Ingredients for the cake:
100 g (3.5 oz) sweet milk chocolate
Half a cup of water
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
250 g (8.8 oz or two sticks) butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs, separated
1 tsp vanilla essence / extract
1 cup buttermilk
Ingredients for the filling:
4 egg yolks
1 1/4 cups evaporated milk
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence / extract
1 1/2 cups sugar
190 g (6.5 oz or 1 1/2 sticks) butter
2 cups dessicated coconut
1 1/2 cups pecan nuts, chopped and roasted
Ingredients for the icing:
250 g (8.8 oz or 2 sticks) butter
1 1/3 cups cocoa powder, sifted
5 cups icing sugar, sifted
2/3 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla essence / extract
Preheat the oven to 180 C (350 F). Grease and line 3 round 7 inch cake tins.
I'll walk you through how I did it, not just what the recipe says, which will never be exactly the same thing. So to start off, I didn't have sweet milk chocolate, only dark chocolate (52% couverture) so that's what I used.
Put the chocolate and water into a glass bowl and microwave for about 2 minutes, stirring once. You don't want the water to boil or the chocolate to melt completely, but the mixture should be warm enough that the chocolate will melt when you stir if afterwards.
In a mixing bowl, sift the flour, bicarb of soda and salt together.
At this point the recipe tells you to start beating butter and sugar and egg yolks in your electric mixer, but if you're like me and you dislike washing your mixer bowl, start by beating the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, and tip it out into a bowl. You can rinse the mixer bowl but it's probably not even necessary - and it's far easier to clean out egg whites to prepare batter than to clean out batter so you can whisk egg whites, which needs a super-clean mixing bowl.
Now measure your butter and sugar into the electric mixer.
Then, with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Add the egg yolks, one at a time, mixing well in between. Scrape down the sides of the bowl if necessary.
Blend in the melted chocolate and vanilla essence, until has an almost chocolate-mousse like consistency:
Add the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk, mixing well after each addition. Now mix in the whisked egg whites gently.
Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 30-35 minutes. I had to bake mine a little longer - maybe 40 minutes in total. You'll know they're done when they spring back a little when you press them in the middle with the flat side of a knife or fork. When they come out of the oven, immediately run a small spatula around the edge of each layer. Cool in the pans for 15 minutes and turn out onto a wire rack.
At this point I ran into a bit of a disappointment, as the cakes didn't turn out well at all, despite the fact that I greased and lined the pans really well. It stuck to the greasing paper, which was additionally greased with butter so it really shouldn't happen:
That's the underside which should be flat - so I really don't like the actual cake recipe all that much. In retrospect I think if I make this recipe again I'll use a different recipe for the actual cake but I will use the filling and icing again - this is quite an expensive cake with the chocolate and buttermilk and all that, and while it gives a nice dense cake I think there are other ways of achieving that.
While the cake is in the oven, start preparing the filling:
Combine the egg yolks, evaporated milk and vanilla in a saucepan.
Whisk until well blended. Add the sugar and butter and cook on medium heat for 12 minutes, stirring constantly.
Remove from the heat. At this point you'll need to protect your tongue and waistline because it smells exactly like hot fudge (which it is, mostly) but it is VERY hot so succumbing to the temptation to take a spoonful might give you blisters.
If you bought roasted nuts, you can just chop them up, otherwise dry-roast them in a pan over low heat and then chop them up:
Add the coconuts and pecan nuts to the fudge filling. Mix well and cool until you can easily spread it.
For the icing:
Clean up your mixer bowl, and then mix the butter and cocoa powder until combined. Add half of the icing sugar, followed by the milk and rest of the icing sugar. Add vanilla and beat until fluffy. I didn't take pictures of this bit, sorry!
I used only about half of the icing sugar and half of the milk and it gave a nice dark not-too-sweet icing, which as it turns out was an inspired choice as the filling is REALLY sweet. In fact when we had the cake that night it was actually a bit overpoweringly rich and sweet, which was disappointing. My friend Lee did say it improved vastly by the next day so maybe this cake is best made a day or two in advance.
So, on to assembly:
Spread half of the filling on the bottom cake layer and the other half on the second, and top with the third layer. You'll have quite a high cake:
Choose the layer with the flattest bottom to go right on top, so you can ice the top as flatly as possible. Then spread the icing evenly over the sides and top. I think this goes well with very little decoration, so I just added a candle:
And here's a picture of the sliced cake, from about 5 hours later:
So what I'd do differently:
1. If I use the same cake recipe, I definitely won't use couverture chocolate. I really couldn't taste the difference that actual chocolate makes in this recipe.
2. The filling is perhaps a bit thick, so I might use less coconut so that it can spread thinner. Hanno also doesn't really like coconut, so an alternative is to use just a lot of nuts with the fudge, which would give it more crunch and it could be really lovely.
3. I'd make it a day or two in advance so all the flavours have a while to settle together.
Anyway, so there you have it! Let me know if you've tried something like this.
Yum! I'm bookmarking this.
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