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Sara had to head back to Turin to work the Monday of Tancredi's birthday so had asked me of I could make him a cake during. He had deemed it needed to be a chocolate cake. My sister has this awesome chocolate cake recipe she uses to make wedding cakes, and having made a variation of it previously, I thought it would be the think to make. We'd packed a tin and were half way to Sauze before I remembered this recipe says, explicitly, to NOT use a spring form pan so i spent an hour or so in the morning plugging up all the leaks with alfoil.
Tancredi and I headed to the next by shops and his face when I picked up 5 blocks of chocolate was rather amusing. My response was 'well you wanted a chocolate cake'. The next glitch I came to was when I'd mixed together all the batter and put the bowl next to the cake tin it was obvious that it wasn't going to fit. I quickly texted my sister and emailed her photos of all the things I could find around the house that might serve as a cake tin. After she took a short icey pole break in the middle of my emergency cake correspondence we decided that using a large glass dish would me okay.
I quickly papered the sides and base and whacked the mix in the oven. Then began the giant waiting game. The recipe says 45 mins at 170c with my sisters side note being 'yeah right, more like 2x this every time' so you leave the cake 40mins and then start stabbing it every 10-20 mins to see how it's doing. At one point when I stabbed it raw mix started bleeding out the hole, yeah, I didn't think it was quite ready yet. Over all it ended up being in there a bit over an hour and a half, but I'm not sure exactly.
I probably got too excited about getting it on to the cooling rack and should have waited a bit longer, it was super fragile and with Tancredi giving me a hand I'm surprised the whole thing didn't break. Now I have enough trouble at Sara's /house/ funding things to use as a cooling rack so as you can imagine finding something there and big enough for a cake at that was a little challenging. In the end I decided to use the rack from the oven. Oh but it's just been in the oven and is hot you say? Don't worry there's a bank of snow outside the living room to throw it into.
With the cake on the cooling rack it was time for the second waiting game. How long will it take for a 10cm thick chocolate mud cake to cool completely. I was hesitant to put it out side this time since there wasn't really a good place for it and I didn't want it to get dripped on. The cake came out of the oven around 4 so I still had plenty of time to head to the shops and grab what I forgot for the ganache before Sara came home. In the end Tancre asked Sara to pick up the remaining few things since she was going to arrive before dinner.
As it turns out it was almost 9pm by the time she arrived. Realising they'd be so late she'd called to tell us to eat and then go watch a ski thing in the town where a while bunch of people skied down the slope with flaming torches. Tancredi by this point was pretty was pretty grumpy. Sara had missed most of his birthday, had to get his present in Turin AND was late getting back so the cake wasn't done either. I promised him he would have his cake on his birthday so when we made it home at 10 I set about hurriedly chopping chocolate for ganache and decorations.
While the ganache was cooling I pencilled out some letters on baking paper to trace with some white chocolate. Chocolate too runny for writing with? No problem, just cooled it in the snow out side. I sat the pan in the snow for a few seconds while stirring it to make sure it didn't set at the edges, once it thickened up a bit I pored it into a paper funnel and travel out the words. It was the first time I'd ever done any sort of chocolate decorating/writing and the fact I was shaking from the rush of getting the cake finished didn't help. I wasn't happy with my traced one so free handed a second set and it came out pretty good. I put the paper on metal tray and sat it out on the snow again to firm up completely. Then it was on to ganaching the cake.
I'd never made ganache before either. This really isn't sounding like the best cake to be making in a small unequipped kitchen in the middle of the night, is it? Liberty had said the chocolate to cream ratio was maybe around 2:1 and I needed it to be like peanut butter at the end. Not having chocolate to spare I added a little less cream to start off with. Again it was still quite runny when I came to putting it on the cake, despite the time I'd spend working on the writing. Back out to the snow I went. In the end I probably could have used the correct measurement of cream. The ganache was a little too stiff and a little too set. I had to work it quickly with the knife before being able to spend it on the cake. Only having a small flat knife I had a hard time getting the cake to look smooth, but I never had any expectations of the perfect hot knife ganache that my sister pulls off every time. I smoothed the top off pretty well, filled in a couple of places where the cake had stuck to the tin and then left the edges and sides rustically messy. Carefully easing my chocolate writing off the paper and placing it on top I was done. And all that in just under and hour!
I brought the cake out and Tancredi's smile more than made up for the stress of getting it done. I'd let him way the off cuts from when I'd evened out the top before we headed down for the ski thing, so he already knew it tasted pretty good but I don't think anyone was expecting it to look as cool as it did. I was super proud of how it worked out, it looked pretty specky so long as you didn't compare it to any of my sister's masterpieces. Everyone was super impressed, especially when I pointed out I'd never made it quite like this before and had never written with chocolate either! Sara's friend who was there too has asked if I can make another one for her sons birthday in a few days.
Later that night when we were in bed Tancredi said my cake was the best birthday present he got. =D
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