My darling and very easy-going husband requested a yellow cake with chocolate icing for his birthday this year so I decided to try a recipe I'd been eying for awhile: Yellow Birthday Cake with Fluffy Chocolate Ganache Frosting from Flour by Joanne Chang
. The photo in the book looks delectable -- thick layers of yellow cake, filled and iced with light brown (thanks to the incorporation of lots and lots of air), super fluffy icing. As you might be able to deduce from the artfully-lit photo above, mine didn't exactly turn out that way. The cake was fine -- a little dense, but moist enough for a scratch cake and not excessively greasy the way many scratch yellow cakes seem to turn out (not greasy = dry; moist = greasy). I followed the icing recipe to the letter, but it came out soupy. It was the consistency of cake batter -- imagine trying to ice a cake with that. I can't quite decide what went wrong. Basically, you melt the chocolate with heavy cream over a double-boiler and let cool completely. Then you whip the butter and cream that with confectioner's sugar, salt and flavoring. Finally you add the chocolate-cream mixture and whip 'til it lightens and thickens. Easy-peasy, right? No. The most obvious culprit might be excessive warmth, but my kitchen wasn't particularly hot that day. I even went so far as to see if there were any corrections to the recipe posted on Flour's website, but nadda.
In the end, it was yummy, if very frustrating. It was impossible to ice and smooth, and very difficult to decorate. Chilling the icing before piping just made it go straight from wet to rock hard, so I gave up on that. I attempted to pipe buttercream flowers on the top, but they just sank under the soupy icing. Piping on a border was out of the question. Yuck. The peeps were very understanding and appreciative nevertheless and proclaimed it delicious. I have the sweetest family!
No comments:
Post a Comment