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