Chocolate Genoise

Every now and then I crave chocolate cake. A couple of months ago when that happened, I made Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache from Rose's Heavenly Cakes. I made them in cupcake format and they weren't very pretty so I didn't bother to take pictures and blog about it. I made too much Midnight Ganache so I froze the leftover, knowing they will come in handy at some point.

HCB: White Gold Passion Genoise

Passion fruit!!! Where have you been all my life?

HCB: Red Fruit Shortcake

This is Red, Blue, and Purple Shortcake. So named because in addition to strawberries, I used blueberries and frozen marionberries.

I didn't use raspberries, as the recipe prescribed.

I planned to do so. Last Thursday I went to the grocery store and bought strawberries and raspberries, 2 pounds each. They were on sale, so I thought why not!

I went home and told hubby that 1 pint of raspberry is for me and 1 pint for him. I also warned him that some of the strawberries will be for dessert. So don't eat it all, I said.

On Saturday morning, I wanted about to start on the cake. First order of business, macerating the berries. I opened the fridge and found strawberries but no raspberries. Asked husband and apparently he had eaten all of the raspberries.

They were that good! :)

HCB: Genoise Tres Cafe

My 59th cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes: Genoise Tres Cafe. I was looking forward to this cake. It's genoise - with the magical beurre noisette as the base.

For a change, I made the full recipes, baked in several different pans. I got these mini heart shaped pan last year at Sur La Table. It was one of those impulse buy on my 1st visit to the store. I have not used it and at some point regretted buying them. Then I saw this post on Hector's website last December where he used Wilton's miniature heart pan to bake a genoise. Hector said that genoise bake well in any shaped pan. I have been planning on using my heart shaped pan ever since.

There are still a lot of batter leftover after filling up 4 mini heart pan. So I used a 6-cavity Wilton mini heart silicone pan for the rest. Even after that, I still have leftover batter, so I used the financier pan. So yeah this genoise produced 10 mini heart shaped cakes and 4 financiers.

Okay, enough talking about the pans. Let's talk about the cake.

The genoise is easy enough. By now I should be able to do this with my eyes closed. Well ehem.. okay.. maybe not that exactly, but it is easy indeed.

The ganache, as always, proved to be difficult. Or it's just my incompetence talking because I curdled it. Thanks to Rose that in this recipe she mentioned how to save the ganache. I remelted it, rechilled, and rebeat. And it curdled again!

Annoyed (at myself), I remelted it again. This time, I told myself, I better not mess it up. Phew, 3rd time's the charm. It didn't curdle and I was able to pipe pretty decoration on one of the stacked heart cakes. By the time I wanted to do the same decoration on the other little cakes, the ganache was too soft. I re-whip it manually, and it was still too soft and threatened to curdle.

Okay then I give up. No way I'm going to melt the ganache for the 4th time. At least I got a pretty little heart cake out of it.

Tasting impression:
YUM! I'm not a big coffee drinker. I love the smell of coffee more than the taste. Not a huge fan of mocha either, but this cake packs a punch. I love the flavor of the cake and combined with the mocha ganache it is awesome.

HCB: True Orange Genoise

In an attempt of baking more often but eating less quantity, I vowed to try to make 1/2 recipes from now on. So for this week's selection, I baked 1/2 the genoise in 6 inch pan. I measured everything correctly, but alas, the genoise only turn out to be 1 inch tall! I was too sad and annoyed (and lazy) to remake it so I went ahead with the rest of the recipe.

The syrup was a breeze to make - I used Grand Marnier instead of Triple Sec since that's what I have on hand.

There has been many discussions among my HCB friends about finding Seville oranges. I couldn't find any here so I went with navel oranges instead. Making the orange curd was pretty easy. I love the smell of the curd as I was stirring it on the stove. Smell so orange-y (this is not a real word, though I think it should be :) and tart! It taste yummy too (I stole a spoonful) - and I can't imagine how much better Seville orange curd would have tasted.

