For Jake’s second birthday, his mom asked me if I could bake him a Thomas cake. I was really happy about her request, because it allowed me to get creative and use some extra bright, primal colors. As you can see in the pictures, it turned out quite alright! Jake got Thomas, and the guests got a light chocolate cake with rich chocolate and vanilla buttercream.
In January, my all-time love and I finally got married. After being over ten years together, we knew what kind of cake we wanted even before we started planning the wedding: Chocolate + chocolate and nothing frivolous, airy, fruity or flower-y. As much as I would have loved baking such a cake myself, I decided this wouldn’t be a project I’d want to take on the days before my own wedding (thank you, past-me). Some of my best-baking friends and family got the scare of the year when I asked them if they’d want to bake one of our wedding cakes. It took a lot of convincing and a very detailed, tried & tested recipe, but in the end they could not have done a better job (we’re forever thankful). So now, I would like to share this recipe, which has a special place in my heart, with all of you, the readers of my blog. I hope it may bring you as much joy as it did us!
This epic chocolate cake consists of three kind of muffin-like, fudgy cake layers, with a chocolate fudge cream in between (‘ganache’).
Ingredients for the cake:
– 300 ml water
– 90 g Dutch cocoa powder
– 250 g flour
– 476 g sugar
– 1 tsp salt
– 2 sachets of baking powder (=2 x 16 g)
– 3 sachets of vanilla-flavored sugar (=24 g)
– 350 ml buttermilk
– 130 g vegetable oil (peanut of sunflower)
– 3 free-range eggs
Ingredients for the ganache:
– 250 g (extra) dark chocolate
– 75 g butter
– 250 ml cream
Method:
One day/a couple of hours ahead: Cook 300 ml of water, dissolve the cocoa in the boiling water and leave to cool.
Mix together the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and vanilla-flavored sugar (if you don’t have vanilla-flavored sugar, just use 500 g sugar instead of 476 and add some fresh vanilla of vanilla flavoring). Next, add the buttermilk, oil and eggs and stir until you get a smooth batter. Then, add the water-cocoa solution, and let the batter rest for about 1 hour. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius.
I highly recommend you either use three baking pans or take turns in the oven to get three cake layers, because this cake is next to impossible to cut into three layers. Grease the baking pan (24 cm diameter), put some baking paper on the bottom and poor in 1/3 of the batter (which will approximately weigh 595 g). Bake the cakes for about 50 minutes and leave to cool on a wire rack.
To make the ganache, slowly melt the chocolate and butter. Let this cool for a little while, and then stir in the cream. You can now let this mixture cool until it has the consistency you like to work with. Smear the ganache on two of the cake circles, stack them up, add the third cake circle, and smear the rest of the ganache all over the resulting layered cake.
To enable easy cutting of the cake, it’s best when it is a bit cooled, but not too cold, because the ganache because difficult to work with – and it doesn’t taste nearly as good as it does at room temperature.
Over the past months, I’ve also been making themed cupcakes. These ‘Nijntje’ cupcakes (a famous figure from children’s books) were for a boy’s third birthday, and the Mickey Mouse cupcakes were made for the guests of a babyshower. Contact me at theemetaimee [ at ] gmail.com if you would like to order your own themed cupcakes!
Last year I took my first trip to the US, to California to be precise. There was one thing on top of my tourist-wish list: Visiting the Cheesecake Factory. The menu totally threw me off! Back here in the Netherlands, generally, we’re only familiar with the basic New York cheesecake, so I had a very very hard time choosing which cheesecake to try. Needless to say, I went for the Oreo cheesecake, and until this day I cannot get the mind-blowing taste out of my head. It honestly was one of the best pieces of cake I have ever tasted.
It took me a few tries, but I think this recipe approaches the sublime original, without being too hard to make yourself.
Ingredients:
– 2 packs of Oreos (2x 176 grams, or 32 cookies)
– 70 g butter, melted
– 250 g mascarpone
– 200 g crème fraîche
– 200 g cream cheese
– 200 g powdered sugar
– 4 eggs, yolks and whites separated
– 2 tbsp corn starch [or ‘maizena’ in Dutch]
– two vanilla pods (or 2 tsp of essence)
Method:
Crush half of the Oreos, including the cream in the middle, (1 pack = 4×4 cookies = 176 grams) and mix the crumbs with 70 grams of melted unsalted butter. Press them in a springform pan lined with baking paper, and let the crust harden in the fridge while you start making your filling. You could of course use more cookies, for a thicker deliciously dark crust.
