Perfecting a cake flavour takes time, patience, a reasonably sophisticated palate, and a pair of running shoes.
And a bunch of willing walking talking waste disposal units (aka somewhere to hide the evidence).
The running shoes are actually self explanatory. There will be kilojoules ingested. If the experiment is a good one, there will be many.
Its actually not always that easy to modify a cake recipe. Oh, you can change the vanilla for lemon, you can wadge in a few chocolate chips or some frozen berries, you can substitute the milk for buttermilk, orange juice or (Heaven Forbid) water…
In these cases, you’ll probably get something quite edible, and sometimes you’ll hit on a major breakthrough.
The hard part is to engineer a breakthrough.
Lets take the Crumbled Raspberry example.
The top layer is pink and you want a pink cake. You hit on raspberry. Strawberry is cloying, Turkish delight (rosewater) possibly too sophisticated, though that has got me thinking…………mmmmmmmmmmm……
Sorry. So you hit on raspberry. Like I did.
But the thing is, how do you get the cake to taste like raspberry? Without cheating and using raspberry essence that is. Essences of obscure flavours often don’t really taste like the real thing, and I wanted a proper raspberry experience.
My first thought was that I didn’t want whole berries in there. First, its obvious. Second, it’s too muffin like. Third, this cake has to last through the layering and icing process which means that it will sit at room temperature for about three days before it is eaten. Whole fruit might disintegrate and make the surrounding cake gooey. Yuk.
Instead, I tried the idea of using a raspberry coulis.
I found a recipe which required the addition of water and substituted coulis for water. There was an immediate problem. The pigments in raspberries discolour from red to almost blue when they come in contact with flour. One Bad Colour. Unpinkable, though I did try.
The second issue came once it was baked. It was jam-sweet and super moist, like a dessert cake. It was not the texture, or the flavour, to go in a formal iced cake. It needed a blanket of marscapone and candied slivers of orange zest on it. It was asking very nicely, so I obliged.
Delicious. But not useful.
So coulis, or unsweetened pureed raspberries would spoil the colour. Whole berries wouldn’t stay pert for a week.
Thinking about how to avoid the dense, desserty type cake I had created with the coulis, I had a few options. I could make an eggwhite only cake, which is very light textured and gorgeously white. But it would be too light to hold the dense sugarpaste icing, and might sink under the icing causing cracks. Which would be a disaster. I could use a Victoria Sponge mixture, which has more structure, but that would make it the same as the proposed pistachio flavoured tier. Or I could try a maderia type mixture, being fine crumbed, and fairly light. I decided on maderia. The problem remained though, how to get Raspberry without Faking it?
I spent an hour or two searching for freeze dried raspberries, as I had seen powdered raspberries in Melbourne at the Essential Ingredient (a very wonderful food and kitchen toys store), at the bargain price of AU$50 for a 100g jar. I wanted that stuff, by the way but had a bad feeling that MAF would confiscate it on sight if they caught me bringing it back into NZ, and the next time I went, there was none… sobs!
No success on the freeze dried front, unless you wanted to acquire a 1000kg wet weight order. I think that would probably fill my kitchen to the ceiling with freeze dried raspberries. Not great for a 10cm square cake.
Then it occurred that frozen raspberries crumble easily into their separate little seed compartments. I suppose there is a word for that. These wouldn’t suffer from spoilage like a whole berry and have a less seedy texture than a whole berry. They would burst on contact if they were thawed, but frozen, could be folded into the cake mixture if you worked fast (of course the cold berries would quickly stiffen up the cake mixture). The mixture is then left in the cake tin to come back to room temperature prior to baking.
Success! The crumbled berries gave a jewel like look to the cake mixture, which I had in this first experiment tinted quite bright pink, to avoid any colour spoilage during mixing. Also, I had been somewhat heavy handed on the vanilla in the cake mixture… vanilla and raspberry…. heaven…. And the thing kept for a week and just got better and better.
The first filling I tried was a traditional icing sugar/butter/vodka buttercream with pureed raspberries. It was HOT pink, almost obscenely pink, and was a combination of blood-singing sweetness with a tart raspberry punch. Incredible. Highly scented. Massive taste. Probably would give you type II diabetes on the spot. I certainly had a hard time getting to sleep after tasting the cake/filling combo, and I hear it was a hell of a productivity boosting sugar rush in the bride-to-be’s office. But was it too sweet?
No… But realistically… probably yes.
For the final cake, I instead layered the crumbled raspberry maderia with a proper french buttercream, made with hot sugar syrup, egg yolk, and butter, folded through with unsweetened raspberry puree. Pure class.
With a cup of raspberry tea from Tea Total, we have real raspberry in three dimensions.
Next up – more mixings…
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