Creaming Butter & Sugar for Gourmet Coffee Cake

Video Transcript

"So our first real step, is creaming the butter and sugar. It's really important to have that butter at room temperature. But there's also a reason we're creaming that butter and sugar together. Molecularly the sugar is solid and liquid. And when it's mixing with the butter and the air of the beater, it's volume is raising. So it's opening itself up to the addition of our flour which is our dry ingredient and our sour cream and eggs are our wet ingredients. So we're going to start with that. Now if you don't have a mixer like mine, if you don't happen to have a Kitchen-Aid, and you have a hand held beater, that's fine. Just make sure you're not using the whisk attachments. You want to use a paddle attachment. And I'm using a stick and a half of unsalted butter. You can see this is really room temperature. You don't want it melted. I mean we still want some solidness to it. But we definitely want it soft. And my beautiful sugar and I'm going to pour that into the bowl, lower my bowl and lock it in. I want to start it sort of slow speed, till it starts to incorporate the sugar and then bring it up to about a medium speed. And I'm looking for it to change to a light, pale yellow color and to look well blended. And when we get there, I'll show you what that looks like. But you'll kind of see it come together. It goes from this solid little clumpy thing to what's starting to be a batter, like a cookie batter. Ooh there's another good thing, cookie batter. Yum. I'm thinking you'd do this for about a minute, a minute and a half at the most. So this is about the consistency that I'm looking for. Going to stop it for a minute, open it up and you can see. Kind of sticky mix. And then at about the same medium speed, I'm going to add my eggs one at a time."