A little trip to Panama - with substandard insurance!

Chocolate. Rum. Almonds. Could we really ever go wrong?


I've made a few Victoria sponges in the last week or so and for my mum's birthday, I thought it would be nice to make a foray into the realms of true patisserie: an extravagant, rich, expensive ingrediented creation called a Panama Torte.


Unfortunately I didn't know that I would be doing it when my mojo was on the blink.


It's not just MY mojo to blame though. A while ago I shelled out a sizeable chunk of money on a sizeable chunk of cookbook, called The Fundamental Techniques Of The Pastry Arts, produced by the French Culinary Institute in New York. It looks like a textbook. It feels like a textbook. It was the price of a textbook, but when it comes to "fundamental" there are a few pieces missing.


Like them telling you you can bake pastry - puff, croissant, danish - in a moderate oven (180 deg C). Let me set everyone straight right now, THIS DOESN'T WORK. You get a rotten rise/puff because there is not enough steam created between the layers of pastry for it to push up the layers. Thence, the butter that you have carefully laminated between the layers leaks out. Yuk.


Like them leaving out quantities for ingredients here and there.


Like them taking photos of the products being put together that somehow bear only a vague resemblance to the photos of the finished product, or indeed the description.


This is an advanced text indeed. You need to apply your own knowledge to the directions. Such as, in the case of my Panama Torte, dusting the surface that the cake is turned out onto with icing sugar. Quite a lot of it.


No. Not just MY mojo.


But I'm getting ahead of myself.


What's a Panama Torte?
Well, its a chocolate almond sponge base, sprinkled with dark rum syrup and layered with chocolate mousseline (more on that later).
With a twist. It's also a roulade, placed on its end, so that when it is cut, you have concentric vertical layers. Groovy.
So it looks like a regular cake until you cut into it. And then, it just looks like patisserie heaven.
And look at the ingredients... Actually, before I show you the ingredients, I'd better issue a health warning, and also tell you that Shark Fin tablets do NOT remove cholesterol.

Ground almonds, melted chocolate, unsalted butter, more chocolate...

The sponge is not difficult, but very step-oriented. There are a lot components. There is a lot of beatings. My lovebird, Hola Bella Margarita likes recipes like this - she sings along with the mixer, and the mixer was working overtime on this sponge.
First, a French meringue is made - this is a mixture of egg whites and caster sugar, whipped up til peaks form. I say french meringue, because actually, there are three meringues - French, Italian, and Swiss (despite my earlier trashing, this is one of the many genius gems which The Fundamental Techniques Of the Pastry Arts actually does impart. In patisserie apparently, you have to take the grainy with the powdered). French is the straight egg whites and sugar. Italian is smoother with egg whites and hot sugar syrup. Swiss, ever rigorous and complicated, requires egg whites and sugar, beaten together over a gentle heat to a specific temperature. Now you know.
The second step is to beat egg yolks (heaps of them!) with sugar until that is pale, fluffy, and creamy. Rum is added to this. A whole lot of melted chocolate is added to this. It smells divine!
The third step - fold the chocolate yolk mixture into the meringue.
Finally, fold ground almonds and flour into the rest.


This mixture is spread out over baking paper on two cookie sheets to make a flat, thin sponge.


A few minutes in the oven = gorgeous.


Mousseline. I know you are impatient to find out about this. You should be!
I never knew about this before The Fundamental Techniques and I met. Now I do, and we are Best Friends Forever.
I talked about french buttercream in my blog on the raspberry cake during Wedding Cake Week. That was hot syrup into egg yolks, followed by butter. Mousseline is one step further.
First, you make a sweet custard with egg yolks, milk, sugar and a little custard powder (yes, there are places in french cuisine for custard powder and even cornflour! Who knew??).
Broken up chocolate is added to the hot custard and beaten until the mixture is just warm. Then, an OBSCENE amount of unsalted butter is gradually added, and the mixture whipped until pale and fluffy.


And. Oh. My. Light, smooth, chocolaty. It's not sweet, and it's not fatty, and it's not... bad for you...
...
...
.
Okay, it's so bad for you. But on the tongue, it just melts away, a one way ticket to a happy place.


So. Now we get into the theory of what happens next. I'll give you the theory stepwise. And then the reality.


