Sunday was my son’s 41st birthday so of course we had to have cake! My family doesn’t eat a lot of cake. Not that we don’t like it because we certainly do. A little too much, in fact. We just reserve cakes and pies and sweets in general for special occasions. So we get birthday cakes 6 times a year and probably a couple more “just because” cakes when all of us get together. Daryn has requested boxed cake mix cakes for years because he likes the oily fluffiness of them. To my daughter and me, this is cake heresy.
So this year I vowed to find the oiliest fluffiest cake recipe out there. After 41 years, I finally came up with a homemade cake that Dz actually liked. Presenting…
Brazilian Chocolate Chiffon Cake
with strawberries and custard
The cake:
Preheat your oven to 325*
Pour 1 ¼ cup hot very strong coffee* over:
4 squares of baker’s chocolate chopped
2 TBS margarine or butter
¼ to ½ ** tsp hot red pepper flakes
½ to 1** tsp cinnamon
½ tsp baking soda
and stir until chocolate is melted. *I ground coffee beans until they were espresso powder consistency, put a couple of heaping teaspoons in my glass measuring cup and then poured boiling water into it and let it steep awhile. Then I reheated it in the microwave and poured the whole mess over the chocolate. Most of the coffee grounds stayed in the cup. You can use 2 heaping teaspoons of instant crap coffee but… I’m just saying…
**The amount of pepper flakes and cinnamon depends on how much you like those flavors. I used more pepper flakes because we like more and less cinnamon because I was serving strawberries and cream with the cake. In moderation both intensify the flavor of the chocolate as does the coffee and you hardly know they are there. Adding more pepper flakes does give the cake an unexpected bite. You can also use cayenne pepper.
Set the chocolate mixture aside to cool and sift together:
2 Cups cake flour
1 ½ cup sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
Make a well in the dry ingredients and add in order:
1 1/2 cup canola oil
7 unbeaten egg yolks
cooled* coffee and chocolate mixture
2 tsp vanilla
Stir with a spoon until the mixture is smooth. Do not beat. You do not want the gluten to start binding together. The less you stir the fluffier the cake will be.
*Make sure your coffee and chocolate mixture has cooled to room temperature. Too hot and it will cook the egg yolks and you don’t want that!
Beat slowly until the eggs whites start bubbling:
1 cup of egg whites (7 or 8)
½ tsp cream of tartar
Then crank the mixer up to high and beat until the egg whites form stiff glossy peaks. Fold, do not stir, the chocolate batter into the egg whites just until they are incorporated. There should be light streaks, medium streaks and a few dark streaks in the batter.
Bake in three ungreased 9” cake pans (or in the case of the cake pictured above one 10 inch flan pan and two 8”pans) at 325* for 25-35 minutes, then check with a tooth pick. If it comes out clean, the cake is done. If it’s got gooey stuff on it bake another 5-10 minutes and check again.
OR
Bake in an ungreased angel food cake pan for 55 minutes. Increase the heat to 350* and bake another 10-15 minutes and test with a toothpick.
What comes next is probably the most ambitious cake project I have ever attempted. I should have stuck to plain old cake with Ganache icing but noooo, I had to try fancy. All I can say is DO NOT attempt this unless you are an experienced cake decorator or you are prepared to fail. I failed. Spectacularly.
Strawberries and Custard Filling
I wish I could give you a good recipe for this. The one I made tasted good but it was a total flop as far as constructing the cake went. I wish I had an excuse to make another cake to see if I could pull it off, having learned from my mistakes but given the expense of the key ingredients (13 eggs! 3 cups of heavy cream, 10 squares of baking chocolate, a bag of Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips and a pint of strawberries), I will have to wait until the next special occasion to experiment. Or not. If you insist on doing this, use the custard of your choice and slice some strawberries up in it. Don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.
Ganache
Where have I been all these years that I had not discovered you can cover a cake in semi-sweet chocolate candy??? Sweet!
On medium heat in a heavy pan, scald 1 ½ cup of whipping cream or to be safe, do it over a double boiler. Watch it carefully because it will scorch in a heart beat. That would be bad. While it is heating, in a heat proof bowl put:
1 bag of Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips,
6 squares of bitter-sweet baking chocolate
1 TBS corn syrup (I used coconut syrup)
2 TBS unsalted butter
2 TBS Dutch processed cocoa mixed with a little of the hot cream.
Just before the cream starts to boil, pour it over the chocolate and other ingredients and start stirring. Stir until the chocolate melts and the mixture is smooth. Refrigerate for 1-2 hours until it is of the consistency you can still pour it onto the cake and spread it like frosting. Start assembling your cake.
