Alpha Bakers -- Ganache Tartlets

 

These little puppies were the triumph they were more or less fated to be, being more or less truffles in mini pie shells. I used half leftover ganache from the ChocolaTea Cake and half almond milk ganache (a sleeper hit) from the alternative recipe.

Alpha Bakers -- ChocolaTea Cake

Chocolate cake, chocolate frosting. Perfect for drop off in the office of your choice. I still make an effort to gift baked goods to my former officemates from time to time, and they are appreciative.

Confirmed. Delicious. Also got an email saying it was one of the best another colleague had had. Simple and delicious wins every time. I didn't have the powdered tea, but I achieved a similar effect with a touch of citric acid in the ganache.  

Alpha Bakers -- Ganache City

I like living with messy people. In fact, I like messy people in general.

That's not to say I'm in love with clothes strewn all over the floor, or dirty dishes under the bed, although those things don't bother me as much as they do some people. What I like is people who are unafraid of the odd impulses, weird tics, and dark holes that live inside them. People who embrace their bizarre habits without too much normalizing commentary and are able to allow their lives to have untucked corners.
Every time a kid starts a question with...'Is this weird...?' my heart breaks a little. Who cares? The only thing that's interesting about anyone is the weird things that they do. There's barely a point to life if all your interesting edges are rubbed off. Sometimes I find that theater people are better at just not caring about small social observances, but sometimes they just find other ones to conform to. We are all so afraid of each other sometimes. It's...weird.

Which is to say, I like to hang out with two and three year olds, who are unabashedly strange. And I have a few strange habits of my own, like obsessive baking. Lately my schedule has been a little thrown off, due to all sorts of business and the arrival of a new person in my life, a person who doesn't even care about sweets. How in the name of all that is holy did I get matched up with a person who can ignore freshly baked cupcakes? At least I know he likes me for me?

Luckily, everyone else in my life is still cupcake-mad, and so after plying my workplace with last week's Praline Tart (made, in my case, with almonds), I whipped up this week's Coconut Cupcakes with Milk Chocolate Ganache for one of my sacred weekly institutions, Nacho Friday. These cupcakes are based on one of Rose's coconut cakes, already a huge favorite in my circles, and the only changes I made were to make them gluten free (using Thomas Keller's Cup4Cup flour) for my friend who has celiac disease and, due to my general messiness and failure to retrieve the muffin pan I left at a friend's house three months ago, to minimize them. As I was having dinner with toddlers, mini-cupcakes seemed like a good way to go, although the decision was not without its own fraught moments, as you'll see.

The cupcakes, with a milk chocolate ganache, that Rose-typically was not just made with milk chocolate but with a mix of white and bittersweet, were delicious and a huge hit. Anais, one of the two and a half year olds in question, ate one excitedly and then asked for another. One cupcake for each of us, she was told, whereupon she dissolved into tears and said, 'But I like two cupcakes....'

Everyone has a fold in their smooth surface. Some of us re-use bathwater or teabags with our spouses. Some of us hang out with our exes even though it hurts. Some of us embrace the things that make us broken. Some of us chant weird lines from children's books and love Maurice Sendak and eat odd things at odd times or do whatever it is we need to stay alive. Some of us like two cupcakes.

After Anais went to bed, several of us had a few more cupcakes. Because we're grown-ass women who can do as we please. 

Alpha Bakers - Posh Pie

Oh dear. I just realized that I uploaded these photos but almost entirely forgot to post. Posh Pie, as Rose calls it, is one of those fun recipes that reverse engineers a convenience food type dessert into something fancy and yet retaining echoes of the Jell-O pudding box. 

Many of my fellow Alpha Bakers found the multi-step process frustrating. I made the pie over several days (dough, pause, cookies, pause, crust, pause, bavarian cream, pause, ganache) and found that it fitted well into my schedule, but clearly the timetable got pushed to a point where I forgot to post an account. 

Posh Pie begins with a chocolate cookie crust. One is supposed to cut the cookies out into shapes but since I was planning to crush them up with melted butter in a food processor, I just rolled out a sheet and baked it. The photo above is butter and sugar glurping around in the mixer. 

