Date I made this recipe:
March 4, 2017 for my husband's 60th birthday
The Great British
Bake Off Perfect Cakes & Bakes to Make at Home by Linda Collister, with
recipes by Mary Berry & Paul Hollywood and the Bakers of 2016
Published by Love Productions/Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 978-1-473-61544-1; © 2016
Purchased at Bibelot,
St. Paul
Recipe: Bitter Chocolate Stout Cake – p. 40-42
Well folks, my darling husband just commenced firing on his
6th decade which gave me the perfect excuse to make a recipe from this
book. And not just any recipe, reader,
but a recipe involving chocolate and chocolate stout (beer) which he considers
to be food of the gods. I cannot argue
with that!
Now even though Andy has a mean hand when it comes to making
cakes, pastries and pies, particularly pies, I did not buy this book for him
because he wouldn't have used it.
Instead, I do what I often do for Christmas and that is to buy a bunch
of cookbooks for myself that I label as being from him; he does the same with
bicycle parts that he wants and it works like a charm! In this case, although I
would have purchased this book anyway, (from "me" to "me"),
as soon as I saw the Bitter Chocolate Stout Cake recipe, I knew I would earmark
it for his upcoming 60th birthday because that's the kind of spouse
I am!
I've mentioned in previous blogs how much I love The Great British Bake Off, the TV show
responsible for cookbooks like these of the same name, and I won't go into a
lot of detail here except to say I have updates and folks and fans, they are
not necessarily good updates so brace yourselves: the show is leaving the BBC for another network that is not the BBC.
There, I said it.
You may be thinking "Well, so what?" but
apparently this decision might just derail the show all together because judge
Mary Berry, and hosts Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc decided not to make the move
and so are- gasp- out! Double gasp! How can this be? The only one left standing who decided to try
out the new network is judge Paul Hollywood.
I am trying, unsuccessfully, to imagine a show with only
Paul as the host. I loved those three
other ladies. Loved them. Now what?
Well not only did all of Britain have a collective meltdown
but here in the U.S. we are left wondering "what next" as well
because the show aired for us here on PBS
which often rebroadcasts BBC
shows. So no BBC in Britain
likely means no PBS rebroadcast here.
I shall stay as on top of this situ for you as I can.
Meanwhile folks, back to the cookbook and here is where I
must take a few moments to critique the cookbook which I now call The Great
British Bitch-off. Why?
Because of the countless challenges I encountered while trying to pull
together a simple birthday cake. A
simple chocolate + stout birthday cake.
First, and in case you didn't know, England uses mostly the
metric system for measuring things which means that instead of ounces, we're
talking grams, instead of fluid ounces, we're talking liters and so on. And while conversion charts abound (including
one in the back of the book but not the front of the book which would have been
more helpful), almost none of the measures I needed was on that inconvenient chart which meant I had to
weigh them out anyway. Besides, all the
chart did was convert grams to ounces and I do not keep a runny tally of ounces
needed in my head: it's "cups"
or bust!
But then to really yank this Yank's chain, some of the
ingredients were in teaspoons and tablespoons.
Well fine, then, be that way. In
my opinion, not enough of the ingredients were in teaspoons but I take my wins
where I could find them.
Still in all, measuring grams or ounces required a kitchen
scale and let me say right now and we shall consider this a new and mandatory
rule: if you don't have a kitchen scale, get one. If you don't want one, this
is not the recipe or cookbook for you. Even then, by the time I finished measuring
out the ingredients (both on a scale or by hand), I'd say a good hour had
passed and I hadn't even started baking yet.
Major point deductions for that, folks.
Major.
Then there was the "guess what this ingredient is
called in the U.S." game that I had to play with a couple of the ingredients
listed in this recipe such as "light muscovado sugar" (light brown
sugar), or "icing sugar," which is confectioners' sugar.
In fact, small story here about confectioner's sugar. I Googled "icing sugar" and finally
found a video of a British baker mixing regular sugar and cornstarch together
in a Cuisinart. So then I Googled "sugar and
cornstarch" and up poppef "confectioners' sugar." Ah ha!
