Saturday, March 15, 2014 – No, not that kind of 4X. There are 4 kinds of chocolate in this cake. Chocolate cake (obviously), chocolate ganache, chocolate buttercream frosting, and for good measure, chocolate chips. (Because why do when you can overdo?)
So as I was saying last week, I’m taking a cake class at Sizzleworks, so I wanted to practice my cake baking. Especially frosting and decorating. The first step is the cake, and Chef Ricky gave us his super secret recipe. So I used it. But the key ingredient makes me feel really dirty.
Hershey’s chocolate. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand Hershey’s chocolate. I use Ghirardelli almost exclusively. (It’s the best brand of chocolate one can buy at the local supermarket.) But Chef Ricky swears by this stuff. So I begrudgingly decided to give it a try before I deviate from the recipe. And (spoiler alert), the cake didn’t turn out awful. (I’ll admit, it’s probably because it’s not milk chocolate, so they didn’t use any rancid milk to make it. But it’s still Hershey’s.)
In any case, this is Ricky’s super secret recipe. So I don’t want to give away too many details. It contains the usual ingredients: vegetable oil, sugar, eggs, milk, flour. In case you couldn’t tell, it’s an oil-based cake (using what Alton Brown calls the “Muffin Method”, or what Ricky calls the “2-Stage Method). And as I mentioned before, it uses cocoa powder and the boiling water trick to bloom the cocoa powder. (There are a few unconventional methods used in this specific recipe that, and Ricky is known for unconventional techniques.) The cake batter came out very runny (which came as a surprise to some people).
The cake came out very soft and very dark. Ricky says this is because of the use of Dutched cocoa. (For reference, Ghirardelli cocoa isn’t Dutched.) Interestingly, the cake took longer than I expected to bake, and even when the outside was fully baked, it was still super jiggly on the inside. And then the cake expanded.
The filling was a chocolate ganache. I used 1 cup heavy cream, 4oz 60% Ghirardelli baking chocolate, 4oz 100% Ghirardelli baking chocolate, and 2 Tbsp butter. But I overestimated how dark the ganache would taste. I think the next time, I should just use 8oz 60% and none of the 100%. I corrected the taste by adding 2oz of white sugar. It fixed the taste, but then the ganache became super stiff as it cooled. Not sure if it was the sugar or the butter. Possibly both. In order to get it onto the cake, I stuffed it into a piping bag and piped it onto the cake. (That expains the shape.)
The next step is the frosting. Here, I used Ricky’s super secret buttercream recipe. For those who don’t know, buttercream is just sugar and butter, and in this case, flavored with melted 60% Ghirardelli baking chocolate. The buttercream came out perfectly. It tasted great, was soft enough to work with, and set up nicely when I left it to cool in the garage overnight.
The sides are patterned using a bread knife. For the top, I decided to try out a more complex pattern, based on something Chef Carol showed me in class. I’d like to say my decorating skills are improving.
Last step is chocolate chips. Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips. And when I finally ate the cake, it was amazing. Chocolatey. Intensely chocolatey. 5 hours of labor with 3 unfamiliar recipes, but totally worth it.