Next step is a chocolate Bavarian cream (fancy analog to the Jell-O pudding, of course). I had actually made this recently for Libby's birthday cake, incorporating Ovaltine, which made the mixture just ever so slightly grainy. This time the texture was perfect, and I slipped in a bit of creamy chai leftover from a Thanksgiving party for part of the dairy, giving it a bit of extra bite. 

The final step is a shiny (or, in my case, not all that shiny) ganache topping. The pie is, of course, delicious, and as I mentioned has not-unpleasing shades of supermarket snack foods. V. Posh.

Alpha Bakers -- Black and White Brownies

Brownies need frosting like this country needs Donald Trump. In. No. Way. In order to make any 'frosted-brownies' type recipe, I have to perform some mental gymnastics and turn the brownies into 'cake' in my head, thus negating their particular brownie qualities (dense fudginess, crackly top, ease of transport) but permitting them into the category of 'things that are acceptable with frosting'.

Mental tumbling achieved, here's the week's baking. It started with a pan of...cake. Brown fudgy...cake. Gently underbaked, minus the suggested pecans, and full of cream cheese and butter, the...cake...was baked and slipped into the refrigerator to cool. A loose, light, custardy white chocolate buttercream followed. The final touch was to be a bourbon ganache, but I resisted. And resisted. The whole thing was already sweet enough. It was one more step on a Saturday night. In the end, though, I couldn't resist the visual of the black and white layers, so I whipped up the chocolate ganache, adding a tablespoon of Portuguese cherry brandy.

The final product was very rich, very creamy, and in general the kind of thing that my workplace approves of, while they go and ignore perfectly delicious plum kuchen. I allowed a few of the twelve year olds to try it, and they told me that the white stuff was good but the chocolate ganache was 'kind of gross.' I'm assuming that the combo of very bitter chocolate and brandy wasn't for them. Then they stole a co-worker's string cheese and ran off.

Two year olds are so much more on my level than twelve year olds. Also, the Prospect Park Carousel has an excellent soundtrack. When every song began, little S, on the right, said 'I like this song!' His taste is questionable, as he followed that with a pretty rock'n'roll rendition of the Music Together classic 'Hello Everybody,' but at least he can appreciate quality.

Alpha Bakers -- Chocolate Pavarotti with Wicked Good Ganache

The wind is howling outside, the radiator is gurgling, and it's good to be inside. It seems like the ideal time for oatmeal, or cocoa. Instead, I bought two kinds of ice cream yesterday and made chocolate cake. I might be the only person in the world who likes oatmeal and cocoa more than chocolate cake, though not more than strawberry ice cream. Strawberry ice cream is fantastic. Why would anybody ever eat any kind of ice cream other than strawberry?

My deviant predilections aside, the Chocolate Pavarotti (so-called because it 'sings in the mouth') is a very nice cake. 

If you detected a bit of damning with faint praise there, your detector is working. The Pavarotti is a smooth, almost dense single layer, made with the addition of melted white chocolate (I used Trader Joe's chips). Perfectly delicious, a bit forgettable. More like my response to opera than Rose's. I always want to love opera more than I do. It's such spectacle, such grand location, such mystique and heavy wigs and wild feats of vocal daring, but ultimately, I find it slow. I want more choreography. I want the story to move more quickly. I was raised on the American musical, not the opera, and there's very little help for it now. 

As for the 'Wicked Good' ganache, it is indeed very good ganache. I find this unsurprising, because the name indicates that it is clearly from Massachusetts, and all things from Massachusetts are excellent, including yours truly. While I continue to refuse to make ganache in the food processor if it is not a special occasion, I followed all of the other meticulous steps to make this one carefully. Corn syrup makes it shiny, cream makes it rich. In this case the cream was not dairy but coconut cream, lightened with a bit of coconut milk. I've found that for most things coconut will make a good substitute--it's fatty and coconut oil hardens up nicely at a cool room temperature. The substitution wasn't a matter of avoiding dairy, just a matter of realizing that there was no cream in the house and I wasn't going out for groceries again.

