For the past little while instead of giving me objects as gifts, my friend Amanda has opted for experiences. It started at Christmas, when she suggested that instead of buying me something that we pick two cake recipes out of Tessa Huff’s Layered cookbook (at the time I’d been making practically one a week for the previous couple months) and make them together. The gift was that she’d pay for all the ingredients, and then we’d each keep half of the two cakes and be able to use them for Christmas events like potlucks. That time, we made a black forest cake and a butterscotch bourbon cake. For my birthday in April, Amanda suggested we do the same thing as my gift, except this time with just one cake. In the same conversation, she was ooh-ing and aah-ing over this chocolate salted caramel ombre cake from The Polkadotter and it seemed like a great thing to make for my birthday baking session!
It has three different types of cake, each cut in half to make six layers total. Then, it has a salted caramel sauce on the top as well as salted caramel Swiss meringue buttercream between the layers and on the outside of the cake. FINALLY, it has chocolate swirl meringue kisses on top for decoration.
First up was the salted caramel. I’d only made caramel a few times before, and 1) all the times were what I think is called a “wet” technique where you start the heating process with sugar and corn syrup mixed together already, and 2) one of the times I still completely botched it and my cake had to go unadorned with sticky goodness. So I’d never tried making caramel where it starts with just sugar all alone in the pot and you melt it. I have to say, this felt so strange and bizarre and I was not convinced during the process that it was going to ever resemble anything other than strange slightly darkened chunky sugar. But I’m nothing if not persistent so I kept stirring and stirring and stirring and hoping it would eventually resemble something less solid. And it did! I didn’t take any pictures during the first part because I was too weirded out by what was happening and too busy questioning Amanda out loud ever five minutes as to whether she thought it looked “right”. (Amanda is not an experienced baker so I’m not sure what I expected to get out of this questioning.) Below is what it looked like after it started to be more liquid-y! You can see the chunkiness on the whisk still.
As you can see, it eventually got bubbly and dark like I knew it was supposed to, and then I added the cream and butter and it sputtered wildly like I’d experienced the previous times I’d made caramel successfully! At the end we added the salt and left it to cool (it was very difficult to resist sticking our fingers into the veeeeery hot liquid just to taste).
Next up were the chocolate swirl meringue kisses. As you can see below, we didn’t have the greatest time with these. First of all, piping them was an unholy mess. The directions have you put your melted chocolate in one piping bag with the tip cut off, and your meringue in another, and then you put BOTH of those into a piping bag with a piping tip on it and then they (in theory) squeeze out of the piping tip together making beautiful swirls. See the link to the original recipe above for photos of the lovely swirls they were supposed to have. Because ours obviously don’t. I was so covered in chocolate all the way up to my elbows that that’s probably one of the reasons they’re not very swirly. The other reason is that we had a really hard time getting the chocolate to come out of its individual bag and into the main joint one! The meringue was very flowy and nice and the chocolate, despite being fully melted, stubbornly refused to join the party and just lurked in unswirly sadness. At the end I managed to bully some of the chocolate into coming out, and they still taste good, but I would like a future attempt at this to get real chocolate meringue kisses. As well, a lot of them cracked! Meringue wizards of the world, any advice on what we could’ve done to prevent this? Did we cook them too long? Or too hot? (We did exactly as the instructions told us to.) Leave me a comment if you have wisdom! Regardless, they still tasted good, so primary objective = achieved.
The three cake types are a dark chocolate one on the bottom, a salted caramel almond cake in the middle, and the lightest one on top is a white chocolate cake. I found it super satisfying to see how even the batters were really distinct in colour.
Amanda was the primary Icing Spreader (official title, of course) and I have to confess, we were a little tight for time. Amanda had to go home to feed and love on her kitties, but the main reason was because in the middle of baking (after the cakes were cooling out of their pans but before we made the icing) we left to go to a local crêperie downtown. Why, you might ask? Well. They started making a new thing called bubble waffles (or Hong Kong waffles, I think) where they used them as cones and you could get three scoops of ice cream and a bunch of toppings on them. Last weekend (when we baked this) was the first weekend they were selling them, AND they’re only available on the weekends from 10am to 2pm. So we had a small window, and it was lucky we went before we made the icing because that was at 1pm, and they only had 12-16 cones left at that point. Because I know you’re just DYING to know, Amanda had vanilla ice cream with chocolate and caramel sauce and mini oreos on it, and I had their signature/special/whatever one, which had cherry Jolly Rancher ice cream and crushed Jolly Rancher “sprinkles” on top, with these lovely sugary smears they made by melting Jolly Ranchers and spreading them out on a tray to dry in fun shapes for garnishes. Obviously worth it.
So the cake has a more “rustic” icing finish because we didn’t have time to put in the fridge for any real length of time. As well, I’ve been having trouble on and off when I’ve made Swiss meringue buttercream lately. Sometimes it works perfectly, and other times (like this time) the meringue looks great and then when I add the butter it separates and looks horrible and has the worst texture ever. And goes into the green bin never to be seen again. And we didn’t have enough butter or time to redo the meringue buttercream in case it went badly again, so we opted for a regular buttercream and that went fine. You add in salted caramel sauce, and it tastes so good. I’m not normally an icing junkie but I just wanted to eat the whole bowl!
I think it was the non-coldness of the cake, but my drips are not the MOST beautiful thing although I’ll accept them because I don’t have much practice at it and I’m improving! The meringue kisses tried to run away off the top of the cake because of the flowing caramel, but I chased them back on and held them there until they stopping trying to flee. Then we cut the cake in half to split and it looks so cool inside! Overall I’m really happy with this cake and it tastes DELICIOUS! (I still have a bit left in my fridge.) Amanda sent me a link to some lemon cheesecake mousse cups yesterday, so that might be our next joint project.
