Yesterday, a friend celebrated his 30th birthday with a potluck dinner. He asked me to bring the birthday cake, and I agreed! Foolishly, perhaps, given my travel schedule and inexperience with making birthday cakes. It was to be a vanilla sponge cake filled with coffee/Bailey's flavored whipped cream:
People seemed to enjoy the cake, and I gained some valuable experience. I'll just have to keep practicing, I guess!
Ready to be refrigerated, before the final step of covering with chocolate ganache.
I had thought that the ganache would be the easy part. If you thought that making chocolate ganache consists of dumping chocolate and cream in a pot and melting them together, I can now tell you from experience that you'd be wrong. The ganache was oily and refused to be spread; it somehow was simultaneously dragging too much on the surface and too slippery. I called every number I knew to reach my mom: cake emergency! I managed to scrape off the failed ganache, leaving this beautiful masterpiece:
Mmmmm...delicious....
The leftover scrapings. My mom told me to save it to use later. Ideas, anyone?
Sidenote: I include these pictures because I wish that food bloggers would show us more failures and mistakes. Not just epic Pinterest fails, as amusing as they are, but more run-of-the-mill mistakes. Otherwise, how are we to know how to recover? Fortunately, I have the ultimate resource in my mom. =) Still, I got so stressed out that I got failed ganache all over the kitchen. I was rather proud of myself when I looked down and saw that I had managed to avoid getting ganache on the front of my new yellow t-shirt...until I realized that I had succeeded in smearing it all over my BACK. Still not entirely sure how that happened.
It's a good thing that the cake's surface was meant to be covered up! That meant that I could try again, this time with better technique (steam the cream first in the microwave, add the chocolate, let set and then stir occasionally) and consequently, better results:
Special thanks to Julie for the beautiful cake server!
People seemed to enjoy the cake, and I gained some valuable experience. I'll just have to keep practicing, I guess!
hahahahh this blog post cracks me up so much!! actually the failed ganache looks sooooo yummy in that cup mmm...
ReplyDeleteps-- also "a beautiful mess" sometimes has run of the mill recipe fails! it's one of my favorite things.. we learn so much more from the mistakes! not that I am really cooking anything eeeee
alas, I have learned that I made another mistake...I should not have used up the leftover whipped cream by covering the cake in it! That made it even more difficult for the ganache to bond with the cake. Too much of a good thing...
ReplyDeletei am so sad i missed this cake! and... mrs. lu to the rescue! always!
ReplyDeleteSo very impressed! When I saw the first picture, the logic followed -- in my universe/experience -- that any efforts to rehabilitate would slowly and painfully lead an ugly pile of crumbles and tears. Clearly, this was the opposite. Nice work to you all for the amazing (and I'm sure tasty) outcome! (I also totally second the idea that bloggers should post the failures too. It's not only encouragement for the likes of me, but I think it makes for a more interesting story and well-appreciated product!)
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