Here’s where things started going south for me. The strawberries and custard in the well of the flan layer, worked out great but the second layer, not so much. The custard was supposed to sit on top of the second layer but it was way too loose. I might not have cooled it down enough. The kitchen might have been too hot. I also should have listened to my gut and gone with my instinct that the recipe I was referencing for the custard called for way too much whipped cream. Probably three times as much as it should have had in it to do what they claimed it was going to do. In other words, 1 ½ cups of heavy cream vs ½ cup of heavy cream whipped. That was my first big mistake.
At any rate, the strawberries and custard started sliding off the second layer of cake immediately. I threw the whole mess in the refrigerator and took a break to contemplate my impending disaster. Then it occurred to me that I could just make a well in the second layer of cake and slap the third layer of cake on top of it to contain it. So I scraped all the strawberries and cream off the second layer, dug a well by cutting a circle 1 ½ inch from the edge of the cake and hollowing it out about 1 ½ inch down. Then I filled it up with the strawberries and cream and used some of the ganache to glue the top layer onto the second layer. That worked for the most part BUT I should have glued the second layer to the flan base too. Mistake number two. Strawberries and cream started oozing out of the bottom layer. Gaaaah!
About now the Ganache is starting to set up big time, desperately trying to turn back into chocolate chips and squares. So I’m starting to panic and I start slapping Ganache on there, trying to use it like Spackle and I’m filling in nail holes on the wall, getting chocolate everywhere. Oh brother… Then it hits me. I can probably just heat this stuff back up to get it back to pouring and spreading consistency again. Ah, yes, that works. Deep breath, all is not lost, yet…
Finally it’s together and doesn’t look nearly as awful as I thought it was going to look. In fact, I’m rather pleased with it, all things considered. I decide I will use this recipe for Ganache again but I need something better than a table knife to apply it with. I put an offset icing spatula on my Amazon wish list.
So 10 long hours after I started baking I have a cake to take to my son’s birthday party. In a fit of laziness, I buy some canned whip cream to cover up the worst of the messiness and make my THIRD big mistake.
My daughter comes to pick me up and talks me into letting the cake be seat belted into the back seat rather than riding on my lap where I can keep it upright. You KNOW where this is going, right? HUGE mistake number FOUR. I knew before I took it out of the car that I was in crisis mode again. The top two layers have slid off of the flan layer and are smushed up against the lid of the cake carrier.
We decide to deal with it in the morning and stick it into Kerryn’s refrigerator. It doesn’t look irreparable and canned whipped cream can cover a lot of sins. Right? Right.
Sooo I’m up early and at K’s house looking for coffee by 7:30. My son-in-law promises to help me fix the cake after Kerryn and I get the roasts in the oven. We begin browning meat, preheating the oven and peeling vegetables. By 10am our dinner is under control and Kerryn and I have made a run to PiggilyWiggily to find the flints for the vintage table lighter I got Dz.
Mike and I get the top two layer of the cake back to where they belong and I proceed to use my trusty can of pressurized whip cream to make pretty flowerets that cover up the worst of the disasters. But wait, before I’m done the flowerets start melting! Oh NOES! The kitchen is too hot from the roasting beef and pork. Back in the fridge it goes!
I go peek at it before dinner and all those pretty whipped cream flowerets have dripped down the side of the cake like whipped cream tears. This cake is looking decidedly and sadly Gothic. THEN I remember that canned whip cream isn’t very stable. Sigh…
In the end before I present the cake to my family and guests, I show them the picture of what it looked like before the whipped cream melted. Then I bring out the sad Gothic mess I had to serve and we all have a good laugh at my expense. Before I can find the camera, they start pulling the chocolate covered strawberries off so Dz can cut it into serving pieces.
Everyone agrees that despite its sad appearance the cake and its damn strawberries and cream custard tastes really good although Jen doesn’t look like she is too sure she wants to taste it in this picture. Dz says it is as fluffy and oily as a boxed mix and I should try again next year. So mostly a success.
In retrospect I should have gone and bought an angel food cake pan or used my Bundt pan and poured the custard and strawberries into the center as advised by one recipe I read but they didn’t have an angel food cake pan at the store and I was afraid my Bundt pan wouldn’t work well enough. I wanted a flat top for the chocolate covered strawberries. Right…
Oh yeah, the vintage lighter doesn’t work either. It needs one of these:
On the other hand it looks really cool but I forgot to take a picture of it. It looks like this but is cooler because it is black and tan and shinier.
We are looking for a working model to get the part we need.
B