So I doubled checked C&H's
(sugar producer) website but couldn't find confirmation that icing sugar and
confectioners' sugar were one in the same.
And the customer service person was no help. When I asked her if "icing sugar" was
the same as "confectioners' sugar" she said "I have no
idea."
Really? I mean, you
work for a sugar company, surely you'd know this. So I put on my best attorney voice and then
said "Well, can you at least confirm (or deny – your choice) that confectioners'
sugar is a mixture of regular sugar and cornstarch?" "Yes, I can confirm that."
Now really, was that hard?
Okay then, so once I resolved those two issues, I was almost
ready to go. Still to be resolved: how to make "self-rising" flour at
home because I sure as heck wasn't going out to buy a large bag that I would
never use. This one was easy: mix 1 cup of flour with 1 ½ teaspoon baking
powder with ¼ teaspoon salt. Piece of cake, 'scuse the pun. Except folks, it wasn't exactly a piece of
cake because I needed more than 1 cup self-rising flour. In fact, I needed 250g or 9 ounces. Well, I was all out of patience with today's
math problems so what my husband suggested and what I did, was to make up
another cup of the mixture then measure out the 9 ounces I needed on my kitchen
scale and then toss the rest. I hate
wasting ingredients but at this point, I just needed to get this cake done
already.
The last thing I needed to do was to convert the measurements
for the British baking pans and that was somewhat easy: two 20.5cm pans are equal to two 8"
round cake pans. I know this because I
have a tape measure in my kitchen with inches on one side and those ghastly
centimeters on the other. Not that I
keep it around for projects like this but since I did and it was handy, it
saved me yet another trip to my computer.
Please note that between tax, license, Google searches and
measurements, the total elapsed time was now about two hours. Good thing I decided to give this recipe a
dry run the night before I served it.
Also? This was one of the easier
recipes in this book!
Speaking of which, please do make a note that the subtitle
of this cook is "Perfect Cakes & Bakes To Make At Home," and no offense to the show, but are they kidding me?
Let's take a look at our chapters and then we can talk:
- Cakes ("Greek Lemon-Yoghurt Loaf Cake;" "Bitter Chocolate Stout Cake")
- Biscuits & Teatime Treats ("Mexican Wedding Cookies;" "Posh Granola Bars")
- Breads ("Sprouted Wheat Bread;" "Cobbled Chocolate Loaf")
- Desserts & Puddings ("Chocolate-Hazelnut Rochers;" "Grand Strawberry Mouse" with homemade ladyfingers, no less.)
- Sweet Pastry & Patisserie ("Bitter Chocolate and Pear Tartlets;" "Gateau St-Honore," and even though "gateau" is the French word for "cake," you should run away from recipes like this because they are involved. Very involved.)
- Savoury Bakes ("Roast Vegetable and Cashew Pie;" "Duck and Pistachio Pate En Croute." Let that last recipe just sink in, okay?)
Some translation is required and so please make a note that:
- Biscuits = cookies
- Puddings = other desserts and not necessarily [Jell-O]pudding as we know it.
- Savoury,
or as we say in
Far be it from the Brits to call a spade a
"spade!"
Anyway, in my opinion, the degree of difficulty rises as we
move from chapter to chapter. The first
one – "Cakes" – is relatively harmless except for the time spent
measuring and "translating" ingredients. But by the time we hit "Desserts &
Puddings," my baking poker hand was getting weaker, by "Sweet Pastry
& Patisserie," I was bluffing
badly, and by "Savoury Bakes," many of which require the use of
phyllo dough, I folded! Now then, will
the person who makes "Duck and Pistachio Pate En Croute" at home on a regular basis please
contact me ASAP? Thank you.
And so now back to our recipe, already in progress! Once I got everything measured, putting it
all together didn't take long but cleaning up afterwards did. I don't know about you, but I find working
with melted chocolate to be a challenge because the cocoa "butter" in
the chocolate itself makes it greasy and greasy items take some real elbow
grease to get clean. And since I had to
melt chocolate a few times over for this endeavor, I was constantly wiping down
melted chocolate from pans and bowls and spatulas and walls since it splattered
here and there.
