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.
If you ever feel like having cheesecake, but you don’t have enough cream cheese in stock, or you just have a package of mascarpone about to hit the expiration date, this recipe will suit your needs. It combines the best of cakes and cheesecakes, and looks great when cutting through the marbled layers. I got the recipe from Peabody’s blog Culinary Concoctions (thank you), and made some alterations plus converted the ingredients to SI measures. I experimented a bit, and concluded that if you don’t have a pumpkin or can of pumpkin puree lying around, a great alternative is to grate a large carrot and mash a ripe banana. The taste, color and mushy texture of the resulting cake are fairly similar.
![Pumpkin bread with cheesecake swirl by Thee met Aimee [recipe at www.theemetaimee.nl]](http://www.theemetaimee.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/pumpkin-bread1.jpg)
For the cake
– 240 g unsweetened pumpkin puree (or 1 cup) OR 1 large carrot + 1 banana
– 120 ml vegetable oil (or 0.5 cup)
– 2 eggs
– 300 g sugar (or 1.5 cup)
– 256 g plain flour (or 2 cups)
– 1 tsp baking powder
– 0.5 tsp salt
– 1 tsp cinnamon – 0.5 tsp ginger – 0.5 tsp nutmeg (or 2 tsp ready-made pumpkin pie spice, or Dutch speculaas spices)
– 120 g of your favorite nuts (or 1 cup)
For the cheesecake swirl
– 252 g mascarpone (or 9 oz)
– 75 g muscovado sugar (or 0.4 cup)
– 6 tbsp maple syrup
– 1 tbsp flour
– 1 egg
![Pumpkin bread with cheesecake swirl by Thee met Aimee [recipe at www.theemetaimee.nl]](http://www.theemetaimee.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pumpkin-bread2.jpg)
Method:
For the cake batter, mix together the pumpkin puree, oil and eggs, and in a separate bowl the flour, baking powder and sugar. Then gently mix these two together and fold in the nuts. For the cheesecake swirl, mix together the mascarpone, sugar, syrup, flour and egg. Now poor about 2/3 of the cake batter in a butter or oil-greased pan, poor on the cheesecake mixture, and finish with the remaining cake batter. You could go through the concoction with a skewer to create a more marbled cake. Bat it at 160 degrees Celcius (or 325 Fahrenheit) for about 60 minutes. To bake the cake in my pictures, I used a round cake pan, just because I wasn’t in a loaf-pan-kind of mood, but you could of course pick whichever way you fancy.
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.
Red velvet has intrigued me for a couple of years now. In the Netherlands, there is no such thing, so I had no idea it was ‘just’ chocolate! Thanks to a Betty Crocker mix, and a little help from my friend Wikipedia, I figured out how to make a red velvet cake from scratch. I am not sure whether it had the authentic taste, but it tasted good nonetheless.
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.
This variation on a traditional pound cake recipe is really easy to make (really! I’m not just saying that) and easy to get rid off. You can keep the finish basic, with a little powdered sugar, or give it a little extra, like I did: I cooked some coconut cream together with sugar (amount: to taste) until it had a nice cream cheese-like consistency, and smeared this on top.
Ingredients:
100 g raisins/sultanas, soaked (15 min. in boiling hot water) and drained
200 g butter
175 g white muscovado sugar
55 g grated dried coconut
2 eggs
2 tbsp syrup
200 g self-raising flour (or flour with a teaspoon of baking powder)
some powdered sugar, or coconut cream + sugar
Melt the butter (on low heat in a small pan, or in the microwave). Mix together all other ingredients, and add the butter last. Bake the cake for 30-35 minutes, in a 24 cm diameter cake pan, at 180 degrees celcius. You know it is done when a skewer comes out clean.
(Original recipe source – in Dutch)
