RHC: Double Chocolate Valentine

Mmmm...chocolate. Cocoa in the cake, semi-sweet chocolate ganache brushed on the outside. Nice. My decision to make this as cakelets didn't work in favor of the cake, however.


I don't have a heart-shaped cake pan, so I decided to go for cupcakes (hey, it's a Heavenly Bakers tradition by now--I'm probably not the only one this week). Then I decide that this might be a good week to try the mini Maryann pan I have, a relic of my mother's cake pan collection. My thought was that the depression on top of the cakelets would lend itself to filling with raspberries, in the style of the full-sized cake Rose showed in Rose's Heavenly Cakes. The Maryann pan was supplemented with a Texas muffin pan for the extra batter.


The cake was quick to mix up--it's made with cocoa powder, which was bloomed in boiling water and cooled. That and the butter were beaten into the dry ingredients, then egg yolks beaten with water and vanilla were added, and it's done. I split the batter between the 6 Maryanns and 4 Texas muffins, but I overfilled the Maryann pans and got mushroom caps on my cakelets. On a repeat I'd make 5 or 6 Texas muffins in addition to the Maryanns.


Hot out of the oven, the tops of the cakes were brushed with a thin ganache glaze. I was operating in a fog and followed the printed directions to use half the glaze at this point, not considering the different geometry of my cupcakes from a cake layer. Once I turned out the cakes and started in to brush the bottom of the cakes with the glaze, I realized how much additional surface area I had for this application. Oops. To add to the problem, the Maryann cakelets had a much rougher surface than the Texas muffin pan cakes, which might be from different behavior of the cooking spray on a regular pan vs. non-stick. (Maybe brushing the cake spray after applying it would have helped.) That rougher surface made the ganache application more difficult, as did the tenderness of the cake. Let's just say these cakes wouldn't have won any beauty prizes. The ganache ran out as I moved to the Texas muffin versions, and as I was out of cream, making an additional batch of ganache was out. The Texas muffin versions just got shorted.


Raspberries were not to hand and sister-in-law already had strawberries, so we went with that for the red berry. These particular strawberries were huge, and so the plan to balance them atop the Maryann cakelets was abandoned in favor of the berry on the side, and a nice dollop of whipped cream in the depression atop the cake.


Tasting comments: All favorable: it's chocolate, with strawberry and whipped cream. What's not to like? Sister-in-law found it nicely not too sweet, as did the nephew. Older niece stuck to a succinct "It's good." My brother noted, as did I, that the interior of the cake was really a little dry. I attribute that to the cakelet form--in a fairly thin, single layer cake as Rose had envisioned this one, the ganache glaze would have penetrated most of the cake. In my more compact cakelets, you get some bites of cake without any ganache to provide the moisture and richness. 'S OK, a little extra whipped cream helps out. However, on the remaining 4 cakelets from the Texas muffin pan that got shorted on the ganache, I may pull out some leftover white chocolate buttercream and give them a little frosting filling.