We ate the cake as part of an impromptu Valentine's Day celebration that included a feverish and cranky baby, sauteed greens and macaroni and cheese, and highlights from High Fidelity ('it. was. called. James') and X-Men: Days of Future Past. I can't talk about High Fidelity right now, that would take most of seven more posts and some sobbing. X-Men, on the other hand, is great fun, but apparently impossible to follow if you have never seen or read anything about it before. Days of Future Past spends an absurd amount of time on expositing its own absurd plot, but expects you to know exactly who its characters are and what they're up to already. I do, but a certain friend who shall not be named Miriam was unable to master even the basics of their names and relationships. "They all have three names and two ages," she very reasonably complained, and "also Katya WHY is it called a Pavarotti?" 

A little recourse to the book and I was able to answer that question (see above), but I couldn't convince her not to call Magneto 'Cogneto' (actually a very decent amalgam of Professor X and Magneto) or Incognito. Everyone liked the cake, at least. One person said that its dense texture and very sweet filling (I added some raspberry cream cheese frosting) made it taste 'like a candy bar.' So there you have it. Opera plus comics plus indie geekery = chocolate cake that tastes like candy bars. Don't say you weren't warned.

Alpha Bakers -- Chocolate Cuddle Cake

Drifting into 2015...
In my storytimes at the library, I talk. A lot. Most of it goes over the heads of the kids, but at my best moments I like to think that I'm embellishing their worlds with rich language. In the winter, I find myself using words that fall in the 'hibernation' spectrum: snuggle, huddle, wiggle, shelter, and cuddle. I like to imagine us as a pile of soft sleepy baby bears under a pile of leaves, warm and safe for winter.

In that kind of mindset, the Chocolate Cuddle Cake from The Baking Bible couldn't be better named. What can I say? I come from a family that has a tendency to lie in a heap, frequently while watching A League of Their Own. Since some of my heap-mates recently had a baby bear of their own, I was on my own for this baking, and while I can't say I hit a home run, I made it around the bases (mixed metaphor alert! don't care!).

The Chocolate Cuddle is a pillowy soft cocoa chiffon, baked in a parchement-lined springform (see above). Aside from some lazy egg-white mixing (see white spot in photo below), mine came out perfectly. I did not measure how tall it was, because, as our bake-through leader would say 'there's nothing I can do about it now'. I did trim the sides a bit to ensure an even rise, as it sagged a bit like a turban or a decorative squash.
The lovely squashy cake was then frosted with a quick ganache--I followed Rose's recipe but made mine on the stovetop instead of the food processor. I notice a slight difference in texture but it's not enough to make me get out my food processor. All extra ganache becomes truffles, by royal decree.

Things were going so well and then I tried to make the caramel whipped cream, which sounds like a good idea, and probably is, except that I screwed it up royally. Royally as in epically, not as in by royal decree. I am not, in fact, royalty.

Ideally, the caramel whipped cream goes like this:
1. Make caramel.
2. Soften gelatin.
3. Whip cream.
4. Whip in the caramel and the gelatin.
5. Oooh, ahh, frost.

Instead, the whole thing seized miserably and looked like vomit.

Note to self, be more careful of temperatures. I made some half-hearted attempts at rescue, but in the end I just whipped up a little extra cream, added a bit of the lumpy mixture to it, and frosted away. Next time.

It was very pretty all the same--a light and easy cake to carry, make, and eat. One co-worker commented that its spongey nature made it a bit difficult to cut, but everyone seemed to manage all right in the end. There you have it.

Please do forgive any whiff of brimstone or verbal loopiness in this post--I'm high as an off-brand DayQuil kite can be, and most of my internal monologue looks like this.

"I'm Leslie Monster, and this is Nightline."

Getting Underway

 The wedding cake planning begins in earnest. A few weeks ago, I met with the bride and groom, and with the bride's parents. We had ourselves a minor cake orgy. In the end, I made them three cakes to taste: a pretty straight version of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache (and candied cherries), from Rose's Heavenly Cakes; a seven layer cake modeled on this one, and frosted on the outside with the same caramel ganache, and a version of Rose's Chocolate Passion wedding cake, which uses a German Chocolate cake base, a milk chocolate soaking syrup, and was filled with passionfruit mousseline buttercream and passionfruit curd, then glazed with Rose's Dark Chocolate Laquer Glaze. This last, which is light and spongy and resembles an extremely upscale ho-ho or ding-dong, was the winner. 

