Happy Halloween! Chocolate Red Wine Cake

 This isn't my first foray into the chocolate/booze experience.  The first was this chocolate rum cake-- good, but I didn't rave about it.  I tried these red wine brownies and had a mixed reaction.  I even tried a red wine chocolate cake once before, but was unimpressed.  So why try again?  Because I'm convinced this is a delicious combination-- I just have to find the right mix.  Is it the recipe that makes the difference?  Maybe.  Food & Wine, the source for today's recipe, has a well-deserved reputation.  Review comments on this recipe, however, seem to put great stock in the wine used.  Seems Bordeaux is the prime choice, while Cabernet Sauvignon did not work well.  Not very helpful, since Bordeaux reds are a blend of grapes, one of which is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Not willing to invest a quality wine to what might end up a mediocre bake, I bought a bottle of Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon, otherwise known as 2-buck Chuck (now $3.99 Chuck).  Despite its low cost, Charles Shaw wines regularly receive surprisingly good reviews, probably because it's actually drinkable, while other wines at that price point are better reserved for salad dressing.  That said, the wine in the final result was completely undetectable, even in the ganache.  I didn't point out it was a red wine cake when I served it, and no one asked about any subtle flavoring.  It was, however, an amazing chocolate cake!

I was bringing this cake to a Halloween party, so I baked it in my Wilton skull pan, but kept it simple.  (I've used this pan previously here and here.)  No fancy decorations this time.  The original recipe is for a 12-cup Bundt; I halved the recipe and baked it in just the face half of the skull pan.  It would probably work fine in an 8" x 4" loaf pan, or a single 9" round cake pan.  Here's what I used:

1 cup all-purpose flour 

3/8 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (not Dutch process)

5/8 teaspoons baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

7/8 cup sugar

1 large egg 

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

5/8 cup dry red wine 

Confectioner's sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 325°. Butter and flour a 6-cup pan. In a bowl, whisk the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt.  In a large bowl, using a handheld electric mixer, beat the butter with the sugar at medium-high speed until fluffy, 4 minutes. Add the egg and beat until incorporated. Add the vanilla and beat for 2 minutes longer. Working in two batches, alternately fold in the dry ingredients and the wine, until just incorporated.

 

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a rack; let cool completely. Drizzle or streak the ganache around the sides of the plate and just a little in the center (to help hold the cake in place.) Dust the cake with confectioner's sugar, then place on the plate. Serve with whipped mascarpone cream.

 

Ganache:
2 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons red wine

pinch of salt

Heat the chocolate and butter in a double boiler until melted; stir together.  Add the wine and salt and stir until smooth.

 

Topping
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese
1/2 cup (118 grams) chilled heavy or whipping cream
2 tablespoons (25 grams) granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Whip together until soft peaks form -- don't over whip. 

 

I over baked this cake, and it still turned out great, but I'm frustrated with Wilton-- they included a recipe with the cake pan for a pumpkin cake that requires a long bake time.  I think it must be the moisture in that particular batter requiring that lengthy bake, because I keep over baking the cakes when I use another recipe.  It was nice of Wilton to include the recipe, but guidance for a standard cake recipe would have been more helpful.  I used a thermal cake strip around the pan, which is supposed to help the cake rise more evenly.  I baked it for 65 minutes, and even though it was overdone, it sank in the middle.  The edges were a bit crusty, but the whole thing was delicious.  The pan probably needs only a normal bake time.

 

Conclusion: This was amazing! Semi-sweet, and so good! Rich and moist and chocolatey, made even more so with just a little bit of the ganache -- you don't need a lot.

Recipe:  Chocolate Red Wine Cake via Kristin Donnelly at Food & Wine

It's Halloween! A ghoulish cake

The competition was for scariest dessert.  I knew I had it, hands down, with this skull cake.  ...  You know what won?  A kitty litter cake.  PLEASE!  She threw together a few packaged ingredients!  What says "Halloween" about a "cake" made to look like a box of kitty litter?  Nothing.  The reason she won was because about 25 of her co-workers applauded for her and the winning entry was based on noise level.  It was a damn close call, even so.  And I'm not bitter at all.

Just look at this amazing creation!

Sigh.  If only it hadn't been so much work.  Almost everything that could have gone wrong, did.  I bought cake mix because I figured it was fool proof.  I don't make many cakes so I don't have a preferred recipe.  I got strawberry with the idea of mixing a little black food coloring to make a sort of gross, grayish pink, inside-the-skull color.  Well, I added too much black, which frighteningly made it look just like chocolate.  (Tells you something about artificially flavored desserts, doesn't it?  It even tasted like chocolate. And that tells you something about tasting with our eyes first.) Then the cake face stuck in the pan.  (WHY do we have to grease and flour a "non-stick" pan???  And then it sticks anyway.)  After much fussing, it came out... or part of it did.  The actual face stuck firm.  I managed to pry it all out in a few pieces and put it back together.

         

                                           Yes folks, that is a strawberry cake.

I wanted to use the cooked flour frosting I've used before, which I really like, but I decided to add a little cream cheese, thinking it would create a firmer product.  (Cream cheese is firmer at room temperature than butter.)  What a disaster.  I can only assume that was the cause of the frosting refusing to firm up at all.  No matter how much I whipped it, it stayed runny.  Like soup.  By then I was exhausted and had to go to bed, so I threw a towel over the cakes, hoping they wouldn't dry out too much, and stuck the soup in the refrigerator, hoping the chill would help.

