Heavenly Cake Baker: German Chocolate Cake (free choice)

This week's Heavenly Cake Baker cake was free choice. I haven't been baking much lately - a combination of it being super hot and humid, having an unusually busy summer and then being on vacation in Montreal (joy!) - so I thought I would choose a cake that my fellow HCBers made while I was away. I chose the German Chocolate Cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes. I've never made a German Chocolate cake before and this seemed pretty straightforward so I decided to give it a go.

The cake was dead easy to make and had a very unconventional way of mixing. Normally cakes have milk which is added to the creamed butter/sugar/eggs mixture in 3 or 4 parts alternating with flour. This cake has no milk. Instead, it calls for oil and extra egg whites. The eggs are separated and the egg whites are added at the end. Worked like a charm!

I decided to make cupcakes instead of a layer cake and they came out nice and moist. They were chocolaty, without being too chocolaty (which can also be delicious!) and the crumb was light and spongy. The light texture went well with the heavier coconut frosting. The frosting was good, but very thick and sweet and I could taste the evaporated milk quite clearly. On the one hand I thought I might not have cooked it down enough (because of the flavor coming through) but on the other hand I thought I cooked it too long (because it was so thick). I used a flake coconut (instead of shredded) but I think the larger flakes would have worked better on a large cake instead of the cupcakes. Next time I might try part shredded and part large flakes. Or I might just use a buttercream frosting instead. My husband had a plain cupcake with vanilla ice cream on top and declared it delicious!

mise en place for the chocolate cake

the cocoa is melted with boiling water and then the yolks and oil are mixed in...

until it's light, fluffy and almost resembles a buttercream frosting

then the flour is added and you get this thick sticky batter.
Finally the egg whites are added (no photo) and you get a very thin, liquidy batter!

finished cupcakes...light and moist

mise en place for the coconut frosting

evaporated milk, sugar and egg yolks get cooked, then coconut and pecans are added

my husband said: "it looks like pasta"

voila!

delicious

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...

Heavenly Cake Baker: Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache

This week's Heavenly Cake Baker cake is the Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache, page 99, from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

I really liked this cake (more than last week) and the ganache frosting (less than last week). The day it was made, the cake was light and very soft; on the following days, the cake was denser, almost like a flourless cake - both "states of cake" were delicious.

I brought about 2/3 of the cake to work - it disappeared in less than an hour and got rave reviews.

In the future, I think I might try this cake with the raspberry ganache from last week's recipe. I liked this cake a lot better than the génoise from last week. Although, after reading this by RLB, maybe I should just keep practicing the génoise until I am more familiar and happy with it.

mise en place for the devil's food cake

ready to bake

gorgeous!

the caramel has been added and the ganache is silky smooth

After several hours - but, I admit, probably not the full 6 - I felt like the ganache was not going to "set up" so I thought I would do a thin layer and then whip the rest to try to speed things along. This lightened the ganache quite a bit  (in color and weight) and also changed the consistency to more of a buttercream texture.

a thin layer of the darker ganache

whipped ganache

a little more frosting for the middle layer

all done - looks great

so light and tender, delicious

Next week is free choice...I'd better start planning!

Bye for now...

Heavenly Cake Baker: Moist Chocolate Raspberry Génoise

This week's Heavenly Cake Baker cake is the Moist Chocolate Raspberry Génoise, page 187, from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

This cake was pretty complicated and, for me, a two-day affair. I started last night with the raspberry sauce - a delicious concoction which I will definitely be making again! I want to buy an ice cream machine just so I can make this tart, light, sweet sauce into raspberry ice cream or frozen yogurt. Honestly, it was so good I almost just ate it all last night, straight out of the bowl. Can you tell that I liked it? I need to find some way to use it and lemon curd in a recipe.

One thing that I really appreciate about this cookbook are all of the tips that RLB gives with the recipes. In this one, for example, she tells you to cook down the chocolate for the cake until it "thickens to a puddlinglike consistency...and pool(s) thickly when a little is dropped on its surface." That kind of guidance is very helpful.

