Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Thanks to my Sunday gaming group for being the taste-testers.

Double recipe of basic cake, without the chocolate chips
Dark chocolate ganache (lots, and make it fairly thick by using a bit more chocolate)
(Just use dark chocolate in the ganache recipe—the darker the better, as it gets thinned with cream)
Vanilla Custard (I used Alisa’s créme anglaise recipe thickened with tapioca and strained, but I wasn’t happy with the result. It probably needs heavy cream instead of whole milk, and a lot less of it…more like a créme brulée custard.)

Bake the basic cake in two pans, either round or square, so that you’ve got two layers. Let cool completely. Leaving about an inch border on the sides and a half inch on the bottom, scoop out the inside of one cake layer. I suggest doing this on the plate you’re going to use to serve the cake, because you won’t want to move it afterwards. I used a melon baller to great effect. The inside space doesn’t have to be perfectly level or even. Save the leftover cake bits to eat in the kitchen by yourself.

Fill the space in the bottom cake layer with vanilla custard. Do not overfill, or things will get messy quickly. Pour any custard that’s left over on top of the leftover cake bits you’ve saved to eat in the kitchen by yourself.

Put the top cake layer over the filled bottom layer. If you have disregarded the warning above, you will probably have custard oozing out from between your cake layers. I told you it would get messy. Wipe up any spillage, or not, depending on how fussy you are.

Pour warm dark chocolate ganache over the top of the cake, letting it spread out and dribble down the sides as it will. If you wish, hold back enough ganache to drizzle over the leftover cake and custard that you’ve saved to eat by yourself in the kitchen…unless you’ve already eaten it, and if so, aren’t you sorry that you didn’t wait?

Let the ganache cool and firm up a bit, if you can wait that long.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 6:55 am and is filed under Tales from the Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.