last one that was cooked as it is in the book. So hopefully this has combined the best of these two into this.

[00:12:02]Yeah, that is that is sensational. So the one with the brandy on the stone is absolutely magnificent. It's got the richness from the caramelization and it's got the top notes from the alcohol.

[00:12:12]It's not quite perfect. So, if I had just cooked that a minute less, then it would have a little bit more of the top notes from the alcohol and a little bit less caramelization and would be a bit more balanced and therefore would have a greater sense of perceived complexity and would be even more delicious. But whichever one you make, they are exceptional. Now, the reason why I've showed you this dessert is because it's a bit of a step up from the tart to tan in terms of technical skill, but it still demonstrates that beautiful sensation of deliciousness just from putting things in the pot and letting them cook. Like I just find it so incredible. And you know, I can talk about the chemistry of the cooking and the molecules that have formed, but I'm never ever ever going to do it justice.

[00:12:51]And you get so much complexity, so much complicated chemistry that it doesn't even make sense to look at it or understand it. Really, all you need to know is that when you heat sugars and proteins and fats and it looks like this, this color, you get something that is just other. And it is remarkable.

[00:13:10]Again, another one to have for your repertoire, another one that you just have to make.

[00:13:15]I think if this was cooked for a minute less, that would be perfect. But these are the kind of margins that we're working with when we cook things in this way, when we when we're after that balance and after that complexity. Now, one thing I wish I made a bit clearer on the tatan video is that even though it requires no skill, what you do have to do is to take it out as it reaches its peak. So, as it's caramelizing, but it still has that freshness. That's where it needs to come out. Further than that, it becomes dark and bitter. Then it's gone too far. But obviously, if you've undercooked it and it's like stewed apple, nothing like the complexity that we're going to be looking for. And this dessert is a bit similar. We need to take it out exactly when it's at its peak. I haven't quite done that. I think this has gone a bit too far. And this one was a bit under. So somewhere between these two was absolute perfection. But you're going to have to judge this a bit yourself. So for the first cook, you just want a really nice color. And then after you've added the cream and it starts to reduce, look for it to thicken a little bit. And then you can add the next lot. But it's going to be 4 to 6 minutes. I imagine if you serve this with a vanilla ice cream, you're going to get that hot cold contrast as well, which is just going to be brilliant with it. Dead simple. You can make this ahead of time. Everyone's going to love it. Tipsy cake.