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.
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.
