Recent Cakes

I have been making chocolate cakes. I just haven't been blogging them.

For the cake walk at the International Festival at M's school, I made Chocolate Domingo Cake from The Cake Bible. I have a funny relationship to this cake. There's a note on the recipe--in my handwriting--that says

delicious - M likes!
do not refrigerate
39 minutes - too long

so I figured I had made it and it was good, but I didn't remember anything about it. It's a pretty simple recipe (this is basically it, but Rose is a bit more specific: 1/4 cup + 3 tablespoons cocoa; 1 1/2 cups + 1 tablespoon sifted cake flour; beat 1 1/2 minutes the first time, after the ingredients are mixed, and then 20 seconds after adding each part of the remaining cocoa mixture). For the cake walk, I wanted it to be beautiful, so I made a glaze (semisweet chocolate, cream, and a bit of corn syrup) and then decorated it with sugar violets from the excellent old-school cake decorating/supply shop in North City. A ring of violets around the edge, and four in the middle in a little cross shape. General familial agreement that it was the most beautiful cake I had ever made.

But the girls did not win it. They won no cakes in the cakewalk, though one of M's friends, who had never in his life won a cake in the cakewalk, won two, but not mine. So I promised I would make the cake for them, and last week when we had our downstairs neighbors and my dad over for dinner, I made it again (the rest of dinner: ginger dacquiris and stuffed grape leaves, taramosalata, and pita bread from the Greek market at the corner, followed by scallops in green pea sauce on Israeli couscous and asparagus). It is a good cake: just moist enough not to be dry and a fine light chocolate taste. Really, it's a very good cake; there's just something, something...not so exciting about it. But definitely worth making if you need an easy cake that is guaranteed to be good.

Then for our seder I made the famous Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake, though I will admit here what I did not admit at the seder which is that, in fact, S pretty much made it because I ran into big trouble. Since I still lack an 8" springform pan, and I remembered that the cake came out a little thin in the 9", I decided to 1 1/2 the recipe. This, I believe, was a mistake, because when I melted the chocolate with the rum and corn syrup, bad things happened. Bad grainy, lumpy, coagulated chocolate things, that S tried to rescue by way of the microwave and adding water (which you're never supposed to do to chocolate unless these bad things have happened, in which case water apparently has the capacity to redeem, but it didn't). I would have kept going, but S said we had to start over. This may be one reason he is a chef and I am not. He went to the corner Greek market and got more chocolate (very nice chocolate) and this time we melted the chocolate first and then added the corn syrup and rum and mixed them up very fast because it looked like bad things were going to happen again (S was firmly in charge at this point). Mixed the chocolate into the slightly whipped cream quickly quickly, and it worked. Poured the chocolate mixture over the crushed Kosher for Passover chocolate meringues in the bottom of the 9" springform pan, and put it in the fridge. And it was fabulous. We ate some for breakfast this morning.