Introduction: Delicious Tropical Cream Cake (Gluten-free, Gelatin Free)

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Is it winter and cold and you're missing the warmth and the sun?

Are you already dreaming of your holidays, maybe on a tropical island with a coconut cream cocktail in your hand? The sand feels warm under your feet and the wind from the sea sends a gently breeze full of the fragrance of holiday...

Sorry, I can't shorten the time to summer, or the time to your holidays, but I can help you to get some summer taste and maybe some holiday feeling in your head :-)

I present you a yogurt cream cake which is gluten free, seems very light and is fluffy and stable without the use of gelatin.

Just follow the steps and you will also get the summer on your table.

(And if your read this instructable in summertime, the cake is really refreshing and cools you down if everything around you is to hot ;-) )

Step 1: Ingredients and Material

What you need for your cake:

For the cake layers:

  • 150gr Butter on room temperature (means around 20°C)
  • 2 Egg yolks (you need the whites for the cream)
  • 50gr sugar
  • 1 package of vanilla sugar (ca. 15gr)
  • 75gr potato starch
  • 50gr coconut flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

For the cream:

  • 250gr yoghurt
  • 250gr whipping cream
  • 2 egg white (see above)
  • 1 lemon with eatable skin
  • 1 can of mandarins
  • 1 pinch of salt
  • optional: sugar
  • optional: coconut flakes and 1 lime for garnishing

Hardware:

  • Cake pan 20cm diameter
  • parchment paper
  • mixer
  • long knive
  • rubberbands
  • 1 thin and clean dish towel
  • ceveral sticks, i used chopsticks
  • Spatual
  • kitchen sieve
  • kitchen scale
  • kitchen mittens
  • and of course an oven and a fridge (or a cold balcony)

Step 2: Prepare Your Cake Layers

Heat up the oven to 200°C in a bottom-top heat oven (or 180°C if you have circulation air)

The dough preparation:

    1. Separate your eggs into egg yolk and egg white. Set the egg whites into the fridge.
    2. Mix first the butter and the 2 egg yolks to a smooth batter.
    3. Mix your dry ingredients, potato starch, coconut flour, baking powder, sugar, vanilla sugar and salt, in a separate bowl.
    4. Mix the dry ingredients in different batches into your batter, until you created a sticky looking dough.
    5. Separate the dough into two equal parts (eye measuring is enough, no need to torture the scale)

    The cake baking process:

    1. Prepare your cake pan with parchment paper to cover the bottom and prevent the cake sticking on your pan.
    2. Spread half of the dough into your pan to a thin layer.
    3. Set it into the oven for about 10min, until the top is tanned.
    4. Take it out of the oven and transfer the baked part with the parchment paper to a heat resisting surface. I used a baking tray.
    5. Take a long knife and directly cut it into your preferred amount of slices, in my case 8, but you could also go for 6 or maybe 10.
    6. It is important to cut it directly after the oven, because than the cake is still very soft and easy to cut. Later, when it cools down it will be very brittle and difficult to cut. If you don't cut it now, you will squeeze the cream out of your cake when trying to cut it at your coffee table

    Repeat the previous steps with the other half of the dough until you take you cake out of the oven. DON'T cut this cake layer. It will be the lower part of your cake and will be cuttable later because it will slightly soak with the moisture of the cream filling.

    (If you have two equal cake pans you can also combine the two baking steps and bake it at once.)

    Step 3: Prepare the "cream Holder"

    This cream filling is made without gelatin or any other additional stabilizer.

    To prevent the yogurt cream filling from just run away, a little bit more preparation than on a normal cream cake must be done and it is a bit more time consuming and takes a bit more effort to get a very fluffy and stiff cream filling. But it is definitely worth it - trust me :-)

    But don't worry, it's not difficult, just a bit unusual.

    1. Take the outside of your cake pan and close it. You don't need the bottom anymore at the moment.
    2. Take your dish towel and lay it over the cake pan, fix it with the rubber bands and stretch it until you have a smooth cover. The amount of rubber bands depends on their strength, you could also use a thin rope instead of the rubber.
    3. Try to fix the excess dish towel close to the cake pan and above the bottom. This is important, because if your towel hangs over your bowl, the drained moisture will not drop into the bowl, but follow the gravity and spread everywhere around your bowl (in the best case on your balcony, in the worse case in your fridge).
    4. Distribute the chop sticks evenly on your bowl and set the prepared draining pan on top.