First, though, a disclaimer. I might not actually describe the FULL horror. My ego won't stand for it.


Theory:
Turn the sponges over onto clean sheets of baking paper.
Reality:
This works, until you want to lift them back off the baking paper. I will sprinkle liberal amounts of icing sugar onto that baking paper before turning the sponges out next time. Failure to do so led to issues I would rather have not had, described below.


Theory:
Generously brush rum syrup on sponges.
Reality, I forgot, and slapped some mousseline on the sponges before I remembered this. I scraped the mousseline off and repaired the situation. I'm not however convinced that the word "generously" was really appropriate, as over-wetting the sponge might have assisted with issues I would rather have not had, described below.


Theory:
Spread a layer of mousseline onto the sponges.
I am happy to report this was not outside the reaches of my mojo.


Theory:
Cut the sponges lengthwise into 7cm strips (or the required height of the finished cake).
Reality:
I, in my ultimate wisdom, fancied that a 13cm high cake would be rocking.
I.
Was.
Wrong.
More on that later.


Theory:
Roll a first strip into a tight roll.
Reality:
Nooooo! The sponge is what I like to refer to as achy-breaky and every rolling attempt leads to another break. Eventually I had to slice the paper the sponge was sitting on so that I could do a sushi-type rolling action with this seriously crumbling sponge. This, a palette knife, and a whole lexicon of colourful language, at least got me into some semblance of a roll.
Swear and repeat.

Theory:
Pick up the next strip and wrap this around the first roll.
Reality: Yeah Right.
I had to continue sushi style with an ever increasing 13 cm long squishy breaky nightmare, my hands coated in mousseline. There are no photos of this. Thank goodness. Though there were breakages, read: there weren't really any parts that didn't break, the thing did actually come together.
ONLY IT WAS TOO LONG!!! it looked ridiculous at 13 cm long and about 12 cm wide. I stood it on end. It gently began to sag.

At this stage it seemed reasonable to enter into a phase of all-out panic, and this I did. For those who know me, I do all-out panic with some aplomb.

Theory:
There was no freaking theory for this. I had to theorise on my own, and FAST, before there was a major catastrophe. 400grams of Lindt was tied up in this disintegrating tower of Pisa and it wasn't on special when I bought it either.  I needed rescue. I cursed The Fundamental Techniques, and not just because its guidelines for evaluating your success only extended to the soft flexibility of the cooked sponge (check) and the smoothosity of the mousseline (check). There were no guidelines saying "The cake doesn't break up like a co dependant relationship when you try to assemble it".

Theory: (mine this time)
The thing was too tall, so the only remedy was to chop it in half. With enormous trepidation and some more speaking-in-tongues I took my biggest knife and did this. Not too bad. I stood one half on its end, and wondered how to get the (mostly broken) other half to be friends with it.

There aren't any photos of how this happened. I was up to my wrists in mousseline and bits of cake. Lets just say, I carefully peeled, mousselined, and reapplied as much layerage of one half as I could to the other.
Too soon to tell, but I have medium hopes at this point that it will still cut quite well.
Of course, the inner part of the roll was unteasable smoosh at this point, and the only good thing I can think about this fact is that it was seriously tasty.

Muttering and trembling (okay not really but I want to instill some kind of drama here) with residual adrenalin, I shunted the cake into an 18cm tin to help keep it together, and refrigerated it awhile. I was super (super) delighted to discover the mousseline intended to set quite firm, making the next task, coating it and making it all smooth easier.

Now we can have some more visual documentation. Here is the cake with its full mousseline coat. You would never know what happened to get what is underneath.

At this stage, I shall pause for a little more Fundamental Techniques Frustration.
This book shows the cake, coated with mousseline and then (probably) a good 5mm coat of whipped ganache. It is then sprinkled lightly with cocoa.
The description however, mentions no mousseline coat and suggests that you should sprinkle cake crumbs (WTF kind of decoration is that for such a sexy cake?) on the top and press them on the sides. How you are meant to get the crumbs to stick to an un-mousselined exterior is beyond me. Anyway even if I was minded to go with their lame description rather than the seductive picture, I had had enough of crumbs.

