Saturday, October 15, 2011

The Magic of Chocolate

N asked tonight what I was going to write about this week. The first thing that came to mind was the cake I made this week. But then I remember, I made a kickin’ chicken chili, too.

Surely both deserve mention, but this week, it’s just going to be the cake.

There was a bake sale coming up at work. I knew I would make something…I always do. I love baking and homemade things make people happy. Normally I would consider trying something new, especially when we’re in the middle of a season of Top Chef: Just Desserts.

This time, however, I had a request to fulfill.

I’ve been making this Guinness chocolate cake for several years. It all started at my friend Sheila’s wedding. She asked me to make her cake and she told me about this cake she had at a local restaurant. So I found this recipe, and the rest, as they say, it history.

It is, hands down, the most requested cake I have ever made. I’ve made it for four weddings, several birthdays and other special occasions. The first few times I made it, I frosted it with white icing because it was for weddings.

The recipe, however, comes with it’s own icing. A chocolate ganache. And that’s what has become famous among my friends.

The cake is dense and rich and moist. And when you top it with a bittersweet ganache, it becomes mouthful after mouthful of rich, chocolately goodness. It’s not to sweet, exceedingly decadent.

The recipe makes a gigantic cake. Three deep layers of fudgy cake is a lot. So I usually serve only two layers when I take it somewhere. Especially when someone else is going to serve. It’s hard to cut and serve a cake that is probably eight or nine inches tall and three layers.

So, I did a two layer cake with the ganache on top for the bake sale at work and split the single layer (with my fantastic 14” cake splitter knife) and iced it with a simple buttercream for the birthday girl.

The birthday cake was a total hit. The Bunny loves cake and it was wonderful to be able to make her a cake for her birthday.

The bake sale cake…well, I’ve auctioned that cake off at work before, so it’s sort of legendary there. Which is why it was requested. :o) And now a whole new group of people have been introduced to it’s magic.

You may think I’m tooting my own horn quite a bit, but I’m really not. It’s such a great recipe and it’s not fussy at all. Not the cake, anyway. The only thing you really have to be careful of is making sure your cocoa, butter and beer mixture is cool enough before you add it to the eggs and sour cream. If it’s too hot, you could cook your eggs and that would be very bad.

The really nervewracking part of this cake is the ganache. Ganache is relatively simple on paper. You heat cream, pour it over chopped chocolate, stir until the chocolate melts, let it cool until it’s the consistency you need it for your recipe.

Do it right and you get a beautifully textured mixture that goes onto a cake so easily, then it solidifies to a point where you can make the corners and edges of your cake sharp as a knife’s edge.

No problem, right?

Wrong.

If you overheat the cream, it breaks down the fats in the chocolate and you get a lumpy, gross-looking mess that you can’t do anything with. It still tastes good, so you could eat it with a spoon. But you can’t serve it. Broken ganaches make the angels cry. Okay, maybe not the angels, but it makes me cry. It’s made me cry several times before. And say lots of bad words. Lots.

Under heat the cream and your chocolate doesn’t get melted all the way. Then you have to baby it either on the stove or in the microwave to get the chocolate just warm enough to melt without breaking. It’s very stressful.

But when everything goes right, when the cream is just hot enough to melt the chocolate, when you catch the chilling ganache at just the perfect moment when it is easy to spread and doesn’t immediately solidify on the cake, it is a wonder to behold.

You can make a pretty impressive, professional-looking cake with a minimum of fussing.

That precision fascinates me. I don’t consider myself a terribly precise person. I don’t weigh my baking ingredients. I tend to measure everything on the generous side. I don’t use cake flour even when a recipe specifically calls for it.

But riding that fine line, looking for that perfect moment when it’s time to move to the next step, watching the transformation of a liquid and a solid into this wonderous amalgam that allows you only minutes to work with it when it’s at that just right place. That is what really gets me jazzed about making this recipe.

Well, that, and the delighted faces of people eating what I’ve baked. Because ultimately it’s feeding people good food that makes me happy.

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