Whipped Cream- Miracle Worker Extraordinaire

Birthday time! Not mine just yet, but a friend’s. I was trying to figure out what kind of cake to make her and decided right away that I wanted to incorporate her favourite chocolate bar (Coffee Crisp) into it somehow. My friend isn’t a big fan of your average ‘birthday cake’ cake, so I knew I wouldn’t be making a white cake or plain layer cake of any sort. I started thinking about how I could make a cake with Coffee Crisp and concluded that the cake itself should also contain coffee. Browsing Epicurious led me to a recipe for a Dark Chocolate Torte.

This torte was also supposed to be topped with a spiked blackberry coulis, but when I think about how my torte would have looked naked, except for a thin coulis topping, I’m glad I went the route I did. That might sound like it turned out poorly, I assure you, it didn’t, just not that way I had originally planned. In the end the cake was attractive and no one would have known that it didn’t look as it was supposed to, except that I’m now saying so (I think I would appear to be a much better cook/baker/kitchen disaster if I didn’t, but oh well). I changed the recipe slightly, but not on purpose. I just didn’t read the recipe properly (a frequent error of mine, I never learn) and ended up adding more butter and chocolate than was called for in the torte. But really, how can extra butter and chocolate be a bad thing? The recipe also called for instant espresso powder but I didn’t have any so I substituted 2 tablespoons of instant cappuccino mix with decent results.



When it came time to pouring the batter into the pan I thought I would be extra clever and use a birthday cake mold on the bottom of the springform pan. I had never used a mold like this before and was pretty excited that I would finally be trying it out. The recipe, however, calls for you to put parchment paper in the bottom of the pan, but I thought that would ruin the effect of the mold (it’s pretty thin) so I just greased it really well. The greasing was not successful. I had to scrape the cake off of the mold, completely destroying any picture there might have been and making the top of the torte look like a minefield. My previous plan of sprinkling coffee crisp on top of a chocolate glaze was definitely not going to cover my mistakes. That’s when I turned to my old pal whipped cream. Whipped cream hides ANY mistake, and as an added bonus it’s tasty too. Of course I didn’t have any cream in the fridge so I had to get in the car and get some, (3rd trip of the day thanks to my lousy memory). Once the cream was home though, it whipped up easily and did a marvelous job of covering the minefield of a cake that I had made. I had bought two Coffee Crisp bars to chop up and crumble on top, but I got hungry while making the cake and ate most of one of them. I knew there was a reason I bought two. In its final state, my dark chocolate torte was more than presentable and quite good, though very decadent. The torte was soft with an almost cakey/pudding consistency in the middle and the Coffee Crisp on top was very much appreciated by the birthday girl.


Technorati Tags:
Food + Baking + Dessert + Chocolate + Birthday