Now I find myself deep in calculations, mathing it all out on a monster excel sheet, bustling away. Wish me luck as the temperature climbs toward 99 farenheit.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Mud Turtle Cupcakes

I just watched an episode of Top Chef All-Stars where Fabio, the ridiculous and usually charming Italian madman, goes into a monologue in a Chinese grocery store about his pet turtle. Apparently, he bought one when he moved to New York, he loves it, takes it for walks, etc...and is deeply saddened by the cruelties of turtle soup.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

I don't think, though, that he'd mind these cupcakes. They don't so much look like turtles as sport that classic 'turtle' flavor combination: chocolate, caramel, and nuts. The base is a simple sour cream cocoa cupcake. The ganache was supposed to be dark chocolate, but my bodegas (even the fancy one) failed me, and it became a Hershey's milk chocolate whipped ganache, over which my bitter caramel sauce dripped nicely. I rarely buy pecans, so the nuts of choice were walnuts, as they have been in the last two Rose cakes that I made (one is upcoming, for free choice). I didn't eat one yet, but I tasted all the components. My taster, who is also my long-lost photographer, home from the opera wars, approved of them, looking askance at the number that I proposed to bring to work. As I work with about four people, he's probably right.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

So happy to have Matt back in the home and back at the tripod--I did extra special food styling tonight to feed his hobby. But he leaves again in not too long, so I'll be needing to get my camera fixed.

Those of you waiting for Lisbon updates, they're coming. Had to wait for most of my pictures to arrive, and I'm still waiting for five minutes to stop, breathe, and reflect. But in the meantime, enjoy the cupcakes.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: White Velvet Cake with Caramel Cranberry Chocolate Ganache

Photo by Matt Korahais.

This week's cake was on the quick and easy list, and quick and easy it was. I had made the White Velvet Cake (egg whites only, very tender) a few times from the Cake Bible back when I was testing cakes for Stacey and Avi's wedding, and as I remembered, it was simple and snappy. The frosting was supposed to be milk chocolate ganache, but I only had a giant bar of dark chocolate and didn't want to be wasteful. Still, to keep it from being too bitter, I added some cranberry almond caramel left over from my attempt at Maury Rubin's Caramel, Cranberry and Almond Tart.

It's getting eaten, but slowly. Not the most exciting cake but solidly good, a basic, a birthday cake...or, as Jill said, 'A good cake to mash into ice cream.' It's a reminder of how far I've come since the days when I could bake mean bread but had no clue how to turn out a perfect white cake.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Molten Chocolate Souffle and Lava Cakes

All right now. I made them. With bad grace, because I didn't really want to. They took ten minutes, dirtied two whisks and about four bowls. They were pretty good. Hmph.

I was never the one ordering that ubiquitous Lava/Molten/Goop Cake on a restaurant menu. The fact that it's still on restaurant menus that are not those of TGI Fridays (now located in Union Square...bleh) surprises me. I guess they're good. Ok, they're good. Eh.

Rose's version was luckily about as simple as a recipe for one of these things that doesn't involve a microwave can be. Freeze ball of ganache, make souffle mixture, drop the one into the other, bake. I made 1/3 the recipe, so three mini cakes. The ganache was leftover from the Tomato Soup cake, so there's a little bit more of Campbell's Tomato Soup in all of us now.

How does ganache get left over? Leave it in the back of the refrigerator in an unmarked container and don't mention that it is there.

Heavenly Cake Bakers go '50s: Tomato Soup Cake

Campbell's sure make a lot of kinds of soup, don't they? And before yesterday, I have no memory of ever buying one. I'm not saying I never had canned soup, but my family were Progresso loyalists, for some reason. But this cake called for Campbell's, and Campbell's it got.