Ganache it was. Bar and a half of lindt, equal hot cream, melt, stir (boy, I sound like Gordon Ramsay).
I thought with the richness of the cake already that whipping cooled ganache would result in a lilly-gilding effect - too much chocolate. Yes, there is such a thing.
Instead, I poured the cooled but liquid ganache over the cold cake, letting it ooze down the sides (the cake is on a wire rack so the leftover ganache just drips through, and if you have been smart enough to put a plate underneath, you can reuse this collected ganache. Yes, I was that smart).

A word to the wise. I don't really think that the cake you pour ganache over should be refrigerator cold. I think (albeit in hindsight) that it should be room temperature, just like your ganache. A cold cake will cause the ganache, particularly on the sides, to set too quickly, which leads to sides with oozy drip marks. Marks which you then have to try and smooth. Very boring. Best to have everyone the same temperature to avoid this.

If you ever come across gold or silver powder (real metal, it's edible - or perhaps I should say its not inedible, because as a chemist I hold no belief that the body actually does anything in particular with it), I recommend you buy it. It's not all that expensive (less than 10 dollars for a little bag) and is very cool. Not only can you mix it with a little vodka and use a paintbrush to apply it to icing, but you can also "blow" the powder onto unset ganache, where it spreads over the surface and gives a perfect liquid metal look. Just try not to sneeze while you're doing this!

Here is the finished cake, ganached, gold and silvered, and decorated with sugarpaste flowers. The wavy lines were made with a nifty cake comb, a piece of plastic with grooved edges which you can use to put texture into icing.

Just for the record, sugarpaste flowers do absorb moisture, and will eventually collapse, so its best not to put them on until just before serving the cake. Not that it matters, because although they are technically edible, I wouldn't eat one. They are made of food, but they are not really Food.

But the proof of this pudding is in the cutting. Chocolate cakes do best when cut with a hot knife, and in this case, I am definitely not going to pussyfoot around with a cold one!

And here she is - vertical layers of deliciousness.

Happy birthday mum... And many more!

Commenting...

I am off home shortly to commence the Panama Cake that Mum is getting for her birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday Mummy, 77 years young. That Elizabeth Arden skincare you used religiously in younger years has served you PROUD! :-)


A few people have complained that they can't seem to comment on these blogs and so I reveal for your viewing pleasure, how to do so.
First, you have to love me enough to sign into Blogger. You can do this for instance with a gmail email address and password.
If you don't have one of those, then you need to love me enough to get one. Its really simple. Go to http://www.gmail.com/ and register for an account.
After that all you have to do is click comment on the bottom of one of the blogs, select your "profile" - ie google account, and type away!


If you have a sign in for Blogger you can also become a "follower" of my blog and stay up to date with cake!

For those unable or unwilling to sign up proper like, I've also added a few "quick reaction" buttons at the bottom... including Recipe Please! If I get enough recipe requests I will CONSIDER imparting my knowledge to you in a quantitative manner :-)


Kadri
xxx

Raspberry Love

After days if not weeks on raspberry skepticism in the lead up to Wedding Cake Week: - that is the true lust-like WANT of a raspberry cake without any reasonable idea of how to achieve one (a bit like having a crush on a movie star), I am happy to report that the razz crush cake is now my favourite. My other other favourite that is.

I made another one this week, and as I previously noted, being incapable of not putting frou on cake these days, was not satisfied to leave it in a state of cake-nakey or "nacakedness". However, I couldn't be bothered with the whole making frenchy french buttercream business, or pureeing and sieving the seeds out of the raspberries.

Dilemma.
I had half a box of Philidelphia cream cheese in the fridge though.

I quite dig the addition of cream cheese to icing. I'm not talking about cream cheese icing, although that is good, particularly when dosed with lemon zest and whipped with sour cream, that is the business and no mistake. But cream cheese icing goes a lot further than just carrot cake (or for the americans in the audience, red velvet cake - not that I believe on the basis of my meagre research on the topic that cream cheese icing is the appropriate topping for red velvet cake no matter what Martha Stewart says, I firmly believe in butter roux icing on that topic... but I digress).

I mean YES, by all means wadge that stuff on whatever you fancy, by all means feel free to add melted white chocolate to it in about a 4:1 cream cheese:chocolate ratio. Feel free to add 70% lindt chocolate to it also, not that I have done this, but whilst I am thinking about it I have to admit I am personally feeling freer and freer on the subject.