This cheesecake filling can be used to make one regular-sized cake (22-24 cm diameter) or you could make party bites: this filling is enough for 45 small ones (in a muffin/cupcake tin).
Mix the egg whites until stiff. In a separate bowl, mix together the cheeses, sugar, egg yolks, corn starch and vanilla. Make sure the mixture turns out smooth. Then gently fold in the stiff egg whites, and transfer it into the crust. Next, you can break some Oreos into large chunks and spread these over the cheesecake mixture – don’t worry, they’re meant to kind of sink in. Now bake the cheesecake for 1.5 hours at 150°C (or 25 minutes at 160°C if you’re making small ones). After baking, the cake may not look too firm, but know that it will set when cooled. Leave the cheesecake in the oven after baking for about two hours so it cools slowly. Then move it to the fridge for at least another two hours. Finish the cake of with some powdered sugar and Oreos on top.
Just a quicky showoff today. My ‘baby’ sister (she turned 21, actually) loves tiramisu, so I was pretty set on baking her a tiramisu-style birthday cake. I can’t really provide you guys with a straightforward recipe: I just combined some recipes off the internet (Pinterest, mainly) and don’t exactly remember the details. It involved regular vanilla cake, layers of buttercream with amaretto, and of course the characteristic cocoa powder on top, and lady fingers (or, as we know them in the Netherlands, lange vingers – which means ‘long fingers’) for the chic finish.
When my grandmother turned 88 last month, I grasped at yet another fitting opportunity to bake something. Something great. Something new. And by ‘new’ I mean: something I have never made before. Because a mocha cake is all but new. It is a Dutch patisserie-classic as old as, well, my grandmother. Its status is therefore not really hip and happening, but needless to say, my grandmother loved it — although frankly I’m not quite sure what’s left of her tastebuds. Fortunately, the rest of the family enjoyed it as well.
It consisted of two layers of vanilla sponge, with mocha buttercream in between & on the outside. A typical mocha cake has sides decorated with candied hazelnut bits, buttercream rosettes and some kind of chocolate decoration. But that’s really as far as the chocolate goes with this cake: mocha has the leading part.
Just a quick showoff post today y’all: It’s a sachertorte, a.k.a. a traditional chocolate layer cake that originated in Vienna, Austria. I made this one for my mom’s birthday. I love you mom, you’re the best!
The recipe I used is available online here [Dutch only]. It is pretty basic, except for the chocolate glaze.
This blog is mainly intended to regularly share my tested recipes with other foodies. But although my bakings are mostly meant to be eaten, every once in a while, a creation leaves my kitchen that is almost too cool to be eaten — if I may say so myself. These cakes/pies/cookies are not always very challenging to the home baker but they do deserve to be in the spot light for a bit.
So, those babies go into the ‘Showoff post’-category, and today I’d like to share with you the pirate ship birthday cake I made for my little foster brother, who turned six recently. I gratefully acknowledge the help of my fiancee, who turns out to have a hidden talent for working with fondant.
For the curious cats among you, this is how we got there:
One day ahead, we started molding the sails (just lay them out to dray on empty toilet paper rolls), cannons, and masts (fondant wrapped around a skewer). Next, we used an edible black marker to draw a skull and crossbone on one of the sails, and tylose -edible glue- to fix the sails to the masts.
The base was made out of a regular sponge cake. I used a a little leftover chocolate buttercream (=half custard+half butter+nutella to taste) to form a delicious middle layer and to smear the outside so the fondant would stick.
The ship was made out of a few layers of boat-like shapes (cut out of a flat brownie) and pieced together using some more chocolate buttercream. We then covered the outside with a piece of brown fondant, and drew on a wood structure-look using a skewer.
Needless to say, all the boys -and girls- were impressed and fighting over who got to eat which part. (btw: those waves are just some whipped cream, piped with a decorating tip intended for piping ribbons)