    Step 4: The Cream Filling

    All ingredients should have a cool temperature (as you would take them out of the fridge before handling).

    1. Open the box of mandarin and drain in a kitchen sieve. Catch the mandarin juice in a drinking glass.
    2. Set the 250gr yogurt in a mixing bowl.
    3. Wash your lemon with hot water and grate about 1/2 teaspoon lemon zest into your yogurt.
    4. Cut the lemon and squeeze the juice of one half into the yogurt, about 2-3 tablespoon.
    5. Add the mandarin juice to the yogurt-lemon-mixture.
    6. Taste your mixture and if necessary add some sugar. I added about 1 tablespoon of sugar, since it seemed to sour. But don't oversweet it. The cake layers are quite sweet and the mixture of sweet cake and slightly sour filling gives a very refreshing taste.
    7. Beat your egg whites to be stiff.
    8. Beat your whipping cream to be stiff to.
    9. Mix the yogurt, the zest and the juice with a spatula.
    10. Take the spatula and gently fold* in the whipped cream.
    11. Gently fold in the stiff egg whites.
    12. Set some mandarins aside for the garnish, gently fold in the rest of the mandarins.
    13. Pour the mixture into the "cream holder" and spread it a little if it doesn't spread out evenly by itself.
    14. You can see that the draining starts immediately and there is already a little bit of liquid in the bowl. Later on there will be much more liquid in the bowl, but also a lot in the towel, maybe even more than in the bowl.
    15. Cover your cream and set it to fridge or balcony (if your weather outside is below 10°C).

    Let it drain for min. 6-8 hours. I prepared mine in the evening to use it the next afternoon, so the draining time was around 18h.

    * fold in means in this case: take smaller parts of your stiff whipping cream or egg whites and try to mix it with the rest of the yogurt without destroying its fluffiness. So don't mix it very fast, but try to move the spatula through the mixture as you would like to scrape something from the side of the mixing bowl

    Step 5: Completing the Cake

    Your yogurt mixture drained and looks already much drier than at the beginning, the dish towel is very wet and there is some liquid in the bowl.

    Now, it's time to combine the cake layers with the filling and therefore the easiest way is to do it with two people. I was on my own, so I couldn't take the advantage of a helping hand. But it still worked out (mostly) fine.

    1. You need something to prevent the cake from falling down when flipping it around. For this I used a part of my kitchen machine, since all my boards and plates were bigger then my cake pan. To prevent the kitchen machine part and the cake from turning over I stabilized the tower with a big stainless steel mug, but every bigger mug or small bowl would have been done the same. Look at this professional looking cake flipping tower :-)
    2. Set the cake bottom (the uncut cake layer) on top of the cream. So the top of the cream now will be the bottom of the cream layer later.
    3. Build up your cake holding mechanism and flip it over (sorry for no pictures while flipping, I needed all my hands)
    4. Take off the rubber bands and remember to hold up the cake pan, otherwise it will fall down - thanks to gravity. I forgot about this and unfortunately destroyed a little bit on one side, but could save it with spreading the cream from the towel back to the cake.
    5. Cover the cream with the second cake layer (the cut).
    6. Carefully set the cake to a plate. This can be done by sliding the plate directly between your platform and the cake, so you don't have to move the cake up (and therefore it can't break or fall down.)

    Taadaa, almost finished, just a little bit of garnishing to make it look nicer.

    I used some mandarins, half lime slices and some coconut flakes, but just be as creative as you like.

    Step 6: Delicious Finished Cake

    The cake need to be at fridge temperature to keep its stiffness, so it is not the perfect cake for a cake buffet, but to eat it at home also for some more days it is perfect.

    We ate the cake over three days and on the last days it tasted as good as on the first. Maybe even a little bit better, because the cake bottom soaked itself a bit with the moisture of the cream filling.

    I'm really happy about how this cake turned out and this will be not the last time that I made it... Mmmmmh...