Feel free to add crushed strawberries.

Feel free to add lemon curd. Or passionfruit curd for that matter.

Or raspberries.

The thing about cream cheese in general as regards its place in baked goods (or on them for that matter), is that as a general rule you have to soften and beat that stuff until it is smooth. One has no desire for lumpy baked cheesecake. If you wanted it lumpy, you would have put ricotta in it. And the thing with cream cheese is that it WILL NOT go smooth if you beat it with something runnier.

I was reminded of this as I started making the icing for my razz crush cake. I softened the butter first, didn't I. But I didn't fancy dirtying another bowl to soften the cream cheese, did I.
I didn't.

I mean, I did my best to achieve smoothosity. I smashed it about a bit and then added icing sugar in order to increase shear forces (bit of physics in there), but frankly, it was not homogenising. The upshot of which is that I wound up with small flecks of whole cream cheese in the mixture.
Not to worry, methought, this is only for my own private noshing. I tipped in the frozen berries, (crushed frozen - so in little bits), and gave it a mix.

Oh Purrrdy like a field of flowers!!! Now I had icing with little flecks of white and little flecks of pure raspberry.
H.E.A.V.E.N.
It is from these incompetencies that great discoverys flow.

I split the cake in half and put half the razz cream cheese inside, then the rest on top. When you cut a slice it just looks like the girliest high tea cake in the universe. Which it is. And the fresh raspberry flavour smashes your brains out.

WCW part 5 - the grand finale

I doweled the cakes the day before the wedding. You have to put dowels in the center of the supporting tiers or the cakes would sink down into the lower ones under the weight, cracking the sugarpaste. Even the little 10cm raspberry cake has about 600g of sugarpaste on it, so there is actually a lot of weight involved.

The Bride and I had settled on a pattern a number of weeks ago, but I thought I would sketch this onto a photo of the actual tiered cake to make sure that the proportions were all right.

Surprisingly, the one on the bottom left, the one we had chosen, was AWFUL! I had to ask Rachel to have a bridezilla moment to choose another one. The groom came to the rescue and chose the top left. God Save The Groom.

While my car was indisposed (having had a girl moment and flooded the engine so much that the thing was sent into a sulk the Automobile Association rescue man could not rescue it from), I coloured up the royal icing for the decoration. It takes an awful lot of gel colour to make something completely white look chocolate brown without the use of cocoa. I didn't want to use cocoa for this because it looked grainy. For the record, I'm not all that excited about Wilton icing colours for anything too dark. There is a place in Glendene that sells Sugarflair colours - the ones Peggy Porschen uses, and next time I have a job like this I will be heading there to get my colours. Also, there are a huge range of Sugarflair colours to choose from.

The car actually started as soon as the towie got it onto the truck, so I had to go to work, but I started on the decoration that afternoon. First, I made a template in baking paper of the shape that I wanted to do. Then I traced this onto the cake using pin-pricks.

The pin marks are relatively invisible but enough to go by.

Next, I gave the whole cake a good dusting with a white sparkly dusting powder to give the sugarpaste a satin look.

Dark royal icing is tricky to work with - because not much more than the slightest contact of the dye in the icing with the sugarpaste will cause a stain. So a steady hand - steadier than most mere mortals (including me!) is necessary. Because of the risk of messing up, I took each line in straight sections, carefully joining the starting and stopping marks by running a pin tip through them to close the gaps and smooth them over.
After one line of royal icing, this is what I had:

I was delighted to see how pretty it was, but the lines looked woefully wobbly to me. Although a lot of "cleanup" can be done when the royal icing is dry (by careful scraping away of lumps etc with a scalpel), the pattern also looked somehow sparse. I decided that two more layers would be best - one beside the first and then next nestled between the two:

In the photo below you can see the satin finish that the dusting powder gives the sugarpaste.

The result of the three lines of royal icing was dramatically dark, putting me in mind of a kind of wrought iron "cage" of the kind that old fashioned perfume bottles sometimes came in. The groom's instinct for this pattern was spot-on. I'd worried that the design was too architectural, but in the end it was just consummate art deco - striking and stylish, and neither too feminine nor too masculine. Another coat of dusting powder and my work was done!

