Working on FL's Cake
In an ever increasing effort to become more professional in my insanity I went to both the library and safeway tonight. I got 3 books on baking to look up the recipes I want to try this weekend.
The cake that Tirzah and I made this weekend was basically a dud. We pulled a recipe off the internet and quickly decided we wanted to use a dfifferent white chocolate Mousse recipe. We still wanted to try the cake recipe though. So the first cake was made. Tirzah had pre-heated the oven. What I did not realize when I put the cake in the oven, is that Tirzah turned the oven up to 400 degrees to pre-heat it. We didn't realize this until the cake was well and truly burned. We pulled the cake out, put together another batch and made sure the oven was the right temperture. In the meantime the first batch cooled enough to taste.
We found the texture to be 1/2 spongy and 1/2 rubbery. We figured that the rubbery part was due to the cake cooking too quickly but the 2nd batch, which we managed to bake at the right temp, ended up being almost completely that rubber texture. At that point I pulled out the cake bible and we found a recipe for sponge cake in there. We took that recipe to try next, replacing half of the egg yolks with the white chocolate mix from the bad juju cake. This resulted in a cake with the right texture but it was still not the best. As the cake cooled it deflated so we ended up cutting the top layer off. Then we decided that based on how thin the cake was we could not slice the layers in half. But if we were only baking one layer and not torting the cake where would the white chocolate mousse go? So we ended up baking another layer. Then Tirzah started working on the mousse. She melted the choclate, added in the other ingredients inlcuding eggs that had been seperated (mental note- get Tirzah's recipe) and mixed everything together. It tasted wonderful but was too liquidy to be a filling. Part of that might have been that it was the last thing we did so it did not have enough time to set up. Sometime I would like to try it again but with time to set. We tried adding unflavored gelitan to the mix but that made the mousse grainy. We pulled the last cake from the oven, cleaned up a little, put the 2 layers together complete with framboise and white chocolate mousse filling and went to the Barony meeting. We left the cake outside because it was colder than a refrigerator outside. when Barony meeting was over we served the cake with the remaining (without gelitan) mousse poured over it
The cake got mixed reactions but on the whole neither Tirzah nor I were satisfied. Hanna said I finally made something that she didn't like. Grrr, it is so frustrating. What I am going to try is a white chocolate ganache, a real cake whether white chocolate or just white cake, drenched in chamborg and maybe a white chocolate fudge filling.
