Baking Week Three: White Chocolate

After much hemming and hawing over what to do for white chocolate week, I finally settled on making a white chocolate mousse and layering it with some rich chocolate cake and have some delicious ganache over top.  Once again I turned to my trusty cake collection in search of a recipe.  I thought I was only looking for a basic chocolate cake recipe and instead ran across a recipe for something called a Chocolate Truffle Torte.  It sounded so decadently delicious that I couldn't resist and immediately began baking. 

The Chocolate Truffle Torte has four main components: the cake, the mousse, and white and dark ganache.  You make them in about that order with lots of chilling in between.

One note before you even begin considering making this.  Be sure you have plenty of time.  I recommend one of those lazy Sunday afternoons because by rushing this in an evening after work, things did not set as they should.

I also recommend eating this cake in VERY small slices as it is one of the most decadent things I have eaten.  Oh and use a warm knife to cut it!  

This cake makes one 9 inch torte

 Start by preheating the oven to 300* F

¾ lb. Unsalted butter, cut into 12 (1oz.) pieces

1 ½ lb. Semisweet  chocolate broken into ½ oz. pieces

4 Large eggs

4 Large egg yolks

Melt ½ piece of the butter and use it to coat a 3” deep, 9” springform pan.

Heat 1” water in bottom of double boiler and use it to heat chocolate and remaining butter until it stirs smooth.  Transfer to a 5 qt. steel bowl.

Heat 1” water in bottom of a double boiler.  Put eggs and yolks in the top half and whisk while heating to 110* (2-3 min.)  Be very careful that you don't start cooking your eggs.  I did but it all still came out okay.  Transfer to mixer bowl and use a balloon whip to whisk on high until they become pale. (6-7 minutes)

Fold 1/3 of the eggs into chocolate.  Add remaining egg and fold thoroughly.  Pour into pan and put on a baking sheet on the center rack of oven for 1 hr. 10 min. to 1 hr. 15 min. until it reaches an internal temperature of 170*.  I baked mine for an hour, and it had some dark taste to the edges but as previously discussed my oven cooks quickly.  

Cool in pan 45 minutes.  Press gently on outside edges of cake.  Remove the sides of the pan and refrigerate (on pan bottom) at least 1 hour.  More is probably better.

Now, make the mousse:

6 oz. White chocolate in ½ oz. pieces

2 Tbsp. Water

1 Tbsp. Myers dark rum ( I used vanilla because we don't have rum and it worked well)

½ cup Heavy cream

Make sure to follow directions, my mousse was somewhat watery because I was impatient and rushing things.  Still delicious, but not the same.

Heat 1 “ water in double boiler (don’t simmer).  Put chocolate, water and rum in the top of the double boiler.  Constantly stir with a rubber spatula until smooth while heating.  (about 5-6 min.)  Set aside.

Whip the cream in a well chilled bowl until stiff.  Whip 1/3 of whipped cream into the chocolate mixture until smooth.  Add this mixture to the remaining whipped cream and fold until smooth.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 45 minutes. More is not a bad idea.

After the mousse and cake have chilled sufficiently, spread the mousse over the top and sides of the cake and freeze for at least one hour (again more is not a bad idea).

When the cake is ready to be taken out of the freezer, make the white chocolate ganache:

¾ cup Heavy cream

1 Tbsp. Unsalted Butter

12 oz. white chocolate , cut into ½ oz. pieces

Heat butter and cream in 1 ½ qt. saucepan over medium heat until boiling.  Put chocolate in a 3 qt. stainless steel bowl and pour boiling cream over the chocolate.  Let stand 5 minutes.  Stir until smooth.  Put one cup of this in the refrigerator to chill for decoration.  Pour the remainder over the cake, covering the top and sides.  

Refrigerate the cake at least 30 minutes, or until the ganaches are ready to be piped on top as decoration.  

The chocolate ganache can be made at any time in the process by following these directions:

¾ cup Heavy cream

1 Tbsp. Unsalted Butter

9 oz. Semisweet chocolate , cut into ½ oz. pieces

Heat butter and cream in 1 ½ qt. saucepan over medium heat until boiling.  Put chocolate in a 3 qt. stainless steel bowl and pour boiling cream over the chocolate.  Let stand 5 minutes.  Stir until smooth.  

After the ganache covered cake is chilled and both ganaches are stiff enough to be piped, the suggested decoration is to pipe the white ganache using a medium star tip to make many stars in two horizontal and one vertical line.  Then cover the remainder of the cake with dark chocolate stars.  

You can see my cake for the general lines, however I did not let my ganache sit long enough and it was too soft for stars.  I kind of did a general wavy thing instead in a similar pattern and decorated the sides because I had more ganache to use and they looked a bit messy.    