The cake looked incredible in the vintage setting of the venue, Mantells in Mt Eden:

Mission accomplished! The happy couple cut the cake that evening, but took it home undemolished. Instead of adding cake to the gorgeous menu they had on the night, they invited guests and friends to their home the next day for champagne, tea, and some sweeter Somethings....

Raspberry, pistachio and Mexican chocolate - ready for sampling! Most guests tried all three - who could blame them.

WCW Part 4 - Ice, Ice, Baby.

Now that the cakes have been baked and layered, they are going to be covered with stable sugarpaste icing. Here's a cute picture I took of the layered cakes in their boxes prior to being chilled overnight in the fridge. Its exciting to see how the cake is going to come together.

Traditionally, marzipan is used as the underlayer for formal sugarpasted cakes. For the record I only like handmade marzipan. That horrendous "almond" flavoured sugarpaste you can buy in supermarkets, that goes on cheap iced Christmas cakes is just awful.
Handmade, it's fragrant, delicious, easy to work with and dries well, making it a perfect stable layer to put the sugarpaste on.

Unfortunately, Rachel-the-bride hates marzipan - even fresh handmade marzipan.

Fortunately, one of my trawls through the web last year looking for a recipe for pourable fondant icing uncovered an unexpected gem - a butter icing which you can roll out. Its pale yellow, soft and smooth, and utterly luscious. I use unsalted butter with a tiny pinch of salt, to keep the mellow flavour, but the key ingredient is liquid glucose, which is sticky, almost solid, but really not very sweet. In fact, its only drawback is you can't make it really really white, so its not really suitable for a top layer where colour control is essential - more on colour control freaking later...

I like this stuff. It sets overnight but is still flexible enough to reshape if necessary.
The cakes get a layer of this, are dried overnight, then a layer of tinted sugarpaste.

Colour choice is a crucial issue. Rachel was keen on a Neapolitan look, but couldn't be having with my suggestion of ivory pistachio and pink. For the record, I still think the ivory would have looked great, but it's true that latte-on-chocolate has a very deco feel. I coloured up the sugarpaste to cover the bottom cake board first, to match the chocolate coloured ribbon which would trim the cake. Its worth knowing that it takes an awful lot of colouring (gel colours that is, not the cheapo ones from the supermarket) to make something that dark brown. I kneaded a lot of cocoa into the bottom layer of sugarpaste to help the colouring process along. You can also buy chocolate sugarpaste from good supermarkets. Worthwhile to circumvent a whole lot of kneading. Adding that much cocoa also makes the sugarpaste less flexible, so its not so suitable for covering a cake.
I then coloured each of the lumps of sugarpaste which would cover the cake, and placed them together, as they would eventually appear on the cake, to check how the colours look together. After a few additions, I had these colours:

Before the coloured sugarpaste goes on, the cakes are brushed with a film of vodka. This gives the sugarpaste something to stick to, and kills any bugs that might have been hanging around on the surface of the under layer.

There they are, after their final sugarpaste, ready to dry.

Next post: fiddly bits... and the eating!

WCW Part 3 Other Mixings

Luckily other flavours just fall in your lap. Pistachio + Victoria Sponge (Pound Cake to you american types) = heaven.

A Victoria Sponge has equal quantities of butter, sugar, eggs, and self raising flour. To this I only needed to add a touch of pistachio essence (smuggled into NZ from Melbourne), and a packet of pistachio nuts, pulsed in a mini food processor with a little icing sugar until they are finely ground.
The cake is lovely, a slightly green gold colour, which I tinted up some more for eye appeal with a touch of green colouring.
Combined with pistachio flavoured buttercream, the double Pistachio Victoria Sponge is apparently keenly anticipated. The mixture also makes gorgeous cupcakes!

You can add ground pistachios to the buttercream for the topping of the cupcakes - and if you don't have a planned trip to the Essential Ingredient in Prahran, a combination of vanilla and almond essence will suffice.

My star chocolate cake right now is the Chili Chocolate Cake. Or Chocolate Chili Cake. Or Mocha Spice cake.  I can't quite decide what to call it. I originally made this cake - based on a mudcake recipe (lots of butter, chocolate and cocoa) with milk chocolate, which is pretty good too. The spices are chili powder, ground coffee, nutmeg, cardamom and cinnamon. The combination is a secret!
I love the way chili adds a zing to dark chocolate.
On my Somethings page on facebook, I use this cake as a base for my Break Up cake, its a little bit firey and comforting all at the same time.