Overall, while the finished cake was very pretty and I liked the different pieces that made up the whole, I have mixed feeling about the génoise (which, see below, may actually be my fault). I've only made a génoise once before but I found this one to be almost a little too spongy and kind of dry by the second day. When I put my fork in - it's a bit hard to describe - I felt like the cake separated from the cocoa syrup/ganache instead of being one cohesive bite.

Here is my finished cake - I loved this picture so much I've added it to the header of my blog! My decoration - which I really like - actually came about from a mistake. I had been putting each layer into the fridge between frosting them but by the time I was finishing the top layer, the cake was so cold that the ganache got hard and very matte. I didn't like the look of it at all, so I drizzled some of the leftover cocoa sauce around in a swirly pattern and...voila, pretty again!

love it!

Now, from the beginning...

The raspberries seemed to take forever to start defrosting and giving up their juice. I tried putting the bowl in the oven with the light on and then up under one of the under-cabinet lights without much luck. Finally, after about 4 hours I turned a burner on low and put the bowl as close to it as I could. I felt so accomplished when I finally got a few drips.

so simple, yet so delicious

finally starting to give up its juice

boiling down the raspberry juice

I don't have a food mill so I just pressed the berries through a fine strainer. It took a while but I ended up with about 2/3 c. of puree and then added the raspberry syrup, lemon juice and sugar. Delicious!

my camera doesn't do "red" well...this looks a bit like tomato paste...

ready to be added to the chocolate ganache

I didn't have any cocoa powder so went to a little local market down the street,
which happens to be a Greek grocer. I have no idea whether this is
alkalized or non since everything is in Greek, but I was desperate! It turned out great.

in the cocoa syrup, I substituted raspberry brandy (framboise)
for vanilla, hoping for a little extra raspberry punch

The raspberry ganache was absolutely fabulous! It would be divine over vanilla ice cream. The smell reminded me of those old Dannon chocolate covered raspberry frozen yogurt bars from the '80s/'90s...but warm (does anyone else remember those?). Oh yum.

I also love RLB's food processor method for making ganache. It's so easy and it's lovely to see it come together...and the smell as the chocolate melts...incredible.

mise en place for the raspberry ganache

creamy raspberry swirls

dark and white chocolate, processed into fine bits

pressing through a strainer, look how shiny and pretty

mise en place for the génoise

chocolate, cooked and cooled

adding the eggs to the castor sugar

before beating the egg/sugar mixture

after beating the egg/sugar mixture for 5 minutes - wow

(I'm going to need a bigger spatula...) the flour has been folded in, chocolate is next

it made a lot of batter so I made four extra ramekins for some individual sized cakes

After exactly 25 minutes, the cakes were done. They came out smooth and looking great...until I tried to get them onto the cooling racks. I didn't have enough racks to follow the directions in the cookbook, so I tried to improvise by flipping them on to cardboard covered parchment paper and then onto the cooling rack...big mistake. Both tops were ripped entirely off (and a good-sized chunk on one). It was sad, but since the tops would be cut off anyway, it wasn't too great a loss (except to my ego) and gave me a chance to taste the cake.

very pretty...until...

argh! must. get. more. cooling. racks.

I was very nervous about cutting these cakes in half since they were already pretty thin and my only serrated knife - a bread knife - is kind of thick and shorter than the length of the cake. I was worried things would get ugly (or uneven), fast.

an adventure in not having the right equipment, my makeshift cake turntable

While I actually managed pretty even layers with the first cake, I dropped half of the first layer on the floor as I was attempting to put the cocoa syruped side down on the cake plate. RLB says the génoise is very fragile after you brush on the syrup - she wasn't kidding! So, my four-layered cake became a three-layered cake.

Since I hate soggy cakes - and I felt like I was drenching the layers - I decided at this point to only brush the top of each layer with the cocoa syrup. This change may be what made my finished cake separate a little from the ganache and also seem dry. In the future I would definitely soak both sides!

my poor broken layer

three layers...no one need ever know about the fourth....

one mini ready to enjoy

another mini with some raspberry sauce decoration

the finished cake - pretty!

Can't wait for next week's cake, Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache.

Bye for now...