Ah, tomato soup cake. Who would have thought that this would be the year I made Mountain Dew Cake and Tomato Soup Cake. I'm a one-woman church supper (although I haven't made brownies or chili quite a while... All the same, although many will find this shocking, I did exactly what the recipe said and bought a little can. The full recipe was for a 9", two-layer cake. I halved it and baked it in one layer in an 8" pan, which resulted in a cake that was fully large enough to torte into two layers, although not the tallest of layers.

Because we love overkill here at Rose's Heavenly Cakes, the ganache also has tomato soup in it. Really, what's not to love--fruit, salt, and probably some fat and stabilizers? Standard cake add-ins, if you think about it.

I fed the cake (with slightly drippy ganache) to friends last night and told them there was a secret ingredient and it was very '50s. They had plenty of guesses, some of them impractical (banana, jam, prosperity, anti-communist propaganda, no pre-marital sex...), but only guessed the correct secret ingredient when I began pointedly intoning 'Andy Warhol...ANDY WARHOL.' Then we ate it.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Cake with Caramel Ganache

I made a ganache this week.

It was a really really good ganache.

I made a cake too, but the ganache was the star. It was a caramel ganache, with creamy caramel added to chocolate. Some caramel ganaches are are bitter, or only taste like chocolate. This one, not so. This one, I love. This one, is like the best chocolate in the box, the one you spy and wait for, and know is the best because it is square and has chewy caramel inside.

The cake was good too, but due to a dome-ing incident, the layers were very thin indeed, rendering the cake/ganache ratio ridiculous. And delicious. I made the cake at the bakery on Saturday, and went back this morning to take a picture. And every piece was gone. Good news for those of you who like photos is that Lily says I should make it again right after labor day.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Cupcakes

Briefly, because this post is late. This is the second time I've made Rose's chocolate butter cupcakes (first was for a birthday in April), and I've found them to be moist, dense, and very reliable. I still prefer the Barts Chocolate Cake recipe because it is lighter and more durable (and full of coffee), but Rose's recipe shares convenience points with my favorite recipe by calling for only cocoa, which is in stock far more frequently than actual chocolate. Somehow the latter never lasts.

I did slip a few coffee grounds into this recipe, with no noticeable effects for good or ill. It was far too hot and humid in NYC to attempt a successful buttercream, so I frosted the cupcakes with leftover caramel ganache from my recent unsuccessful encounter with the Baked 'Sweet & Salty' cake. Then I packed the cupcakes up into a little tin, and took them camping, where they were great substitutes for the marshmallows that I'd forgotten to buy.

One recipe note: When Rose calls for cocoa in a batter, she usually instructs that the cocoa be mixed into boiling water, and then the mixture cooled to room temperature. I never feel inclined to do this extra step, and have had no trouble mixing the cocoa into slightly warm water and proceeding with the recipe. Any thoughts from anyone on what the logic here might be? Is it just to ensure that the cocoa is well and truly mixed, or does boiling water actually have some chemical effect on cocoa?

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Le Succes

Well, it certainly was a...success. This flourless cake was fun, many finicky steps but none of them too difficult, and an elegant final product. I made Le Succes at the bakery, on Friday morning, while I prepped and baked the bread. It all started with ganache, which I began around 7am. This was a simple one, just sour cream and cream over chocolate bits, with a small citric acid shot from a few teaspoons of "lemon tea powder," an ingredient that baffled many Heavenly Bakers, until it was identified as plain old iced tea powder (I used Tetley's--now we have to drink a lot of fake iced tea). Despite the addition of such low-brow (for Rose) ingredient, the ganache was sleek and elegant, with an almost imperceptible citric accent. So almost imperceptible, in fact, that only Lily could even come close to identifying it.

Then the ganache was set to cool while more bread dough was kneaded for the following day, and then I brought out my little container of pre-ground almonds and sugar (there's no small pulverizing instrument at the bakery). I whipped up some egg whites, added cream of tartar and some more sugar, and then folded the almond/sugar mixture in.

While I was at it, I took a few shots of the bakery kitchen for the curious. Somehow, my angle was never quite right, but here they are.

