The Ultimate Chocolate Cake Adventure

Generally I make birthday cakes after everyone goes to bed on "birthday eve". But for some blessed reason, this year I made Doc's cake early in the day, while everyone was at school. And that night, when the power went out for 3 hours, I was SO grateful that it was already done!

I've written about my cake-making in the past, and this year for Doc, I really wanted to make some chocolate decadent dream cake. Something so dark, rich and chocolaty that Doc would fairly moan with delight when he tasted it. It had to be moist, and deeply dark, with amazing texture. And I wanted it to look stunningly elegant and classy.

So of course I turned to Google for help. After hours searching and reading reviews and what not, I finally decided that this cake was The Worthy One. I started preparing for this cake quite early and in hindsight I'm really glad because I noticed that A) the recipe is from England, so the measurements are all in metric. No sweat...I'll use one of the handy online conversion tools to figure it out. But then, B) what the heck is muscovado sugar? To say nothing of golden caster sugar. And notice, it even says "no substitutes". Clearly, I needed the aid of the omnipotent Google again.

This time, though, Google wasn't helping much. I wanted to know what the equivalent of muscovado and golden caster sugars were in the USA. Though I learned a lot about sugar in my searching, I never did definitively determine what these ingredients were called in the land of milk and honey. But I think I came close. For the muscovado, I used the darkest brown sugar I could find. And for golden caster, I ended up getting ultra fine granulated sugar. Which wasn’t golden, but oh well. Ultra fine sugar has a significantly smaller granule than regular sugar...which makes it dissolve much faster and results in a smoother texture. Or so they say.

I did get the highest quality 70%+ dark chocolate bars that I could get my hands on. And then I started the process of making the cake.

It wasn't till it came time to pour the batter in the pan that I realized the Pan Issue. Who the heck has a 20 cm X 7.5 cm pan? I've never seen one. That’s almost 3" deep. My pans are only 1.5" deep, and boast a 9" diameter. No wonder they wanted you to bake it for an hour and a half!

In desperation, I ended up using my two regular 9" rounds, and cutting the bake time down. Then, because I had 2 small layers, I cut each one in half, making 4 total. The resulting cake was more short and squat than it would have been with the pan they called for. But at least there was lots of ganache filling.

Ganache is amazing. If you don't know anything about ganache (and I didn't till this past year) it's the BEST! And the reason I say that is because it's A) super easy to make, and B) Scrumdiddilyumptious. Bonus, C) it's such a fun word. Ganache. Ganache. Panache.

Okay, once the panachey ganashe was made, it was time to make piles of chocolate curls. And of course I'd never made chocolate curls before. Again, Google to the rescue. I found a few different suggestions on how to make them. You probably know that you can just use a peeler on a bar of chocolate...but this results in very skinny curls (unless you have a mondo thick bar of chocolate. In which case you're a Lucky!). For this, I wanted some of the big guns. So isn't this brilliant? All you do is melt some chocolate, then spread it on a metal cookie sheet in a thin layer. Put this in the freezer for just a moment...long enough to firm up but not freeze. You have to experiment to get the right temperature. If it's too cold, it'll be brittle and break. If it's too warm, well, chocolate soup. Which is yummy, of course. But it's not curly. So when it's just the right temp, you take a metal spatula and start pushing it along to curl the thin layer of chocolate up. It's brilliant! I made all kinds of chocolate curls. And after I curled them, I put them in the fridge to hold their shape.

Thanks to my friend Michelle (who keeps saving the day!), I had an elegant cake server to present the whole thing on. My old cutting board covered with aluminum foil is what I usually trot out for cake serving. But this one required something classier.The final assembly proved to be something of a trick...and as I mentioned the look wasn't quite what I'd hoped for and envisioned. But the real test came after blowing out enough candles to heat a small village, when Doc took his first bite.


"Blue, this is seriously the best chocolate cake I've ever tasted. And I'm not just saying that. It really is." That's what he said. Truly!

Glory Hallelujah and amen. I'm so glad it was a hit.