Everybody knows about chili and sour cream. Not everyone knows that you can use sour cream to make chocolate ganache. Just the same as you would make regular ganache, equal parts of cream and chocolate, heat the cream til nearly boiling, remove from heat and add the chocolate, let it sit for a bit then stir carefully until smooth. Carefully - sour cream ganache can split if you're too enthusiastic.

Chili chocolate cake and sour cream ganache... I think its a little mexican. Mexican style hot chocolate is spiced and sometimes contains coffee,  so this cake must be Mexican Chocolate Cake!

Back to the wedding cake process.
Here are the tiers, layered, filled, and coated thinly. Cute huh?

The raspberry layer is 10cm, the pistachio is 15cm, and the chocolate is 20cm. Peggy Porschen, cake maker to the rich and famous and author of the gorgeous book Cake Chic, says that a well proportioned tierd cake has tiers which are about 8.5cm high, including the cake boards that they sit on. These ones are 9cm total. I am proud of myself because the boards are only 5mm thick. That means we have 8.5cm of cake action in each tier. A "tea party" type portion of cake is 2.5cm x 2.5cm. This cake is going to make 16 portions of Crumbled Raspberry Maderia, 36 portions of Pistachio Victoria Sponge and 64 portions of Mexican Chocolate Cake. IF its cut with "Monica From Friends" precision. The problem is... how many guests will there be like me - who needs to sample every flavour? After all, research is essential.
That remains to be seen.

Next up - icing

WCW part 2 - The Mixings - 3D Razz

Perfecting a cake flavour takes time, patience, a reasonably sophisticated palate, and a pair of running shoes.
And a bunch of willing walking talking waste disposal units (aka somewhere to hide the evidence).

The running shoes are actually self explanatory. There will be kilojoules ingested. If the experiment is a good one, there will be many.

Its actually not always that easy to modify a cake recipe. Oh, you can change the vanilla for lemon, you can wadge in a few chocolate chips or some frozen berries, you can substitute the milk for buttermilk, orange juice or (Heaven Forbid) water...
In these cases, you'll probably get something quite edible, and sometimes you'll hit on a major breakthrough.

The hard part is to engineer a breakthrough.

Lets take the Crumbled Raspberry example.

The top layer is pink and you want a pink cake. You hit on raspberry. Strawberry is cloying, Turkish delight (rosewater) possibly too sophisticated, though that has got me thinking............mmmmmmmmmmm......

Sorry. So you hit on raspberry. Like I did.
But the thing is, how do you get the cake to taste like raspberry? Without cheating and using raspberry essence that is. Essences of obscure flavours often don't really taste like the real thing, and I wanted a proper raspberry experience.

My first thought was that I didn't want whole berries in there. First, its obvious. Second, it's too muffin like. Third, this cake has to last through the layering and icing process which means that it will sit at room temperature for about three days before it is eaten. Whole fruit might disintegrate and make the surrounding cake gooey. Yuk.

Instead, I tried the idea of using a raspberry coulis.
I found a recipe which required the addition of water and substituted coulis for water. There was an immediate problem. The pigments in raspberries discolour from red to almost blue when they come in contact with flour.  One Bad Colour. Unpinkable, though I did try.
The second issue came once it was baked. It was jam-sweet and super moist, like a dessert cake. It was not the texture, or the flavour, to go in a formal iced cake. It needed a blanket of marscapone and candied slivers of orange zest on it. It was asking very nicely, so I obliged.

Delicious. But not useful.

So coulis, or unsweetened pureed raspberries would spoil the colour. Whole berries wouldn't stay pert for a week.

Thinking about how to avoid the dense, desserty type cake I had created with the coulis, I had a few options. I could make an eggwhite only cake, which is very light textured and gorgeously white.  But it would be too light to hold the dense sugarpaste icing, and might sink under the icing causing cracks. Which would be a disaster. I could use a Victoria Sponge mixture, which has more structure, but that would make it the same as the proposed pistachio flavoured tier. Or I could try a maderia type mixture, being fine crumbed, and fairly light. I decided on maderia. The problem remained though, how to get Raspberry without Faking it?

