It's All About the Technique (Not a Blow Job Post)

I don't know why I persist in baking new cakes, despite the accumulation, by now, of a substantive repertoire of chocolate deliciousness for all occasions. Perhaps that persistence is related to my penchant for new projects, new running routes, and new vacation spots. Ironically, the one arena in which I am prone to repetition is food: I could eat nothing but bread and butter for weeks in a row, and at the restaurants I return to again and again, I always order the same thing. Although, come to think of it, I like the same vacation spots as much as I like the new ones, so perhaps there is no determining thread, and I should just get to the cakes.

Passover was approaching, and despite past successes (did you say Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake?), I was once again poring over the cookbooks I've already read dozens of times. And a good thing too, because I found something new: Joan Nathan's Prince Albert Cake.

My aunt in Israel always bakes the same things. There is cheesecake and N's cake and C's cake. C is my dad, and his cake is a chocolate cake in which you bake part of the batter into cake and then you spread the rest of the batter (unbaked) on top of the cake (baked) and it becomes a mousse-like topping. Yum. Now go click on that link. Yes! It seemed as if Joan Nathan's Prince Albert Cake might be C's cake.

Only it wasn't. I emailed my aunt, and she gave me the recipe for C's cake in indecipherable form (list of ingredients in grams, no instructions) but with sufficient information that I could tell Joan Nathan's Prince Albert Cake was not C's cake (for one thing, C's cake has a lot of flour).

Still, it seemed worth trying. But not without searching the internet. First I googled Prince Albert Cake and discovered little of relevance except the Joan Nathan recipe I'd already discovered, which was not promising. Then I did my usual cruise through AllRecipes.com and Epicurious, generically seeking cakes, and found Chocolatissimo, which, strangely, had basically the same ingredients as Prince Albert Cake, but a different technique. What to do?! Try the Prince Albert Cake, as previously resolved.

In the Prince Albert Cake you beat the butter with half the sugar, add the egg yolks one at a time, fold in the melted chocolate, whip the egg whites with the other half the sugar, fold in the egg whites, bake 2/3 of the batter in two pans (the recipe says one 12 x 18 pan, then cut it in half, but who has a 12 x 18 pan?! I baked it in two 9" circles and skipped the cutting in half), chill the other 1/3, then spread the chilled batter between the layers and on top. OK, easy enough, except something just didn't seem right: the batter was pretty ugly and kind of buttery, as in tiny bits of butter. But with grated chocolate on top it looked good, and the first seder guests were satisfied. It was a pretty hefty slab of fudgeness, with a good taste in the mouth and on the tongue, but so sweet that it almost hurt your teeth. The next morning, though, it was better.

Still, I was not satisfied. A good enough cake is not good enough for me. Then I realized that Chocolate Meringue Truffle Torte, which I was thinking of making for the second seder, needed to chill for a full day or night, and it was already noon on Sunday. So I decided to try the Chocolatissimo, which seemed, instinctually, to make more sense, and would let us see what kind of difference baking technique made with the same ingredients.

In the Chocolatissimo, you melt the chocolate with the butter, beat the egg yolks with the sugar (a little more than half the sugar in the Prince Albert, which made a definite difference), fold the chocolate/butter into the egg yolks, whip the egg whites (no sugar), fold in the egg whites, bake 2/3 the batter in one layer, and chill the rest of the batter and spread it on top. At every moment of the process, this cake made total sense (though I did not make total sense, especially when, separating my 14th egg of the weekend, I broke some yolk into the bowl which already held four whites, and then dumped the contaminated whites down the sink, instead of saving them to combine with the four additional yolks I would create, by separating an extra four eggs for the cake, to make the four eggs we would need for the matza kugel, but that's a different story). And this cake...

This cake was phenomenal! It looked beautiful, it tasted delicious, it drew the desired raves and recipe requests, it's going on the record as the Passover cake to make--except S insists that come next year, I'll be looking for new cakes, because that's what I do, regardless of technique.