... And Then the Flood

Continuing in the spirit of Great British Bake Off-inspired experimentation, I moved from a cake without any chemical leavening agents to a cake without any chemical leavening agents and without any flour.  No flour!  That's right all you gluten-free people out there.  It is not that there is a flour-substitute in this cake - there isn't.  It is made only with chocolate, sugar, water, butter, eggs and coffee.  Some flourless chocolate cakes use similar ingredients but are treated almost as souffles, with soft peak egg whites folded into the batter to raise the cake.  This results in a 'fallen' look to the top of the cake when it cools.  This cake, however, is not really leavened at all.  Something akin to a mousse is made through combining melted chocolate, butter and sugar with beaten whole eggs and coffee.  It is not folded into anything, however, and no heavy cream or gelatin is involved.  The batter is simply poured into the prepared pan and baked in a bain-marie.

I say 'simply', and it generally is, but please take more care than I did - there will be less stress in the end.  In order to easily remove the cake after baking, I used a springform pan.  I used two springform pans actually: a 9" for the cake and an 11" for the bain-marie.  I took care to line the inside of the larger pan with foil so that the water would not leak out of it.  I did not, however, line the outside of the smaller pan to keep the water from leaking in...

Fold pieces of foil several times in the centre to waterproof.

I chose this recipe from Nick Malgieri, or rather was given it by my sister, because it was the nearest version either of us knew to the flourless chocolate cake that we used to decorate in the bakery.  I adapted it to fill a 9" pan instead of an 8", and this version can be found in the Recipe Box, along with the salted caramel and whisky sauce (see below).

If the chocolate does not melt, reheat gently over a double boiler.

While I'd seen the cakes baked many times, and eaten them many times, I'd never actually made any myself; hence the experimentation.  I did remember that the bakery used esspresso in the cakes, so I got a double shot and mixed that with enough pour-over coffee to make a 1/4 cup.  I did not, however, remember the more important piece of information...

Let the coffee cool before whipping it into the eggs.

As I was lowering the cake into the bain-marie, and giving it a bit of a push into the water (I didn't think it should float - another genius move) I had visions of peeling foil off of the bottoms of the flourless chocolate cakes in the bakery.  'That's odd...', I started to think in the split second before the water began to gurgle up with increasing speed between the edge of the batter and the inside of the pan, before another leak sprung and then another.  The top of the cake had flooded before I could finish cursing.

Temper the eggs with a little bit of chocolate before combining.

I poured the water out and off of the cake as best as I could, and proceeded to put it in the oven with fingers crossed.  The oven was having heating issues as well, of course, requiring to be set at Gas Mark 5 despite the desired temperature being a mere 300F (150C); fortunately I had purchased a thermometer that morning.¹

Whip it all together...

When the timer went off, I held my breath, opened the oven and pulled out a cake submerged under a small lake.  More cursing.  I very nearly had my own personal bingate!  Instead, when trying to tip the cake over the sink (not into the rubbish) I noticed that it was holding together, so I changed tack and soaked up the water with paper towels, covered the top where it was dark and would have been at risk of burning, and put it back in the oven.  However long it was in there in the end, I couldn't say, but I removed it for good when I thought that it seemed set and the top a bit dry.

Not too bad, in spite of the flood.

While the cake was cooling, I set to making salted caramel and whisky sauce to cover up any less aesthetically-pleasing aspects of the cake.  Salted caramel whisky sauce also has the added benefit, of course, of being utterly and totally delicious.  But you can leave it off if you like, your call.

I made this caramel once before, but in its original calvados incarnation in a recipe from BBC Food.  This time I substituted whisky and added about a 1/4 tsp of coarse Breton sea salt (for a very Celtic sauce, I suppose).  I thought that the sauce might have needed a bit of reheating before serving, but it was fine at room temperature.  If left in the refrigerator overnight, however, prepare for it to be spreadable.

Not bad for gluten-free.

¹ It really make me wonder what I baked the last three cakes at, though...

First Came the Fall...

The colours of the leaves are changing and there is a chill in the air.  The arrival of the Pumpkin Spice latte has been declaimed from every window of every Starbucks on every corner.  It's Autumn!  And though the Fall inspired this cake, unfortunately it wasn't the only kind involved in its making.

