WeddSplosion III: The Cake of Doom

I’ve started giving the WeddSplosion episodes names.

After the wedding cake project started rolling in a serious sort of way, Emily came to me with a recipe she’d gotten from a friend.  “Apparently it’s supposed to be really good,” she explained, “They said they’ve made it for several weddings themselves and the cake is delicious!  Just let me know if it’s too crazy.”

Always being game, I took a look at the scanned-in pages from an old magazine to get an idea of what was involved.  After giggling at the 1970s version of Rachel Ray (complete with beehive hairdo) I started perusing recipe itself…and my head started swimming.  Let me summarize a bit.

The cake is three tiers (14, 9 and 6 inches), each tier split into three layers.  Between each layer there is a layer of coffee buttercream, a layer of chocolate ganache, and a layer of “chocolate souffle pastry.”  What the hell is chocolate souffle pastry?  I had no idea.  Even googling it really didn’t yield any useful results, which says a lot.  Maybe it’s a 1970s term for simply “souffle” …I wouldn’t know.

Needless to say the recipe was a little intimidating.

Still, I’m not one to balk at a challenge as long as I have time to work with it.  So I took some time to sit down and reduce the recipe to a reasonable test cake size (my typical 6×3″ cake pan) and figure out how I was going to handle it.  In order to increase the likelihood of success on this cake I decided to cut it into only one layer instead of two; this way I wouldn’t screw up the physical integrity of the cake and I also wouldn’t have to bake quite as much (purely to reduce the intimidation factor…not because I’m a slacker!).

I was worried at first that my reductions were a little inaccurate; most of the final measurements verged into “3/16 cup” and “1/12 cup” areas, so I occasionally had to estimate ingredients.  Luckily this mostly worked just fine (everyone who says baking is an exact science is a dirty liar).  I did end up with some coffee buttercream left and a large amount of the souffle pastry, but all in all it was better than having an entire cake leftover.

Unfortunately I started out inauspiciously – the center of the cake fell before I took it out of the oven.  !@#$%  I think this was because I put too much batter in the pan.  Next time I won’t be so aggressive.  So I started out with a nice divot in the cake.  Still, the cake itself appeared to come out just fine despite my error.  It tasted fine and had a good solid texture.

Next I put together the coffee buttercream.  When I glanced over the recipe I at first assumed it was a “normal” buttercream – I thought it was straight-up butter and sugar creamed together.  But to my delight I was wrong!  In fact, it turned out this buttercream was actually a french buttercream of sorts.  Instead of melting the sugar into egg whites and whipping them into a meringue as you would with a swiss buttercream (my recent frosting-style of choice), this time I boiled the sugar into a syrup and slowly added that syrup to whipped up egg yolks.  It was cool learning a new technique – and I only totally burned one batch of sugar syrup first!  And oh.  Fudge.  This buttercream was to DIE for.

Next I tackled the “chocolate souffle pastry”.  I found this generally confusing because I’d never made a souffle before, but again, it ended up not being a big deal.  I followed the directions and hey, whaddya know?  It worked out just fine.

After that I whipped up a quick ganache with the last few ounces of chocolate left in my apartment and assembled the cake.  I actually bought a Wilton Cake Slicer today and it TOTALLY rocked my world – it’s the best $6 I’ve ever spent on a cooking utensil.  I’ll never have a lopsided cake again.  Hopefully.

The final verdict?

Well, it depends on which part of the cake you’re talking about.

Overall the cake got a lukewarm “pretty good” response.

Separately, though, opinions were highly varied:

Unanimously, everyone fell in love with the coffee frosting.  Even Adam, who claims to “not be a coffee person” thought it was good (in fact, it was the first to say so).  Basically, the decision has been made that this frosting must be present on the wedding cake in some fashion.  Even though I had a good ~2ish cups of this frosting left after we finished the cake, I’m pretty sure we collectively ate 1/2 – 1 entire cup on its own.  I hope everyone washed their hands tonight…because a lot of fingers took “just one more taste” of it.  I hope that doesn’t sound too gross…because if you’d tasted the frosting you would understand.  Don’t hate!

The cake itself was a little “meh”.  It was very eggy tasting (because, surprise, there were a lot of eggs in it) and even though it wasn’t at all bad, it just wasn’t that great either.  An interesting experiment.

The other flavors were…well…chocolate, and fine.  Emily felt the souffle pastry was slightly hazelnut flavored and was fine…but no one raved about anything in particular.

An extra shot in the arm for me was the appearance of Hannah Skoonberg, an artist and friend of Emily’s who came by to share the wedding invitations she’d finished printing.  It was actually her mother who provided Emily with the recipe, and Hannah was able to validate that this was, in fact, a tasty piece of cake.  I felt like I had done a good job, and patted myself on the back.  /fistpump

So!  Next week we’ll see the combination of Adam’s chocolate birthday cake and this fantastic coffee frosting.  And I have little doubt that it will be delicious and all of our heads will collectively explode.  And I’m totally looking forward to it.

PS – I may post the reduced celebration cake recipe at another time when I have the kinks worked out.

For the continuing WedSplosion saga, read here:

• WeddSplosion: Prologue
• WeddSplosion: The First Tasting
• WeddSplosion II: Return of the Cakes