I spent an hour or two searching for freeze dried raspberries, as I had seen powdered raspberries in Melbourne at the Essential Ingredient (a very wonderful food and kitchen toys store), at the bargain price of AU$50 for a 100g jar. I wanted that stuff, by the way but had a bad feeling that MAF would confiscate it on sight if they caught me bringing it back into NZ, and the next time I went, there was none... sobs!
No success on the freeze dried front, unless you wanted to acquire a 1000kg wet weight order. I think that would probably fill my kitchen to the ceiling with freeze dried raspberries. Not great for a 10cm square cake.

Then it occurred that frozen raspberries crumble easily into their separate little seed compartments. I suppose there is a word for that. These wouldn't suffer from spoilage like a whole berry and have a less seedy texture than a whole berry. They would burst on contact if they were thawed, but frozen, could be folded into the cake mixture if you worked fast (of course the cold berries would quickly stiffen up the cake mixture). The mixture is then left in the cake tin to come back to room temperature prior to baking.

Success! The crumbled berries gave a jewel like look to the cake mixture, which I had in this first experiment tinted quite bright pink, to avoid any colour spoilage during mixing.  Also, I had been somewhat heavy handed on the vanilla in the cake mixture... vanilla and raspberry.... heaven.... And the thing kept for a week and just got better and better.

The first filling I tried was a traditional icing sugar/butter/vodka buttercream with pureed raspberries. It was HOT pink, almost obscenely pink, and was a combination of blood-singing sweetness with a tart raspberry punch. Incredible. Highly scented. Massive taste. Probably would give you type II diabetes on the spot. I certainly had a hard time getting to sleep after tasting the cake/filling combo, and I hear it was a hell of a productivity boosting sugar rush in the bride-to-be's office. But was it too sweet?

No... But realistically... probably yes.

For the final cake, I instead layered the crumbled raspberry maderia with a proper french buttercream, made with hot sugar syrup, egg yolk, and butter, folded through with unsweetened raspberry puree. Pure class.

With a cup of raspberry tea from Tea Total, we have real raspberry in three dimensions.

Next up - more mixings...

Wedding Cake Week - Introduction

Cake. Cake makes people happy, at least until you scoff the lot and then stand on the scales...

I've been making and decorating cakes for a lot of years now. I used to only ice or decorate a cake once in a blue moon - but that was probably because as a teenager I suffered from chronic cant-be-arsed-itis. Now, I feel wierd if I don't decorate them. Even a dust of icing sugar gives me feelings of cake-nakedness.

I have made a bunch of cakes for myself and others in the past couple of years and they have consistently been getting more grandiose and, as I would have it, sillier. This has spurred the creation of my facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Auckland-New-Zealand/Somethings/179789461358?ref=ts&__a=9&ajaxpipe=1, and now at the suggestion of my sister in law, this blog.

This week is Wedding Cake Week, and it seems fitting that if I am to start a blog, it should start with an Event. My girlfriend Rachel is having a (vaguely) art deco themed wedding on Saturday and it has been my task over the past few months to suggest cake flavours, fillings, colours, and decorations. I confess I have learned a lot more about art deco style than I expected, and with it has come a deep abiding affection for vintage Cartier jewellery. I wish I could afford it.

So what of this deco wedding cake?

Well as Rachel is a classy girl, this is to be a classy cake. Three square tiers, tinted neapolitan-esque in pale cappuccino, pistachio and pink, decorated with chocolate brown motifs. So far, so elegant.

But Rachel is also a bit avant garde - and so there would be no boring "fruitcake" dull "chocolate cake" or tasty but snoozeworthy "plain old vanilla maderia" inside this baby. In a literal mood, it occurred to me that the colour should dictate the flavour, brown for brown, green for green, pink for pink. The flavours became obvious: Chocolate chili spice cake, Pistachio victoria sponge and Crumbled Raspberry maderia cake.

In a further literal take, these are layered with sour cream ganache, pistachio buttercream and crushed raspberry buttercream. From pre WCW experimentation, I can humbly assert that we have achieved multidimensional flavours.

Some have suggested that this is OTT and in all other ways unsuitable for a wedding cake. These people have been roundly ignored. Cake should be like the best kind of people. Sensational on the outside and the inside.

Next post... The Mixings.