The next day, the frosting was firm, but as soon as I started mixing it, it went back to soup.  Advice on the interwebs was to add sugar (gross), DON'T add sugar, add meringue powder, chill it, add more butter...  I added some sugar and some meringue powder to no avail.  I went out and bought canned stuff for emergency backup but the ingredient list grossed me out and I couldn't bring myself to use it.  I started over with fresh butter, then slowly added the soup, and that way managed to get a usable frosting.  By this time I'd spent all morning and was due at the luncheon in 30 minutes.  I started decorating. 

I glued the face together with frosting, and then the two halves.  When I used this skull pan for a Guy Fawkes cake, I had no trouble with the face sliding off, but this time it did.  I had to prop it up with more cake under the chin.  I used gummy eyeballs, one hanging by licorice laces (from a booger-filled eye socket), licorice lace hair, and candy corn teeth.  Then I dripped a little green icing slime from eyeballs and teeth.  The final touch was the meat cleaver (which I would have liked to have embedded in the skull but was afraid it wouldn't hold up.)

In the end, not only did the cake not win, but it didn't even hardly get eaten.  People didn't know how to cut into it, even though I got it started by slicing off the top of the head.  They want to cut it like a regular cake, but that gets you either little frosting or most of it.  So it got destroyed.  Making it look even scarier.

Chocolate Sourdough Cake for Guy Fawkes Day

Remember, remember the fifth of November --
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot.
I know of no reason the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot!

I'm not a big Guy Fawkes proponent (although I loved V for Vendetta), but the timing was right.  I bought this 3-D skull pan last year and had hoped to use it to make a sugar skull cake, but didn't get my act together soon enough, so it became a Guy Fawkes mask cake.

Some time ago, I made a "sourdough" starter from the wild yeast off my own organic grapes.  It's a very mild starter, not sour at all.  I don't bake bread often enough to use it all, so when I came across this sourdough cake recipe I was eager to try it out.  The recipe calls for King Arthur Flour's own sourdough starter, but by referring to the photos in their blog I was able to make adjustments so it would work with my own starter.

The planned baking day was very cool, and after 3 hours my flour/milk/starter mix hadn't budged.  After six hours it looked good, but by then it was late, so I put it in the refrigerator until the next evening and hoped for the best.  I forgot that wet flour, when left alone for a long period of time, will develop gluten all by itself.

Chocolate mixture.

Sourdough mixture, cocoa dusted.

When I went to use the mixture, it was as tough and stretchy as rubber!  Mixing it with the chocolate mixture was impossible, so I added a little milk to loosen things up.

In the end, I didn't get everything completely mixed together and there were small swirls of white in the final cake that baked up very tough.  I also made a mistake in not reducing the oven temperature to account for the longer baking time.  The pan comes with a recipe that calls for 65-75 minutes in a 325F oven. I had made note of the baking time, but not the temperature.  So I set the oven for 350F as called for in the KAF recipe and after 65 minutes it tested done.  Well, yeah.  Over done.  The best parts were the parts I cut off to get the two halves to fit together smoothly.  (It rose quite a lot in the middle, partially, I imagine, due to the overly hot oven.)  Next time I'll pay better attention... I hope.

Here's what I used:

1 cup "fed" sourdough starter
1 cup whole milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 cup unsweetened baking cocoa (not Dutch process)
1 teaspoon espresso powder
2 large eggs

Combine the "fed" starter, milk, and flour in a large mixing bowl. Cover and let rest at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours. It won't necessarily bubble, but it may have expanded a bit.

Preheat the oven to 350°F (325°F if using a 3-D pan). Lightly grease a 9" x 13" pan.  (If using a 3-D pan, lightly grease and then dust with flour or cocoa.)  In a separate bowl, beat together the sugar, oil, vanilla, salt, baking soda, cocoa. and espresso powder. The mixture might be grainy.  Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Gently combine the chocolate mixture with the starter-flour-milk mixture, stirring until smooth. Be sure to thoroughly incorporate the two.  This will be a gloppy process at first, but the batter will smooth out as you continue to beat gently.  Pour the batter into the prepared pan and rap a few time on the counter to release any large air bubbles.  (If using a decorative pan, this is especially important in order to settle the batter into the grooves.  For the skull pan, I poured in just enough batter to fill in the face and then rapped it hard several times to make sure the batter was fully filling the form.)  Bake the cake for 30 to 40 minutes, until it springs back when lightly pressed in the center, and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.  Remove the cake from the oven; allow the 3-D pan to cool for 15 minutes before removing cake and cooling completely on a rack.

Constructing the cake was a little tricky, but went smoothly.  I sandwiched the halves with purchased dulce de leche, then went about constructing a nose out of cake scraps, also attached with dulce de leche.  (That stuff is sticky!)  I should note that both halves of the cake have a portion that rests on the plate, so your filling doesn't have to be firm enough to support the face.  (I hadn't been able to tell prior to making it.)  I also had to construct a lower lip.

 

I had yet another new thing to try in the frosting.  I find most frosting too sweet, so when I heard about cooked flour frosting that was less sweet, I had to try it.  You start with a loose roux, and that helps give body to the frosting.  I used half the full recipe and had just barely enough to cover the outside of the cake.

While very tasty, this frosting is not especially good for intricate decorating, as it has a whipped consistency that's difficult to smooth.  To get it truly smooth (and I did not do this), you should chill the completed cake to firm up the frosting, then use CLEAN fingers to smooth out the surface, just like cold butter.

Conclusion:  This cake was delicious!  Where I didn't over bake it, the cake was soft and moist.  It is not a very sweet cake, so your taste might require you to add another half cup of sugar or so, but with a sweet frosting it balanced out nicely as is.  I feel sure the issues with texture were due to over-developing the gluten in the flour and/or over baking.  I definitely will make this again, including adapting it to other flavors.

Recipe:  Sourdough Chocolate Cake via King Arthur Flour