Finished cake must be kept in the refrigerator.  

It didn't turn out as well balanced between the white and the dark chocolates as I envisioned, but still absolutely delicious!!

Baking Week Two: Miniature

Week two of the baking challenge was all about miniatures.  I went simple and made mini white cupcakes (with store bought frosting. 

The boy's favorite is white cake with Betty Crocker's Rainbow Chip frosting so I made these for him.  Since I don't know how to get the chips that Betty Crocker uses in this frosting I wound up with from scratch cupcakes and store bought frosting.  Still delicious. 

For the cake batter I used a recipe in a collection that my mom made for me a few years back.  For a birthday gift she gave me "Marina's Cake Collection" which was a collection of cake, torte, frosting, and filling recipes in addition to things like common cake mishaps, and measurements.  The particular recipe I used was for Colette Peter's White Cake. 

My note to you all before starting the recipe.  If you use a stand mixer (like I do) I recommend beating the egg whites first and switching it to another bowl to do the rest in the mixer.  Beating egg whites by hand is a PITA and mine completely failed because I got some yolk in them.  Going along with this though is that the cupcakes turned out just fine despite this. 

Ingredients:
2 3/4 c. of flour
1/2 tsp. salt
4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 c. room temp milk
1 1/2 c. sugar
4 egg whites
3/4 butter (softened is best)

Grease mini muffin tins (or use papers, but I discovered I didn't have any mini liners)

Cream butter until light.  Her recipe called for vegetable shortening but I refuse to use the stuff. 

Slowly add 1 c. of the sugar, beating until fluffy.  Add vanilla extract.

Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together.  Add 1 Tbsp, of this to the butter mixture and mix well.  Then add 1 Tbsp. of the milk to the butter mixture and mix well.  Continue alternating until well combined.  I was using heaping Tbsp. of the flour mixture and it worked well. 

In another bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form.  Slowly add remaining 1/2 c. of sugar and beat until stiff peaks form.  Fold this into the batter carefully. 

Bake in preheated 325 degree oven for around 18 minutes.  My oven cooks quickly so it only takes about 14 minutes in my oven, but my reading to determine how long to cook it for suggests the first time. 

This makes about 4.5 dozen mini cupcakes. 

Baking Week One: Almost Famous Blondies

So over the past few months I've become addicted to a site called Reddit.  For anyone not familiar with it, the site has "subreddits" that you go to or subscribe to and read things people post.  Sometimes it is links to articles or blogs, sometimes it is adorable pictures (the aww subreddit is awesome), sometimes it is just someone's interesting perspective, rant or question. 

Well, among the many, many subreddits I've discovered two particular ones that you'll be seeing regularly here.  One is 52 Weeks of Baking and the other is 52 Weeks of Cooking.  Both work with the premise that each week is a new theme and the participants will make something within this theme and post it to the subreddit.  I'm challenging myself to do AT LEAST one of these challenges each week and I'm hoping to do both.  We'll see when it comes to cooking challenges where I completely DESPISE the ingredient for the challenge. 

Anyways though, for the baking challenge this week's challenge was brownies for which I decided to try Almost-Famous Maple-Butter Blondies from the March 2010 issue of Food Network Magazine. 

They came out delicious!!  I didn't follow the recipe exactly (when do I ever?) but I'm here to share it with you.

10 Tbsp. room temp unsalted butter
1 c. walnut pieces
2 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 c. packed brown sugar
3 large eggs
2 Tbsp. Vanilla extract
6 oz. white chocolate (recipe called for chunks, I used chips)

There was also a recipe for a topping (when you get the famous version at Applebees it has this, but I wasn't feeling it when I decided to bake)

My altered Steps:
1. preheat oven to 350 and line a 9x13 pan with foil and spray it with nonstick spray

2.  Pulse 1/2 c. of walnuts in a food processor until almost fine.  Do not overprocess.  I screwed this up and wound up roughly processing the full cup.  I wound up with probably 1/2 of my walnuts almost fine and half in chunks but all together.  Worked fine.  

3.  Whisk ground nuts, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in medium bowl.

4.  Beat butter and brown sugar with a mixer on medium speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes.  

5.  Beat in eggs one at a time.  Scraping down sides as needed

6.  Beat in vanilla.

7.  Gradually beat in dry ingredients until just combined

 8.  Fold in white chocolate and nuts.

9.  Spread in pan and bake 25-30 minutes.  They should be light brown around the edges and spring back when pressed.  Cool Slightly on wire rack.  Enjoy!

Baking Week One complete!  Stay tuned for this weeks cooking challenge: eggs.