So I tell you what, if it wasn't for my husband's birthday
and his love of the two primary ingredients, I might have been tempted to chuck
this book into the nearest dust bin (British-speak for "waste basket")
but a birthday comes but once a year and a 60th birthday is
special. Plus, and this is the big
thing, the cake was delicious. The cake
itself was a little dry but only a very little, probably because I baked it the
full 25 minutes but that's because it was still soupy at 22 minutes (baking
time was 20-25 minutes). Fair warning
then: somewhere between 23 and 24, but not 25 minutes, is where you want to
land. Had judge Paul Hollywood sampled
it, he would have likely said "It's good, but the sponge – which he
pronounced "spooonge" is a little dry," so thank goodness for
the frosting which was the real star of the show.
I have previously mentioned in this blog that I am all about
the frosting as the cake doesn't interest me much at all, and this frosting was
delicious. That "icing sugar"
(!) was just the ticket and I could have eaten the entire bowl and skipped
putting it on the cake all together except Andy had some guy friends over and
we needed to be able to serve a frosted cake to our 15 or so guests. Said guests
then inhaled every single crumb of this cake, every single piece and so my plan
for leftover frosting (and oh sure, the cake, too) went out the window. Damn and blast!
Now then, I have one last piece of unfinished business to
discuss and it's the alcohol in this cake.
For those of you with concerns, let me just talk out loud about a couple
of things: You might (emphasis on
"might") be able to substitute a chocolate syrup mix for the chocolate
stout if you wish; consider the "Hot Bitter Chocolate Sauce" recipe
on p. 20 of the book. You might also
consider using a slurry (I just love that word) of chocolate syrup, malt powder
(used in the recipe) and milk instead of the alcohol. Or, you can think of it this way: the recipe calls for 150ml of chocolate stout
(or porter) which is the equivalent of just over 5 ounces (8 ounces is a
cup). Andy cut this cake into 15 slices
and so it you divide out that 5 ounces into 15 slices, you basically have about
an eye dropper full of chocolate stout per piece which is to say not much of
anything. That said, I am not here to
encourage you to cook with alcohol if you're uncomfortable, but I think it was
there to just enhance the flavor and add to the volume without intending to
give anyone a hangover.
All in all, my husband had a great 60th birthday
and this cake helped a lot. He was a
little nervous about inviting "the guys" over since sometimes men can
be reticent about going to a birthday party, but a good number of them came
over and enjoyed the cake and other savoury/savory items, and it was a lot of
fun. I'm still on the fence about the
level of fun I experienced making the cake but that is to be expected as the
bakers in this cookbook were all (2016) contestants on the show and they could
out-bake me with their hands tied behind their backs. In the end, I'll take the fact that I didn't
go nuts, didn't scream at anybody and didn't burn down the house as my own version
of a "win" on The Great British
Bake Off – "At Home with Ann and Andy!"
Bitter Chocolate Stout
Cake – serves 10-12 – Ann's Note: it
helps to have a kitchen scale
For the sponge
40 g cocoa powder
1 tablespoon malted-milk drink powder (use
"original," not diet or flavoured versions)
150 ml chocolate milk stout OR porter
150g unsalted butter, softened
120g caster sugar (Ann's Note: a/k/a superfine sugar)
120g light muscovado sugar (Ann's Note: a/k/a light brown sugar)
2 medium eggs, at room temperature, beaten to mix
4 tablespoons buttermilk, at room temperature
250g self-raising flour (Ann's Note: *see below for how to make this at home)
¼ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (Ann's Note: a/k/a Baking Soda)
Good pinch of fine sea salt
*The standard "recipe" for making self-rising
flour is to add 1 ½ tsp baking powder and ¼ tsp salt to 1 cup All Purpose
Flour. Since you will need more than
that for the recipe, make a double batch of the recipe then weigh it and
subtract out what you don't need.