The big oven, my convectional nemesis.

After everything was folded, I piped the meringue batter onto a piece of parchment with circles drawn on, smoothed and leveled, and baked briefly, until the meringue was lightly brown.

Detaching the meringue discs was a slow and finicky business, but with a small tear or two, it was done. The meringue discs were thing and chewy. The next step was just to pile them up and layer with ganache, chilling for an hour between each layer. I spread, I leveled, I waited, I chatted with Lily and with her apprentice Rob as I finished up the day's bread.

The top middle layer came out a bit thicker than the lower top layer of ganache, but all in all it was a respectable job of assembly. Despite a few attempts, I couldn't manage the decorative spoon design that Rose recommends, so I just put in a little swirl.

The cake was certainly good--it was basically a truffle in cake form, with the ganache layers larger than the cake layers, and it looked pretty cut (sorry, no slice shot this time). While it wasn't my favorite ever, it was an excellent choice for a Passover-observing chocolate fanatic.

Oh, and the bread is looking pretty good, too. This is a sourdough loaf.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Apricot Roll with Lacquer Glaze

When I took on the Heavenly Cakes, I knew it wasn't going to be all bundts and lemon syrup.

This week, the cake complexity took a wild leap and landed in the weeds of roulades, glazes, and all kinds of ways to beat chocolate with sugar--the Chocolate Apricot Roll with Lacquer glaze. This was also the first cake I've made at the bakery, where I've grown very comfortable baking bread, but had to learn my way around all over again in the sweet department.

The main trick of this cake is the separate creation of a number of parts, and then the perfectly timed assembly of said elements. It takes time, and some dexterity, and I have only a partial measure of each, so there were some errors. The final product, while very delicious and more or less elegant, could be improved by a few simple fixes that I learned as I went--too late for this time, but now I know. I don't know why I would expect anything so complicated to come out perfectly the first time.  My main flaw was probably impatience--at the bakery, my time is sometimes limited, and even when it isn't, I have no distractions to help me let things take their time, and often an incentive to clear a surface or finish a job quickly. As you'll see, these factors may have led me to rush this cake a bit.

This cake. This cake began with my first biscuit (bis-KWEE) roulade, a soft, flat sponge cake made on a half-sheet pan. The recipe was simple, although it has several steps. The biscuit is an eggy, butterless cake made with egg whites as the main leavener. There's plenty of whipping and folding, and at last it's all spread onto a lined half-sheet and baked very briefly. I'm still a bit unsure of what the bakery convection ovens will do to cooking times and browning, and I wound up taking the cake out after only 5 minutes of the recommended 8, because it was browned and seemed resilient. I might thus have slightly underbaked it, but only slightly, as the convection fans are powerful. However, I attribute any lack of firm height it later displayed to this underbake, and to a slight undercooling, I may not have let it take all of the time it needed as I needed to leave the bakery and get to my internship.

The ganache, too, lacked time to take its sweet time, because although I had intended to make it first, I had to leave it until second because I found I didn't know where the valve was on the stove in the bakery, and had to wait until Lily came in to show me (I'd guessed properly, but didn't want to take any chances).

Still, everything was looking pretty good as I worked my way through the five pages of the recipe. The apricot ganache went smoothly (I threw in a tablespoon of apricot filling instead of apricot brandy, and then I assembled the naked roll. Here, because I didn't let everything properly take its time, is where I believe the cake got a little squashed down and the ganache flowed as much as spread. I didn't make my own levkar, opting instead to use some stiff apricot filling that Lily had on hand, slightly moistened with water. The rolling was a little uneven, because the ganache was still flowing a bit, so the filling didn't end up entirely even, but it worked, a layer of apricot jam, a layer of ganache, roll that puppy up. I was impressed by how easily the soft cake rolled, as I'd always feared that would be the most difficult part of a roulade. I wasn't really thinking, though, of how close it is in nature to a crepe or pancake, which of course rolls easily.

At this point, I left my somewhat lumpy creation in the refrigerator, went to go catalogue news videos.

