RHC: Molten Chocolate Soufflé and Lava Cakes

Rose's version of the "molten lava" chocolate cake is a flourless chocolate cakelet with a ball of ganache placed in the center of the batter before baking to produce the "lava" effect. My previous experience with a molten lava cake used the single-stage "underbaked cake" approach, which I had no trouble with that I recall and which is a good bit simpler. I'll have to do a direct comparison some time to see if the extra trouble in this recipe is worth it. It's really pretty hard to go wrong with a molten lava cake (as long as you do get the molten effect) in my book.


First up was making the balls of ganache by pouring the hot ganache into the cups of an egg carton, lined with plastic wrap. Theoretically the ganache would then harden enough to be handled--in actuality the ganache stayed quite soft, and was hard to roll into balls even using the plastic wrap to push. I ended up forming the balls, or maybe "globs" is a better term, as I put them into the cake batter...especially after I realized I was 2 short, one from mis-counting, and one because I had even more batter. Well, sort of miscounting--there's some recipe confusion here too. The overall note says the recipe yield is nine 3-oz. cupcakes or seven 4-oz. cupcakes. The subsection for the ganache centers makes 8 tablespoons, meaning a total volume, as the instructions do say to pour the ganache into 9 cavities. I missed that, however, and apparently picked up the 8 tablespoons and prepared that many globs.

On to the cake itself: I had 5 3-oz. brioche tins (not silicon), 2 slightly larger ones, then had to fall back to silicone muffin cups for the remaining cakelets. The cake batter uses chocolate (62%), cocoa powder, and butter melted together. You whisk in a mixture of the egg yolks and crème fraîche, then a little egg white, then fold in the rest of the egg whites which have been beaten to a stiff peak with some sugar added. It did take me 4 eggs, not 3 plus an extra white, to get the specified weights of egg and yolk. I don't always decided to check, but when I do (and when it's an egg-heavy recipe), I'll need to add more egg yolk to get the specified amount.

My (10, not 9) little molds were on the edge of over-filled. The balls of ganache were placed on top and not pushed down, as instructed (so that wasn't a contributor to the overfilling, at least not at the start). The baked cakelets rose out of the pan (that was the "soufflé" part <g>) and the edges almost burned in about 12 minutes. The recipe said 10 minutes for the 3-oz. tins and 14 for 4-ounce muffin cups, but for silicone molds--I should have checked on my metal pans earlier. I expected the ganache to sink and become invisible, but instead I had deep pits in most of the cakelets. In only two, I think, did the batter mostly close over the ganache. In the end, the "lava" didn't seem to run out of the holes on re-heating, so the pits were not a problem.

In another complexity over the other recipe I've made, the cakelets are cooled after baking and refrigerated. Then each cake is microwaved individually just before serving to re-heat the center and let it flow--an advantage if it's not convenient to serve the cakes straight from the oven. I served them with a small scoop of ice cream to offset the intensity of the dark chocolate.

Tasting opinions: It was unanimous--these are really good, and a nice serving size for our tastes without any adjustment except the bonus 10th cakelet. I do want to try my other recipe again before too long and compare the results to see if the extra trouble on this one was worth it--it's not a very involved recipe (especially compare to the charlotte or the pineapple pudding cakes), but if the simpler approach suits us as well as this one, we'll go with simpler.

Quick White Bean and Collard Green Gratin

I think it was a mention on 101 Cookbooks that sent me to the Amazon 'look inside' feature of Frank Stitt's Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill for this recipe--I had it printed out and in my huge notebook of recipes to try. I ended up making a rather bastardized version of the original, but it was very good and (in my simplified approach) not hard to throw together. I added about an 8" piece of chorizo that emerged from my freezer when I went looking for something in the "ham, sausage, etc" line as called for, but number of sausages or a little ham would lend their own character to this. The chorizo gave a spicy punch to what could have been on the bland side. If I use a different sausage next time I'll make sure it's a spicy one, or else add some spice separately--maybe smoked paprika would be good.