For the chocolate filling and frosting
85g dark chocolate (about 70% chocolate solids)
1 ½ tablespoons malted-milk drink powder
("original")
2 teaspoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons boiling water
115g unsalted butter, softened (Ann's Note: one stick of
butter is 113g so you will need a little more from another stick)
25g light muscovado sugar (Ann's Note: a/k/a light
brown sugar)
75g icing sugar (Ann's
Note: a/k/a Confectioner's sugar)
Good pinch of sea salt flakes, or to taste
To finish
15g dark chocolate (about 70% cocoa), grated
Pans
Ann's Note: You'll
need two 20.5cm round, deep sandwich tins, greased with butter and
base-lined. Translation: two 8" round cake pans, greased then
lined with parchment paper. I have no idea why round cake pans are called
"sandwich tins," but mine is not to question why, mine is to Google search to figure it out!
Heat the coven to 350F.
Measure the cocoa and malted milk powders into a small pan, add the milk
stout and set over low heat. Whisk
constantly with a small hand wire whisk until the mixture is smooth and comes
to the boil – take care it doesn't catch on the base of the pan. Remove from the heat and leave until cooled
to room temperature.
Meanwhile, put the softened butter into a mixing bowl, or
the bowl of free-standing electric mixer
fitted with the whisk attachment, until creamy and mayonnaise-like. Scrape down the side of the bowl, then beta
in the caster sugar. As soon as it is
thoroughly amalgamated, beat in the muscovado (light brown sugar) sugar (press
out any lumps first). Once combined, scrape
down the side of the bowl again, then beta for 2 minutes to make a soft, light
creamed mixture.
Gradually add the eggs, beating well after each addition and
scraping down the side of the bowl from time to time. Beat in the buttermilk a tablespoon at a
time, adding a tablespoon of the weighed flour with the last 2 additions. Sift the remaining flour with the bicarbonate
of soda (baking soda) and salt into the bowl.
Add the cooled cocoa mixture. Mix
in using the whisk on its lowest speed, stopping as soon as the mixture is very
smooth.
Divide the mixture equally between the 2 sandwich tins and
spread evenly. Bake in the heated oven
for 20-25 minutes until the sponges are well risen and springy when gently
pressed in the center. (Ann's Note: 20 minutes is too short. Twenty two minutes was also too short. Twenty
five minutes was too long. Try for 23-24
and then stop. Immediately.) Remove from the oven and run a round-bladed
knife around the inside of each tin to loosen the sponge, then turn it out on
to a wire rack and leave to cool.
When sponges have cooled to room temperature, make the
chocolate mixture for the filing and frosting.
Gently melt the chocolate then leave to cool until needed. Put the malted-milk powder and cocoa powder
into a small heatproof bowl, add the boiling water and stir to make a smooth
paste. Leave to cool. (Ann's
Note: this didn't really make a
paste as it was more like a thick syrup.
No matter, it worked.)
Beat the butter in a mixing bowl until very creamy using a
wooden spoon or hand-held electric whisk, then beat in the muscovado sugar
(press out any lumps first). Add the
cooled melted chocolate and beat well, then beat in the cooled cocoa liquid. Sift the icing sugar (confectioner's sugar)
into the bowl and beat, slowly at first, until the mixture is very smooth and
light in texture. Sprinkle over the salt
and stir in.
Now set one sponge, crust-side down, on a serving
plate. Spread over half the chocolate
mixture. Set the other sponge on top,
crust-side up. Spread and swirl the rest
of the chocolate over the surface. Grate
the dark chocolate on top – or decorate with chocolate curls shaved off with a
vegetable peeler. Leave the frosting to
firm up for at least 2 hours before cutting the cake. Store in an airtight container and eat within
4 days.
Ann's Final Note: I didn't have time to let the frosting firm
up but it was just fine and met my strict frosting requirements, thank you very
much. Also, intriguing as it is to know
that this cake lasts 4 days, I don't think it lasted for four minutes once Andy
started cutting it. Of course, it helps to have 15 people helping to eat it but
still, this was one tasty cake. It
looked like hell but I was not trying for bakery-competition worthy so there
you go.
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