Rose's Alpha Bakers: Chocolate Cuddle Cake

Week six of my bake-through adventure with Rose's Alpha Bakers is the Chocolate Cuddle Cake, from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Baking Bible. I'm back in school this semester and had some studying and a paper to write this week so I made an abbreviated Cuddle Cake; I omitted the caramel whipped cream topping and just covered the cake with the ganache. I had some darker ganache left over from my Ischler cookies so I drizzled that over the top in a sort of crisscrossing pattern. Not the prettiest cake I've ever made, but it was chocolatey and delicious!

a very light and tender cake

The cake was a chiffon cake, so it's leavened by beating the egg whites into a meringue and folding that into the batter. The recipe called for what seemed like a lot of sugar, so I was a little worried that the cake would be too sweet, like some chiffon cakes are, but the cocoa powder cut the sweetness and it was just right. 

The cake's texture was extremely light (almost fluffy) and very tender. It was also very moist (some chiffon cakes can be dry, in my opinion); going on day 3, it's still very fresh and moist. My only complaint was that the ganache was very firm when it cooled so it was less like frosting and more like...almost like a chocolate truffle topping. The ganache melted in your mouth, so still delicious, but I would have liked a softer ganache as frosting.

The ganache is made first and set aside to firm up for a few hours. Next time I might add a touch more kahlua because the flavor got lost in the finished ganache.

the ganache called for kahlua...yum!

so easy, but I forgot to add the kahlua when it was in the food processor...
no problem, I'll just stir it in

Now on to the cake!

mise en place for the cake

The cocoa powder is melted with boiling water and the cooled slightly. Then the oil, egg yolks, and vanilla are added.

combining the wet ingredients

mixing the wet and dry ingredients

Then the wet ingredients are added to the dry ingredients and mixed well. I only have one bowl for my stand mixer and didn't want to take the chance of my meringue being deflated by any traces of oil, so I just mixed these ingredients by hand. Whisk whisk whisk!

after whisking for several minutes my batter is smooth and shiny

Now it's time for the meringue. This was actually quite fun and easy to make and was very pretty when done. The egg whites and cream of tartar are whisked until soft peaks form. Then some sugar is added and the mixture is whisked again until stiff peaks form. The final meringue was smooth and glossy.

soft peaks...still very foamy and bubbly

now whipped into stiff peaks...a gorgeous meringue!

When you reach the stiff peak stage, you're ready to incorporate the egg whites into the chocolate batter. Gently fold in the egg whites otherwise your beautiful meringue will deflate.

looks like a snowy mountaintop...so cute!

carefully folding the meringue into the chocolate batter

don't completely incorporate the meringue (until the final addition)
or the egg whites will deflate and the cake will be flat

I had to improvise with my pan set-up because I didn't have the required cake strips (which go around the pan and help it bake evenly)...so I just wrapped a few layers of aluminum foil around the side of my cake and it came out just fine.

Before baking a flower nail (used for making sugar flowers) is inserted into the batter which helps the batter rise evenly.

voila, my handy-dandy flower nail

my finished cake! It even has cracks on the top,
just like Rose said it would.

The cake is cooled upside down on this ingenious cooling rack set-up. Cooling it upside down helps to avoid the dip in the center of the cake often seen in a chiffon cake.

the cooling rack is elevated on the edges of some glasses

and here is my upside down cake, cooling

when the cake is completely cooled, the pan is removed and the
parchment strip is carefully peeled away

now it's time to frost!

My crisscross ganache decoration was a bit messy, but tasted delicious!

I'll just pretend I was going for an avant-garde look

the finished cake is lovely

time for a bite...yum!

Bye for now...

Heavenly Cake Baker: Tiramisù (free choice)

It's free choice this week in the Heavenly Cake Baker club. I was debating between the Red Velvet Cake on page 83 of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes and Tiramisù on page 267. Tiramisù won out in the end as it seemed like more of a challenge.

I must confess that I cheated a bit this week and deviated from the recipe in the book to (mostly) follow a recipe I'd made once before. While baking, I went back and forth between the two but the final cake, in the end, leaned more toward the more familiar recipe and not the book. I hope I won't be kicked out of the club!

To start with, I got totally flummoxed when reading RLB's instructions for the ladyfingers because she instructs you to pipe the fingers but also to pipe out an 8" disk...but the disk is never called for in the tiramisù recipe. It wasn't until much, much later that I realized the disk instructions were for the recipe on the previous pages. D'oh!

The recipe I (mostly) used called for ladyfingers for the top and bottom layers and a sponge cake as the middle layer (another reason I kept wondering where to incorporate the ladyfinger disk). As you can see from the pictures below, my ladyfingers were pretty much a disaster. Next time I will definitely either use RLB's ladyfinger recipe or the sponge cake recipe (which said it could also be used to pipe the ladyfingers).

I'm not sure exactly what went wrong with my ladyfingers. I think I may have over-beaten my eggs, egg yolks and sugar mixture, but everything seemed fine until just before I started filling the pastry bags...then the batter just collapsed before my eyes. Sad.

mise en place for the ladyfingers

beating the eggs and sugar

I can tell disaster is coming; after adding the flour and butter, the batter is already collapsing

as you can see I had a hard time getting a light dusting of powdered sugar!
the first set wasn't great but they weren't too horribly bad

the second set was a complete disaster

they look okay from afar and were actually very light inside...but

...they were so sad and FLAT up close

The sponge cake, on the other hand, was fantastic. It was easy to pull together, it didn't collapse on me and it baked in less than 10 minutes. It was spongy and moist (it would roll up nicely for a roulade!). It was a bit sticky on the top, but otherwise was very easy to work with after it was baked. I picked it up, flipped it over - both dry and wet - and it never tore.

mise en place for the sponge cake

egg whites and sugar are whipped to a stiff peak

gorgeous!

dry ingredients are added to the egg yolk, sugar, vanilla and water mixture

after the whipped egg whites are folded in, it's baked in a sheet pan

less than 10 minutes later - done!

mise en place for the pastry cream

making the pastry cream...whisk whisk whisk until it boils

the mascarpone has been added to the pastry cream which is set over an ice bath to cool

the final ingredients: cream to lighten the pastry cream; super strong coffee and Kahlua to soak the layers;
and cocoa/powdered sugar to decorate

adding the whipped cream to the mascarpone pastry cream

almost incorporated - smells delicious!

the first layer of cookies are soaked with the coffee/Kahlua and
covered with the mascarpone pastry cream

the sponge cake layer is up next; it's given a good soaking

I had lots of extra cookies and more sponge cake than I needed for the large serving dish I was using so I made a second dish (what I'm going to do with TWO dishes of tiramisù though, I don't know). However, at this point I started thinking that I was going to run out of the cream filling by the time I got to the top so I whipped up some more heavy cream, added a few splashes of the coffee/Kahlua mixture for a bit of flavor and then incorporated it back into the mascarpone pastry cream mixture. It diluted the delicious pastry cream flavor a little, but definitely made it go further.

the final layer is made up of ladyfingers and then topped with more cream

all done...looks great

now I just need 20 people to serve this to!

after setting up for about an hour, I sliced into it; I think it will be even better tomorrow after the
flavors have more time to meld

delicious!

Bye for now...