Brioche Cake with Caramel Custard Cream

This post is way late, but better late than never :o) For our fifth Bread Bake-Together (BBT), Janis and I both wanted to bake a sweet yeast recipe to change things up a bit. The choice was easy: Brioche Cake with Caramel Custard Cream from "The Cake Book" by Tish Boyle. Doesn't that sound ridiculously good? :o)

So far I've baked a good handful of recipes from this book and loved each and everyone of them. Needless to say, I was very much looking forward to this recipe as well, especially since it's my first yeast recipe from Tish's book. She clearly mentions that the dough will be very soft and she wasn't joking. It was so soft that it was borderline soupy, but I carried on. To be honest, I was skeptical until the very end, but shouldn't have been. The Brioche Cake turned out great.

Look at all that fluffiness :o)

The recipe calls for baking this Brioche Cake in a 9" springform pan. That's a lot of cake for just the two of us, so I decided to bake it in two 6" springform pans instead so I could give one away to a friend. This reduced the baking time to about 18 minutes.


As usual, I used my bread machine to make the dough using the Dough cycle. After the initial kneading cycle, I let the dough rise in the machine until doubled in size. Afterwards, you're supposed to retard the dough in the fridge overnight, up to 12 hours. I let it rise a little longer than that (a total of 18-20 hours). It was a lot easier to work with the soft and sticky dough when it was cold :o)

The Caramel Custard Cream was very easy to make. You basically make a caramel with sugar and water, add milk and then follow the regular steps you would for making pastry cream. After it's cooled, you lighten it by folding in whipped cream.

The syrup was also very simple to make. It provided both moisture and sweetness to the brioche (which didn't contain that much sugar). I actually had some syrup left when I was done.

Here are some step-by-step pictures:

I was very skeptical when I saw this :o)

I had a bit more hope when I saw this about 1 hour later.

Brushed with an egg wash and sprinkled toasted sliced almonds on top.

Wow! No idea why I ever doubted Tish Boyle!! :o)

Hard to see perhaps but the crumb is so light and tender!

Syruped and filled.

Dusted with powdered sugar and ready for serving.

Look at that soft and fluffy interior. Bon appetit!

Final thoughts/tips:

• Hubby loved this cake. Especially the softness and tenderness of the cake, even when eaten straight from the fridge. He gave it a good 9 out of 10 rating!! :o)
• Personally, this was yet another yeast victory for me. I had serious doubts after seeing the dough, and then again, when I divided the dough into balls and placed them in the baking pan. I was nothing short of pleasantly surprised that it turned out as well as it did. I resisted adding more flour the dough and I think that paid off. The cake has a very soft, light and tender texture with a wonderful buttery flavor.
• Changes in the dough: subbed equal amount of agave nectar for the honey, added 3/4 tsp of baking powder, reduced butter to 2 oz (4 Tbsp) and added 1 oz vegetable oil, used 1% milk instead of whole milk.
• Changes to the egg wash: added 1 tsp of orange blossom water.
• Changes to the cream: added the leftover egg wash to the custard, and added 33 grams of sugar, used 1% milk instead of whole milk.
• The recipient of the other 6" cake told me she loved the cake and that she ate way too much of it already :o)
• Don't forget to check Janis' Brioche Cake post.
• If you'd like to make this recipe, I highly recommend purchasing a copy of The Cake Book.
• I found an adaptation of this recipe online. There are some differences. The recipe in the book uses an egg wash instead of warm honey prior to baking, as well as a sugar syrup for brushing on the two layers.
• Through Joyce's blog, I learned about a bread round-up linky site called BYOB (Bake Your Own Bread). Clever huh? :o) I'm submitting this post to BYOB.
• I'm also submitting this post to YeastSpotting.