Hello hello!
Over two months now, about time to get back to my blog. June had been a hectic but incredibly exciting month. My parents were visiting us here in Scotland for a bit. We took them around to a few places around Scotland and a long weekend in London. I do love London, but mostly as a tourist, not sure I could cope with living there. And one of the most exciting things about London is the food culture. The variety of cuisines is amazing! I managed to make stops at the Laudrée in Covent Garden London for their famous macarons and also had amazing Japanese confectionery at Minamoto Kitchoan.
Having finally settled down into usual routine of work home and life, though I do miss my parents and all the travelling, but I happy to get more time to do some baking.
The first multi-layered decorated cake I made was for my husband’s birthday. It was a chocolate genoise cake with mocha caramel frosting. I had never made genoise cake before and I really liked how it came out, extremely light and spongy.
Chocolate genoise cake recipe:
3 tbsp clarified butter (heat the butter till it is clear liquid but do not burn)
1 tsp vanilla extract
65 gm plain flour
30 gm cocoa
4 eggs
135 gm granulated sugar
- Pre-heat the oven to 180 ˚C . I use fan oven so please adjust temperature according to your oven.
- Sift flour and cocoa together and keep aside.
- Boil some water in a pan and simmer. Combine eggs and sugar in another bowl and keep it over the simmering water and beat the egg sugar mixture till the egg mixture is lukewarm.
- Then take the pan off the heat and keep beating the eggs till it triples in volume and it resembles softly whipped cream.
- Now fold in the flour mixture in 3 parts.
- Add the vanilla extract to the clarified butter.
- Scoop out a bowl full of the flour egg mixture into the vanilla butter and fold in till butter is completely combined. Then fold this into the rest of the batter.
- Divide the batter into 2 x 8” greased and lined cake tins and bake at 180 ˚C. It takes about 30 minutes or till the cake shrinks away from the sides and springs back on pressing.
- Cool the cake on a wire rack.
- This can be stored in fridge for couple of days.
And that is what I did. I had made 4 cakes a day before actually assembling it together and wrapped it in cling film once it was completely cooled, this I stored in fridge.
Genoise cake is very light and a bit dry. I moistened it with a coffee syrup. Dissolve 2-3 tsp of instant coffee, depending on how strong coffee flavoring you want, in ½ cup of hot water. Add 3 tsp of sugar to the syrup and stir to dissolve.
Unfortunately I had not made a note of the mocha caramel frosting I made for this cake. You can use chocolate, caramel , butterscotch or just plain mocha frosting with this cake. I have previously used Mocha whipped cream frosting from joyofbaking.com and it will go brilliantly with this cake. Here is the recipe for the frosting:
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3-4 tbsp granulated sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp instant coffee
240 ml whipping cream
In a cold bowl add the vanilla extract, sugar, cocoa and coffee. Add a splash of the cold whipping cream and mix to make a paste so that the coffee dissolves. Then add the rest of whipping cream and beat with a hand mixer till it forms soft peak.
To assemble the cake, except for the bottom face of the last cake, I brushed the top and bottom faces of all the cakes with the coffee syrup. A tip here, be liberal with the syrup soaking , I had not done it enough and hence my cake was a tad bit dry.
Then layer the cakes with icing between each layer, spread the frosting on the top and the sides to make it smooth. You can decorate as you want. I made a plain and white chocolate collar for this cake.
Thanks for stopping by!
theflourmill 