eau du gateau: kayali oudgasm
making cakes that taste like perfume
hey hey hello,
It’s been a minute since the last one of these and we are soooo back! If you’re new here, hi!! And welcome to a very special cake series, Eau de Gateau, a little bit where I make cakes that taste like perfume.
What do I mean by taste like perfume? Well, I take the *edible* scent notes of a perfume and apply the to cake, to see if what smells good together tastes good together. Today’s cake is a doozy of a flavor profile and does taste… well, very perfumed. Which, I haven’t decided if I hate it or love it, if thats a good or bad thing. It’s kinda the perfect example of I do this so you don’t have to. We’ll get a little more into that in a bit.
Hope you’re ready for a wild flavor ride.
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So, I get a lot of comments + DMs asking for the perfume cake recipes. Which I did share for the earlier cakes, and kind fell off on the sharing of the recipe aspect for a couple of reasons.
These cakes are a bit of a creative exercise for myself and not necessarily something I’m creating with the idea of replication in mind, like I do for the recipes that I intentionally develop to be shared. They all boil down to following the cake formula I mentioned in a previous post, and make ingredients swaps to my base recipes to create a new flavor profile. For the most part the cakes are made once, to flex that creative baking muscle.
Because I’m riffing off of my base recipes, and saying things like, “I take my vanilla pastry cream recipe and infuse it with xyz” I think it’s easy enough for you to find the PC recipe and infuse with “xyz” to your own personal taste levels to make your own caramel pastry cream with anise + fennel seed for a Lira inspired pastry cream. Right, because I really just want you guys to take control of your own creativity and this is a means to spark that creativity in ya.
These cakes are not cheap to produce lol ahahaha. But, since making cakes that taste like perfume has sorta of become a bit of my thing. I now have things like bergamot oil ($30/6.75 oz), oud tea ($41/ 50 grams), yuzu juice ($24/8oz), tonka beans ($35/2 oz) ylang ylang flavor drops ($22/ 5ml) on hand and they’re not one time purchases. But like for the cake in today’s newsletter you would need: saffron, rose water, oud tea, and hazelnuts. Aside from what you’d spend on the basics for this cake- milk, sugar, eggs, butter, flour etc. You’d also need to spend $18 on saffron, $4-$20 on rose water depending on where you are and how easily you’re able to source it, $41 on oud tea, and $15 on hazelnuts. These aren’t exactly pantry staples (at least not in my house prior to kicking off this series). That’s $78-$94 on specialty ingredients (sans any shipping costs) to flavor the cake. So, it’s not really worth sharing the recipe in regards to it actually being remade in a home kitchen, ya know what I’m saying??
This is also the big big big reason why I would never sell these cakes, food cost = crazy. You ≠ spending $350+ on a 6” cake. Or, why it takes a while between perfume cakes- why i’m not just pumping them out at a rate of 1/week. It takes time to source the ingredients- right like where do you even get sandalwood powder?? huh.
Also, do you know how long it takes to type and format a recipe this complex? For probably no one else to actually make it? AHHHHHH
I mean, at the end of the day I’ve decided to continue to share the recipes, so spark that inspiration in ya and to show the cake formula in action and all the things you can do to a recipe without having to “change” it. Think of this like the final boss to recipe riffin’. It’s also like, maybe you won’t drop $$$ to make the cake in its entirety but, maybe you’ll make one component for a cake, or donut filling, or whatvaaaa.
Anyways, today’s cake is modeled after Kayali’s Oudgasm which has notes of:
Top Notes: Pear, Praline, Saffron
Middle Notes: Bulgarian Rose
Base Notes: Cashmere Wood, Vanilla Sugar, White Musk, Oakmoss, Oud
With the key notes being: Vanilla, Praline and Oud.
When it comes to ideating the final flavor make up of the cake, I think about where each flavor component would fit best with-in my cake formula, while also trying to balance top, middle, and base notes so the cake has a similar flavor experience to the perfume. *hopefully* If you smell a heavy hit of oud first and it dries down on the skin to a rosey, hazelnut then that’s kinda how I want you to experience this slice of cake too.
So, for this one I went with a rose water vanilla chiffon, with a saffron soak, saffron poached pears, oud tea creme legere, all wrapped up in the most decadent hazelnut praline buttercream.
The result? I mean, rose + saffron + oud = a very perfumey flavor vibe. Which like, yeah, I’m making cakes that “taste” like perfume, but this tastes like perfume. With previous cakes, while they were modeled after some of my favorite scents, they didn’t explicitly taste like perfume. Jazz club tasted like a night out at your favorite cocktail lounge. Annabel’s Birthday Cake tasted like the best birthday party from your childhood. MALIN +GOETZ Strawberry tasted like a summery love letter to the beloved summer fruit. None of them tasted like mouth breathing while spritzing yourself down. Know what I’m saying? The general consensus of everyone who tried this cake was, “Yeah, it’s good. It’s weird. But, I keep eating it. I’m not sure.” I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s something I could eat an entire slice of.
ROSE WATER CHIFFON
When it comes to chiffon, you have a ton of wiggle room when it comes to flavoring it- without changing the make up of the chiffon. The liquid component, which in a traditional recipe is water, can be swapped for more flavorful counterparts. Right, because it’s water you can sub it out for water of a different flavor. Think rose water, orange blossom water, teas, etc etc.
When making rose chiffon for my ispahan cake- which is layers of rose water chiffon, raspberry jam and lychee whipped cream, I go all in an sub all the water out for rose water. Mostly because the rose needs to be able to go up against the strong flavor or the tart raspberry. Here in this cake, there’s some really strong hitters that are definitely gonna blow out your palette if ya overdo it. So, I opt to doing half rose water half plain water for a more mellow flavor that will play nicely with everyone else.
SAFFRON POACHED PEARS
Okay, I’ll admit, I’m not a huge saffron girlie. The flavor can become too much very very easily. So, when poaching my pears I added just a pinch of the saffron threads to my poaching liquid. Giving them a little taste, they hadn’t taken on much of the flavor. So, I made a saffron milk soak for the cake layers to bring out a *little* bit of the flavor.
This is why it’s important to taste the components of what you’re baking. I’m not gonna toss the poached pears and start over to add more flavor. But, you can always adjust the next component to help balance things out.
OUD PASTRY CREAM
First things first, what is oud? It forms when Aqulilaria trees become infected with a type of mold called P. parasitica. The tree produces a resin to combat the fungal infection. The resin is fragrant and very often used in perfume making for it’s musky, earthy, animalic notes.
TWG Tea makes a blend that utilizes this resin. So, this is what I use to infuse the milk of my pastry cream before moving forward in making the recipe. A little goes a looooong way with this incredibly fragrant blend. Like, a little bit goes way further than you’d think a tea could go in terms of flavor. Which, you know is fine. I tasted the custard on it’s own before folding into whipped cream. Since the flavor was so intense, I opted to fold in a higher ratio of whipped cream to help mellow things out a bit. Once again taste as you go, adjust as needed.
HAZELNUT PRALINE SWISS BUTTERCREAM
Since hazelnut praline is 50% caramelized sugar, I reduce the amount of sugar in the swiss by the amount that will be added in with the praline. Just to keep things balanced. There’s also a little brown sugar in the meringue for an extra depth of flavor to play off the nutty flavor.
I had hazelnuts on hand so I made the praline myself. It’s nothing too complicated, but my poor little food processor kept overheating while getting the paste to the right consistency. So, next time I make this, and there will be a next time, I’m just gonna opt for buying premade praline paste. I think it’s worth the extra coin to not short out the fuse box.
