Hey Everyone, lets talk baking disasters!
Have you ever dropped an entire layer cake? I don’t mean just a little bump but a full drop, with a cartoon-like sploosh as it hits the floor? Over the 13 years of doing this job I have had my fair share of accidents; wedding cakes being damaged en route has left me severely allergic to making that particular style of cake, but when it comes to dropping cakes, that has amazingly only happened twice. The first disaster was on a magazine photoshoot. I was commissioned to make a very special patisserie-worthy chocolate cake; it was assembled with passion fruit curd and layers of chocolate ganache and given a beautifully shiny glaze, it was a really gorgeous cake. Part of making the cake involved freezing it, before it could be glazed. As I opened the freezer door to remove the cake, as if in slow motion, I watched the cake slide out and fall to the floor, landing upside down with a deep thud. The second time this happened was yesterday. I made the cake you can see in this post and it was looking beautiful, I lifted it up to transfer it to the fridge. I misjudged the centre of gravity and it slipped from my hands and fell to the floor creating a mess bigger than you could ever imagine. The worst part? Not only had I wasted so many ingredients and so much time, I hadn’t even photographed the cake yet; the pictures you are seeing are from the second time I made the cake, which I made this morning so I could the recipe to you for the weekend. But what even is this weeks recipe?
The ultimate chocolate cake, that was the brief. Does this achieve that lofty goal? Honestly, I have no idea, but it might just be my favourite chocolate cake, that I’ve made, and eaten, in a very long time. I was given the brief when I was part of a live recording of the Ask Ronna podcast last week at Kings Place Theatre, one of the hosts had been on a mission to find the ultimate chocolate cake. The cake got an incredible response, with multiple people telling me it was the best thing they had ever eaten. I always take those compliments with a big pinch of salt, partly because I don’t take compliments very well and partly because I am always critical of my own work, but also because people are naturally very kind when you are stood right in front of them.
The cake element is a very simple affair, inspired and adapted from a layer cake that appears in my book Small Batch Bakes. That particular cake is filled with a simple dulce de leche frosting but I wanted to amp things up a bit with this cake. The cake is cut into thin layers and sandwiched with layers of whipped salted caramel (see last weeks newsletter) and layers of rich chocolate ganache. The whole cake is then covered in more of that same ganache. It’s the cake Bruce Bogtrotter wishes he’d have been able to eat in Matilda. The cake may also appear a little smaller than usual and that would be an astute observation, it’s only 6 inches wide (most layer cakes are either 8 or 9 inches). But the cake is rich and despite its size will still happily serve a crowd, a little will definitely go a long way with this one.
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