I've been watching too much Great British Bake Off (again) and as a direct result decided that I should challenge myself to make something other than my standard butter cakes for a layer cake that I was preparing for some friends' party.  I wanted to try a génoise cake, which is leavened with beaten eggs instead of baking powder and baking soda.  I also had a can of pumpkin lying around, and with the aforementioned arrival of Fall, I wanted to use it.  Happily, Williams-Sonoma had already beaten me to this combination, so I followed their recipes for both génoise cake and pumpkin mousse.  These are condensed in the Recipe Box.

I had to bake this cake twice.  The first time, the layer was pretty pancake-like; far too thin to be split.  The second attempt was far more successful.  The differences amount, I think, to the use of fresh eggs, the temperature at which the eggs are used, the degree to which they are beaten and the size of the tool used to fold the mixture.

Even though génoise is leavened with eggs, and the best eggs for whipping are fresh, I first unwisely elected to use some eggs that were perfectly safe but which had admittedly been in the fridge for awhile.  I also used them cold, straight out of that fridge, which may or may not have contributed to the failure of this layer.  For the génoise, the eggs are beaten whole with the sugar over a double boiler until they reach 140F (60C), or, for those of us without a candy thermometer, until the sugar is entirely dissolved.  They are then beaten on high until 'pale and tripled in volume'.  'Pale' may not be the best measurement, as I don't think the eggs had been whipped up enough to support the cake when I stopped at 'pale' the first time.  A better measurement is to stop when they hold a ribbon, which I later discovered Martha gives as one of her tips for this type of cake.

That is how far I beat the eggs the second time.  These eggs were also fresher and at room temperature when I used them.  Room temperature eggs create more volume, and therefore are likely to produce a better result in a cake in which they are the leavening agent.  The final important difference between the first cake and the second was the size of the folding tool.  The dry ingredients must be carefully folded into the beaten egg and sugar mix, and the wider the spatula the more effective each fold.  None of my spatulas are particularly wide, and with the first cake I could hear the bubbles in the batter popping with every turn of the bowl and twist of the spatula.  To try to minimize this damage, I used a cake scraper the second time.  While this was a bit messier because the scraper lacks a handle, it did work quite well.

The same recipe, same ingredients and same amounts produced twice the cake.  What a difference a little practice makes!  The third or fourth time might really have been the charm, but with enough cake for three layers I quit while I was ahead.

The pumpkin mousse was far less problematic, once I got past the complications of using leaf gelatine instead of powdered.  The recipe calls for 2 1/4 tsp or one sachet of powdered gelatine, which through using Nigella's conversion and some maths (which of course I did not write down) I calculated equals 3 1/3 leaves of Dr Oetker's platinum grade leaf gelatine.  I don't know if that's actually accurate, but that's how much I used and it worked just fine.

First set the gelatine to soak as directed on the packet, and then mix a 1/2 cup of the pumpkin puree with the sugar and salt in a saucepan over medium heat until the sugar dissolves.  Mix in the gelatine and let it cool to room temperature before mixing it into the remaining pumpkin and adding the spices.  I didn't have any rum, so I substituted a 1/2 tblsp molasses mixed with a 1/2 tblsp calvados in the hopes that this would approximate its sweet dark flavour.

Like the dry ingredients of the génoise getting folded into the beaten eggs, the pumpkin mixture gets folded into whipped cream.  Whip the cream to soft peaks in a large bowl, and use a large spatula (or a cake scraper) to fold the pumpkin mixture into it in thirds.

To set up the cake, the layers should be built up inside of the clean springform pan.  I used the first, denser cake layer as the base layer of the cake, and split the second layer to make a three-layer cake; the recipe was intended to be two layers, but why have less cake when you can have more?  For a little added punch and moisture, I drizzled the residue of the rum-substitute onto the middle layer.

The whole thing should then be left in the refrigerator for at least four hours, but as I was using the cake the next day, and wanted it to be very stable on its journey, I froze it.  To finish it off, pipe a whipped cream border before serving.

The pumpkin mousse essentially tasted like a light pumpkin pie - not a bad thing in my book.  It was very good paired with the lightness of the génoise, and added a bit of moisture.  The crowning achievement of the cake, however, or its most resounding endorsement, was one host's claim that there had never been so much success in getting Brits to eat pumpkin.  Still, I doubt they'll be queuing up at Starbucks for a Pumpkin Spice latte any time soon.