Tuesday 4 December 2012

Seven layer vanilla cake

Layer cake, and not a regular one. I don't even know where to begin with this, except to say that Mr T's belated birthday party gave me the perfect opportunity to go all out and do something a bit different from the norm. I'd read about Zumbo's V8 cake (8 different vanilla flavoured layers) somewhere on facebook when a lucky person was surprised with such a cake! Me being me, time to adapt it - I wasn't even going to try and make a replica because....

  • I can't follow recipes to the letter. Zumbo has far too many complicated and weird sounding ingredients which I don't think are required for my home baking. I mean, titanium dioxide? gellan? Definitely the too hard basket - if I need to get it from a super specialty store then its not gonna work for me.

  • Time constraints - I had the birthday dinner to think about as well as the cake!

  • I needed something foolproof and wasn't really willing to gamble with things that had a high potential for fail (I know I'm crap at stuff like custard and creme chantilly so just had to find a substitute layer instead)

  • I'm not really into total replicas anyway since it doesn't have a "me" stamp on it!

  • I'm into shortcuts,e g. using vanilla bean paste instead of scraping out vanilla seeds from the pod saved me washing extra knives, a chopping board, wasting all the actual pods themselves


The other option was the 8 texture chocolate cake by Quay, as suggested by Miss G, however Mr T isn't really all that into chocolate, and I thought that doing alternate chocolate / vanilla layers might still just be a bit too chocolatey. However, I will try a version of the 8 texture cake as well. Recipe is here if you're interested in what that looks like.



 

I ended up with 7 layers (no recipe posted since I don't have one for 4 of the 7 layers - though I have put a * where I borrowed the recipe from Zumbo):

  1. Dacquoise* - not sure if this is a fancy way of saying meringue; the method of making it certainly made it feel meringue like. This was the bottom layer and had to be sufficiently dense to hold up the layers on top.

  2. White chocolate ganache - white chocolate version of regular ganache. Mine wasn't setting properly in the time given and was too runny to spread properly, but the internet suggested I whip it up with electric beaters to stiffen it, and I ended up with wonderfully whipped thickened ganache. No idea why I didn't think of this before... if my ganache has whipped cream in it of course it will whip! Duh...

  3. Brown sugar crumble - regular crumble you'd put on a bog standard apple crumble, except with brown sugar.

  4. Chiffon cake* - lovely smooth textured cake, but a pain to make. Next time I'll go with a regular vanilla cake and slice it up.

  5. Macaron* - almond meal, icing sugar, egg whites, similar to the dacquoise. Isn't it amazing that the same few ingredients can yield a whole bunch of different textures???

  6. Cream cheese frosting - since I was in a hurry I didn't have time to be precise in measuring out perfect circles for every single layer and making sure everything was exactly the same height. Unfortunately this also meant the cake looked a little like a dessert burger so I needed the cream cheese frosting to cover all the gaps. Unfortunately I didn't make quite enough and so the sides of the cake are not perfectly regular.

  7. Piped whipped cream roses - Mr T thought the top of his cake was looking rather bare. I was going to pipe a picture of the Sydney Opera House but he wanted something that would provide more coverage.. so I pulled out my trusty Wilton 2D and he ended up with a lot of roses and flowers instead. It looks a little wedding cake-ish (that was not the intention!) since I got slightly carried away. Oops.






All in all it was a pretty tasty vanillery (is that a word?) concoction. I would really have liked to reduce the sugar level, but frosting wouldn't be frosting and the macaron / meringue layers won't set without sufficient amounts of sugar.

Happy Birthday (again) Mr T and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as your carrot cupcake.



Ideas for the next cake experiment anyone?

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