Yup. 9:30 pm. Started with my single layer cake, a Mocha Pecan Torte. This is the same cake that won the Single Layer Cake Sweeps in 2015. I didn't have the desire to try out a new single layer cake this year so I went with what I knew. This has been one of my favorite go-to cakes lately. Cake was in the oven by 10 pm and I moved on to my multi-layer cake.
I love doing complex multi-layer cakes. I love the juxtaposition of cake flavors and fillings. I always disliked the sickly sweet confectioners' sugar frostings that came on mass produced cakes so I always want to make sure my frostings and fillings can stand alone and are just as tasty as the cake. I love beautifully decorated cakes too but have decided I want my entire cake to be beautiful and tasty. That's one reason why I've shied away from fondant. Yes, you can make awesome looking cakes... but everyone peels off the fondant.
Quite honestly, I hadn't had the time to think about my multi-layer cake this year. I ended up brainstorming an idea while driving home from dropping off my first batch of Fair items on Friday. This is what I dreamed up - a banana cake with buttercream frosting, and throw in some fresh bananas, caramel, toffee chips, and pecans somewhere in the filling. I also had a recipe for cookie butter buttercream but I wasn't entirely sure I could incorporate that too. Oh, but I love me some Bischoff!
Anyhoos, I picked up the ingredients for the banana cake on Friday night and did a trial run. My original idea called for a banana sponge cake. I like fruit in my cakes but I was worried the banana would make the cake too heavy as a layer cake. A heavy moist banana cake is good as a single layer snack cake. Pulling off a multi-layer banana cake would be a little trickier. So... I made the ultimate banana sponge cake. It had 8 eggs with the whites all whipped up. I pureed the bananas in my blender to make them extra smooth and light... and then the thing baked up HUGE! The original recipe had it filling either two 9" round cake pans or three 8" round cake pans. I wanted a three layer cake but I don't have any 8" pans so I made it in three 9" pans and just figured the layers would be flatter. NOT! The batter baked up all the way to the top of my pans. If I had put it in two pans it would have overflowed and made a ginourmous mess in my oven. By the time I got all the filling between the layers the cake was so tall it wouldn't fit in any of my cake carriers.
I let the cake sit on Saturday, then tried it when I got home from work Saturday night... and hated it. The frosting and filling were great. The cake, not so much. It was moist and spongy but, well, it was spongy and I didn't like the mouth feel of the sponge. I like cakes with a fine crumb and there was no crumb at all, just sponge. Plus, there were all these long tunnels in the cake. This was not going to work. I took the remains to work the next day. At least my co-workers liked it. Funny though, many of them could not identify what kind of cake it was since I had essentially liquified the bananas into the batter. Some people thought it was a spice cake even though there were no spices in it!
So now it was back to the drawing board. I had found another banana cake recipe. This one was more of a traditional cake. I bought more ingredients on my drive home from work on Sunday and made it next. This cake went into two 6" round pans. Directions were to bake it for 22-25 minutes. I questioned that cause it not only had mashed bananas in it, but sour cream too. It was a heavy batter. At 25 minutes it was no where near done! I ended up checking the oven in 3-5 minute increments and finally pulled the cakes out after 40 minutes.
Set the banana cakes to cool and glazed my Mocha Pecan Torte.
Next up was making my buttercream. I have several buttercream recipes and used to always make a Swiss buttercream which requiring boiling a sugar syrup and whipping it into some eggs, the slowly adding butter. It was wonderful but tricky and really time consuming because you had to whip a boiling hot sugar syrup until it reached room temperature, then add butter and if everything was not at the right temperature the whole mess would separate and curdle.
Two years ago I discovered a cooked flour base buttercream. I love it because it mimics whipped cream. I really like whipped cream on cakes but it's disallowed in the Fair due to food safety rules.
I started making my buttercream at 1 am. It required you to cook together flour and milk on the stovetop while stirring constantly so it doesn't burn or get lumpy. This takes about 15 minutes to cook properly or else the frosting will taste pasty. Once that's done, it has to cool to room temperature before adding it to a whipped butter and sugar mixture. The buttercream got done at 2 am.
OK, all that's left to do is frost the cake. I had put the banana cakes in the refrigerator by now to chill as I had to split each one in two to make four layers. I split the cakes. They didn't turn out exactly even but I was too tired to obsess about it at this point. What I ended up deciding to do was make a four layer cake. My buttercream had a vanilla butternut flavoring. I saved some of it for the sides and top of the cake. Next I mixed in toffee chips and chopped pecans to some of the buttercream, then went ahead and made a cookie butter buttercream by whipping together some Bischoff spread into the buttercream. Next I diced a banana and mixed it with caramel sauce. I wanted to coat the fresh bananas in something before adding it to the filling because I was worried the moisture in the bananas would liquify the adjacent filling.
To assemble the cake I did a layer of cake, then toffee pecan buttercream, pressed some caramel coated bananas into it, covered the bananas with more toffee pecan buttercream, then another layer of cake, cookie butter buttercream, another layer of cake, another toffee pecan caramel banana layer, then the final layer of cake. Crumb coated the whole thing and stuck it in the fridge. Now it was 3 am. I figured I'd let it set up for at least 30 minutes and went to rest on the couch.
45 minutes later... ugh... it was hard to get up off the couch. I considered just going to sleep and finishing the frosting in the morning but then decided I just wanted to get this done. Frosted the sides and top, then drizzled my caramel pattern on top... then decided the top of the cake was a wee bit lopsided, as in not level. CRAP.
Pressed some pecan chips into the side of the cake to see if that would change the visual at all. Not much. Grrrr. I got out my icing bags and tips and thought about doing some type of border around the top that draped down the sides and experimented on some cups... but that didn't seem like a good idea either. Part of the problem was that my caramel pattern was so close to the edge of the top of the cake that anything else would make it look crowded. Finally, at 4:30 am, I decided it was time to STEP AWAY FROM THE CAKE! I knew I was tired and I was afraid I'd do something stupid. I also thought that, if it came down to it, I could let everything harden up for a couple hours then scrape the caramel topping off the top of the cake and level the top with more buttercream and do the caramel pattern over. I went to bed.
This morning though, I looked at the cake again and decided it didn't look all that bad, so I left it alone.
Here are my cakes...
Banana Delight
Mocha Pecan Torte
Both were successfully dropped off this afternoon. Now it's naptime!
No comments:
Post a Comment