Saturday, March 23, 2019

Chocolate-Orange Marbled Cake

Guess what! It's birthday time again. And, as usual, my husband's cake needed to be chocolate. But what else? I consulted the elderchild who suggested orange. After tossing a few ideas around (chocolate-orange mousse filling?) I settled on a marbled cake. I warned my husband I was making it up and got to work.

First I made two batters: Orange cake, from this recipe, but I scaled it down to 2/3 of the recipe. And I made half of my usual sour cream chocolate cake recipe. Then I spooned everything into two cake pans and swirled them with a knife.

Since I wasn't sure how long they'd need to bake I checked on them frequently. Ultimately they baked for 35 minutes. After they cooled, I made ganache: 10 oz of cream, 10 oz of 60% chocolate (bittersweet), 2 T. butter.

Once everything was cooled and the ganache was the correct consistency, I assembled the cake. Since the layers were very rounded on the top I cut off the excess on one layer and that became the bottom. I used ganache and orange zest between the layers and then put the intact, rounded layer on the top. Then I poured the rest of the ganache and allowed it to enrobe the cake. I topped it with more orange zest and then some orange curls - I used a peeler to get strips of zest and curled them on a chopstick before placing them on top.

One thing I should not have done - refrigerate the cake. Unfortunately, the ganache cracked slightly. But not too bad.

This experiment was a success! After a birthday outing to an escape room, we had take-out Chinese dumplings and then, cake!

Thursday, March 14, 2019

A Separate Note

So I don't lose it, I wanted to link to this very easy recipe for alfredo sauce. I made it last week and it worked out much, much better than what I've done in the past. The recipe I'd jotted down involved eggs, milk, and cheese, but this one has cream cheese instead of eggs. It's easy, and it clings to the pasta nicely. 10/10, would make this one again.... 

Pi Day

Once again, Pi Day has arrived. This morning the elderchild and I made a peach pie, using two jars of peach pie filling I made last fall. I had a little problem with the pie crust and I'm not sure why, but I ended up needing a lot more water and the crust ended up crispy rather than flaky. No matter. We had pie. We also had pizza for dinner so we had all sorts of circular foods!