I actually had mixed feelings about this cake. Flavor-wise, I was really looking forward it because my favorite chocolate is dark chocolate with oranges. What worries me is because it calls for ganache. Ganache is my nemesis in baking!!! The first time I made ganache last year, it turned grainy and gooey and icky looking so I threw it out. The second time I made it, it never set - even after a day of refrigeration (though it didn't go to waste this time, I bought strawberries and banana and had a yummy chocolate fondue :)). Oh, and keep in mind that I tried different recipes here - so it's not the recipes' fault. You would think third time's the charm, but no, not in this case. The light-whipped ganache I made last month - I renamed into chocolate butter. The texture was odd, too creamy and it didn't want to stick to the cake. It still taste good and we ate the whole cake :). This weekend was the fourth attempt of said nemesis. I made 2/3 of the ganache. Everything went well and I leave the ganache to set in a container at room temperature while I made some soup. Well, 1/2 hour afterwards the ganache looks like it has set so I prepped the cake to be decorated. By the time I was gonna spread the ganache, it was too hard to spread easily. I still persevered but I ended up pushing some of the curd out (they were oozing from the sides of the cake). It's no big loss though I think the cake would lose some of its orange flavor. Back to ganache, I managed to spread it all around the cake nicely - but I didn't have anything left to drizzle on top of the cake (though at this point the ganache is not drizzalable). So I went ahead and made a small batch of it. I made 1/5 of the recipe. This quantity is too small to do in a small food processor, or so I found out right away. So I scrape the whole thing off to a saucepan and heat on low heat while mixing on the stove. This is where the disaster happen. The mixture start to separate. It looks oily and odd. I was about to give up when I remembered an advice from Annie (from Rose's blog) about adding some cream to it. I added about 1 tsp of cream and mix, still looks odd, I add 1 more tsp of cream, and the whole thing came back looking more like ganache. The good thing about the cream also is that it makes the ganache drizzalable (I love this made up word :). And this is the result...



Lalala... I'm so happy that I managed to save ganache...



Tasting impressions: I love this cake! It's really really good! I do wish it's a bit more tart or orange-y. And I realized after it's all done that Rose give tips of reducing the juice oranges if not using Seville - which I forgot to do. Oh well, for next time. For now, I am enjoying this yummy yummy cake.

HCB: Tortas de las Tres Leches

I have never heard of this cake before and was very curious as to what it would taste like. The idea of a cake that is soaked in 4 different kinds of dairy mixture sounds so odd. I was so intrigued that I made the cake a week ahead :).

The cake itself is easy to put together. Combine eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt and whisk over simmering water. The eggs was already at room temperature so it didn't take long for it to get warm to the touch - as Rose suggested. Then beat the eggs mixture on high until it tripled in volume. Then sifted flour and fold until everything is well mixed. I have to admit that this time my arm got tired folding the flour in! It feels like forever until everything is mixed, and I was afraid that my slow arm caused the batter to lose volume and ended up destroying the cake. Well about 1/2 hour later, I found out that everything's fine. The cake turned out looking so nice that I had to take a picture of it. It did rose a bit in the center, but it became flat right away after I flip it out of the pan.


Oh did I also mention my kitchen smells like egg heaven when this cake is baking. YUM!

Rewind a little bit, while the cake was baking I made the leche mixture. I should've planned better and made this before I started the cake because it took about an hour for the the milk mixture to reduced by half. Once it's reduced, I added the heavy cream and condensed milk. After both the cake and the milk mixture cooled - I put the cake inside a small trash bag. I figured using a trash bag is easier then using 2 sheets of plastic wrap. I placed the cake back inside the cake pan, then poured the milk mixture over the cake. Then everything is refrigerated for 8 hours.

8 hours later...
I took the cake out of the fridge. Then lifted the trash bag. I've decided I was not about to attempt to flip this heavily soaked cake. I was too afraid that my hands would slip and the whole thing would be splattered all over the floor. So using a really long metal spatula, I lifted the middle of the cake a bit and pulled the trash bag away. It worked :)!

At this point it was already 8 PM. So I didn't bother with fancy decorations and just decorated the cake simply - like in the book. Here's the result.



I found it funny that you can see some milk oozing out of the bottom of the cake.



Tasting impressions: I love this cake and so did everyone. It's very moist (with all those milk) and lightly sweet. The taste is better than I had anticipated, so I was glad I made it :).