The next morning, as I set the bread to proof, I got to work on the lacquer glaze, which is the glaze on the cake on the cover of the book, and apparently a newish discovery (at least post-cake bible). The secret to its gloss is gelatin, whisked in at the last minute.I had some trouble with the glaze, which begins with melting some sugar and water over the stove. Although the sugar appeared melted, I feel that I may have left it a bit crunchy, which affected the liquidity of the whole. Next, cocoa is mixed into the sugar, which left it very stiff. Here is the place where I probably should have added a bit more water, but I was trying to follow the beaten path for once, and so I just put it back over the stovetop, whipped in cream, and brought almost to a boil. Then it cooled a bit, I whipped gelatin in, and there it was. When I saw the instruction to 'pour' the glaze over the cake, I knew there was a bit of an issue, as mine was more spreadable consistency. I spread it a bit, hoping it would magically smooth its gelatinized self out, but more predictably, it didn't, and I finally gave in, added more cream and a little heat to the remaining glaze, and had a thick, glossy finish to pour over the slightly lumpy log. It would have been better to avoid putting all the lumps on in the first place, as they didn't go away, but the finished product was satisfactorily slick and glossy.

I didn't get a great picture of the finished roll, and especially not of the middle, which was prettier, but here's what it looked like after I trimmed the ends.  And here below are the ends themselves, a sweet, chocolate-saturated, vaguely eastern European/Passover tasting creation. Lily was kind enough to humour me and put it in the case to sell--a few people even bought slices and liked it. Next time, more cooling for sponge and ganache, and more liquidity in the glaze, would make it perfect. The apricot faded into the background a bit under the chocolate avalanche, so next time I'd spring for the apricot liqueur to heighten the flavor.

But I no longer fear roulade.   

Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Caramel Chestnut Cake

I must have really been missing elaborate cakes. Although if you asked me, I'd almost surely tell you that I love crispy, buttery, nutty desserts, cream and fruit over chocolate, and pies over cakes, somehow when it was my turn to pick the week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, I went all out. I picked the Chocolate Caramel Chestnut Cake, a three-layer extravaganza filled with chopped nuts and buttery ganache, and then covered in more chocolate glaze. No joke.

The magic word, of course, was chestnuts. No one, not even, I dare to say, an Appalachian farmer living through the winter on them before the blight, could love chestnuts more than I do. I love everything about them, from their hokey homey-ness, their association with fires and hot cider, and their sweet, firm, and slightly dry roasted selves. I love them from street vendors and hot out of the oven. I adore them with brussels sprouts and dream of them in stuffing. Chestnuts are it.

Cake? What cake?
Oh, this one.

As many TWD participants mentioned, this was an extravagant and expensive cake. Over a pound of butter, a pint of cream, and nearly a pound and a half of various chocolates, not to mention the chestnut paste and chopped chestnuts. This was a CAKE. Just thinking about it makes me feel awed and giggly.

It was also a two-day affair. (Some, like the Engineer Baker, made it a one-day affair by skipping out on all the trimmings. As you can see, she was pleased enough by the cake plain and simple. This may be me next time--I'll be making truffles out of my ganache if nobody minds.)

It began with ganache--a stovetop caramel, lightened with cream, flavored with milk and dark chocolates, and thickened with butter. That went into the refrigerator, and on to the cake.
The cake was a butter cake, creamed and sugared, with the addition of a cup of sweetened chestnut paste, and lightened with beaten egg whites. I made mine in a 2"x8" pan and found it filled it nicely, although because the pan was smaller and taller than recommended, it took nearly 45 minutes longer to cook. The cake, wrapped well, went into the refrigerator with the ganache.

Two days later, assembly. Cake was sliced into three layers, and trimmed and leveled to perfection. Each layer was brushed with a syrup of Campari and sugar. Following the syrup, a full cup of ganache was luxuriantly spread over each layer, followed by chopped almonds--(it was supposed to be chopped chestnuts, but the chestnuts at the corner bodega were clearly from last year, dry, hard, and sadly, moldy.  I was able to salvage a few for decoration, but the almonds had to do last minute duty. Next time.)

