Thursday, April 8, 2010

The Devil is a Chocolate Salted Caramel Cake.

Easter Sunday was not the finest day for our household. We planned our day around a tutoring session Miles had at 11; we thought we'd go to an early service, Miles would go to tutoring, then we'd relax for the rest of the day. Ha. So we thought. We missed church due to an internet snafu (services were at 10:30, not at 9 as the website said), and Miles' student canceled the lesson right as he was walking out the door (how thoughtful.). In an attempt to turn our day around, I decided to bake a cake.

I may never bake again.

For starters, I should have listened to my mother when she told me it was insane to bake a cake when my kitchen sink was clogged. How many dirty dishes can it possibly make, I thought. I work in a bakery. I should have KNOWN how many dirty dishes it would cause. Mountains of them.

Lesson number 2: always read the recipe in its entirety before you commit to the project. Had I done that, I would have noticed that the recipe required me to make caramel-- twice-- which is something I'd never done before. That may have given me pause. Oh, if only I had been given pause...

The cake baking went fantastically. I have some new Chicago Metallic 8" round pans that performed like magic. While the layers were cooling, I worked on the salted caramel and whipped caramel ganache. Cue the ominous music. I thought caramel batch #1 was a little burned, so I seriously erred on the side of caution for batch #2, which was for the whipped ganache. As a result, the ganache never really achieved the "fluffy" consistency the recipe indicated, even after HOURS of whipping. I'm not exaggerating. We had an EARTHQUAKE, and my little KitchenAid artisan stand mixer was still there in the corner, whipping away.

At Miles's suggestion, I made a 3rd batch of caramel; the idea was that if I added more caramel to my ganache milkshake, maybe it would thicken up. This third batch was PERFECT. The most beautiful batch of caramel you've ever seen. It did nothing for my milkshake. Finally, I decided to just start over with the frosting (keep in mind that we're washing dishes in the bathroom sink because the kitchen sink is so clogged that water is backing up out of the dishwasher. By the end of all of this, I've washed so much chocolate down the bathroom sink that it's coming out of the toilet. That was exciting.).

Batch #4 of caramel was somewhere between batch #3 and batch #1, and when I whipped it, a liquid came out of it that I thought was unusual but just went with. What did I know?? After all of that, the frosting really didn't look that much different than the first batch. At this point, I had made Miles make me a whiskey. I could hardly bear to look at the cake, let alone frost it. But I soldiered through (I know! I'm tough, that's what you're thinking. It's true. I am.). However, at this point, my cake layers had been cooling for about 9 hours. One of the layers had the consistency of almost-dried concrete. Great. I didn't care. I was frosting this cake if it was the last thing I was going to do. As you can imagine, milkshake frosting doesn't exactly stick so well to the side of the cake, so after a little refrigeration, I could get it to do my bidding (must keep this in mind when dealing with Miles).

I'm getting stressed out reliving this, so let's just get to the pictures:





No, they don't let me frost cupcakes at the bakery, if that's what you're wondering. But not toooo bad looking, right? "Rustic" maybe, but not hideously ugly. Take a look at what it looked like the next day:





Sigh.

At least it tasted good. Unfortunately, I now feel like I have to defend my baking skills to Miles, so I think I'll tackle banana cupcakes next. To be continued (cue ominous music)...

No comments:

Post a Comment