The remaining ganache iced the cake, and then...wait for it...I poured a dark chocolate glaze over that. In the final slices, it was beautiful to see the two layers of color in the chocolate icing. This was serious cake. I had intended to freeze it and present it to my family for Thanksgiving, as I won't be there with them, but there was a more immediate need, and off the cake went to load-in for Granada, my theater company's new play, where dusty and exhausted producers and crew were able to add some richly-deserved chocolatey smears to their talented faces.

Here is the recipe, adapted from its appearance in Bon Appetit in 2005.

Chocolate-Caramel Cake with Gold-Dusted Chestnuts
by Dorie Greenspan

Ingredients:
Caramel ganache
9 ounces high-quality milk chocolate (such as Lindt or Perugina)
3 ounces bittersweet (not unsweetened) or semisweet chocolate, finely chopped
6 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons water
1 cinnamon stick
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons heavy whipping cream
1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (21/4 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

Cake:
2 cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/4 cups (packed) golden brown sugar, divided
4 large eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup sweetened chestnut spread with vanilla (or several cooked chestnuts spun in the processor with some vanilla and sugar)
1/4 cup whole milk

Brandy syrup
1/4 cup brandy
2 tablespoons golden brown sugar
24 jarred peeled whole chestnuts; 12 coarsely chopped, 12 left whole (about 7.25 ounces)

Glaze
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
8 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
Edible gold dust (optional)

Preparation
For ganache:

Combine milk chocolate and bittersweet chocolate in medium bowl. Stir sugar, 2 tablespoons water, and cinnamon stick in heavy medium saucepan over medium-low heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat and boil without stirring until syrup turns deep amber, occasionally brushing down sides of pan with wet pastry brush and swirling pan, about 6 minutes (time will vary depending on size of pan). Add cream and salt (mixture will bubble vigorously). Bring caramel to boil, whisking until smooth and caramel bits dissolve, about 1 minute. Discard cinnamon stick. Pour hot caramel over chocolate; stir until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth. Let stand until completely cool, stirring occasionally, about 1 hour.

Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until fluffy. Beat in chocolate mixture in 4 additions. Cover and refrigerate ganache overnight.

For cake:

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and flour 9x9x2-inch metal baking pan. Line bottom of pan with parchment paper. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt into medium bowl. Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until fluffy. Beat in 1 cup brown sugar, then egg yolks and vanilla extract. Beat in chestnut spread, then milk. Sift dry ingredients over and gently mix together. Using clean dry beaters, beat egg whites in another large bowl until soft peaks form. Add remaining 1/4 cup brown sugar and beat until stiff but not dry. Fold egg whites into batter in 3 additions.

Transfer batter to pan. Bake cake until golden and tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 48 minutes. Cut around cake to loosen. Cool cake completely in pan on rack.

For syrup:

Stir brandy and brown sugar in small bowl until sugar dissolves.

To assemble: 
Turn cake out onto work surface. Peel off parchment. Using long serrated knife, cut cake horizontally into 3 equal layers. Place 1 cake layer, cut side up, on 8x8-inch cardboard square. Brush cake layer with half of brandy syrup. Spread with 1 cup ganache (ganache may needs some time out of the refrigerator first to become spreadable--KS). Sprinkle with half of chopped chestnuts. Top with second cake layer, cut side up. Repeat with remaining brandy syrup, 1 cup ganache, and remaining chopped chestnuts. Top with remaining cake layer, cut side up. Spread remaining ganache over top and sides of cake. Place cake rack on sheet of foil; place assembled cake on rack. Chill while preparing glaze.

For glaze:
Bring cream, sugar, and 1/4 cup water to boil in heavy medium saucepan, stirring until sugar dissolves. Add chocolate and whisk until melted and glaze is smooth. Let cool until thick but still pourable, about 4 hours (it only took mine about 10 minutes-KS).

Pour glaze atop cake, spreading evenly over sides. Chill until glaze sets.

Brush 12 whole chestnuts with gold dust. Arrange chestnuts across top of cake. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover with cake dome and refrigerate. Let cake stand at least 4 hours and up to 8 hours at room temperature.) Serve cake at room temperature.