The beans-and-greens combination is almost creamy, at least at the moisture level I used, and the panko-cheese-olive oil topping gives a crunchy contrast. I think this one will end up in my comfort food repertoire.


Quick White Bean and Collard Green Gratin
heavily modified from Frank Stitt's Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill

4 garlic cloves, chopped
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 small red bell pepper, cored, seeded and cut into 1/2-inch dice
2 cans lower-sodium collard greens, drained (I used Glory "Sensibly Seasoned" canned greens)
2 cans small white beans, drained and liquid reserved (I used Goya's descriptively labelled "Small White Beans")
1/4 -1/2 cup diced or chopped cooked ham hock, sausage, bacon or chorizo
1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Extra virgin olive oil
1 rosemary sprig, leaves removed and finely chopped
Kosher salt and fresh black pepper to taste (I skipped any additional salt, as the canned beans had plenty)
1/2 cup panko

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Spray a 3-quart flat casserole, or a gratin dish, with cooking spray. (The original recipe called for rubbing the pan with another clove of garlic. Feel free--I never am convinced that I can taste any effect from this if there's other garlic in the recipe, and besides, I hate getting garlic all over my fingers.)
In a large saute pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add onion & bell pepper and saute till tender, about 10 minutes. Add the chopped garlic and cook for a minute. Set aside.
Put the drained beans and collards in a large mixing bowl and toss to mix them well. Add the chopped meat, the sauteed vegetables, half the cheese, a splash of olive oil, the rosemary, and salt and pepper. Mix gently and adjust seasoning. Add some of the bean liquid for extra moisture if needed.
Spread the mixture in the prepared dish. Top with the rest of the cheese, bread crumbs, and a drizzle of olive oil. Cover with foil and bake for 30-35 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 10 minutes, or till top is golden and crusty.
Serves 8-10 as a side, 4-5 as an entree.

RHC: Yellow Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate-Egg White Buttercream, and Chocolate Tomato Cake, round 2

Along with an official cake-of-the-week (not the very time-consuming Pineapple Pudding Cake, I hasten to add--I'm baking a couple of weeks ahead to allow for my end of the month vacation trip) I baked for the neighborhood block party last weekend. The neighborhood association provided barbecued pork and chicken and asked everyone to bring a side. Gee, I think I'll bake something! The butter cupcakes with chocolate buttercream seemed like a good option (Marie did these very early on, in May of 2009), maybe as mini-cupcakes to be bite-sized. Then there's the cakewalk, a tradition at our block parties--I had a partial can of the pirouette cookies around from the chocolate tomato cake, and that cake with the fancy presentation seemed likely to be a hit for the cake walk even if the cookies were too much for my family's tastes.

Both of these recipes are butter cakes, so the mixing process was very similar. The cupcakes use sour cream instead of the tomato soup, and of course leave out the cocoa, but otherwise I felt like I was making the same recipe twice. I again did a 6" cake of the tomato cake--I didn't want to have to buy two more cans of those cookies, and I also have some sympathy for the parents whose child comes home with a huge cake...or two (either multiple children, or one child with multiple cakes). Oh, and if you recall my post on the tomato cake, you'll not be surprised that I went with a plain ganache, sans tomato soup.

I overfilled my mini-cupcake liners and got flat-topped mushroom cakes. Oddly, the bottom of the cupcake liners felt empty, and in fact there seemed to be airspace under the cupcakes even though there were crumbs on the bottom of the liner. My guess is that as the cakes shrank on cooling, the cake pulled up from the bottom. Very odd...

The chocolate egg white buttercream was not quite so easy. It took a long time to get to anything resembling stiff peaks in the meringue, but it finally got there (or close enough). Then I started adding the butter a tablespoon at a time, and halfway through got the dreaded curdled appearance. Turned up the mixer to high as the recipe instructs...and the mixture got really curdled. However, persistence paid off, and eventually the mixture went smooth again and I could finish adding the butter, then the melted chocolate. By then my energy had flagged, so I squished the buttercream into a large decorating bag with a large star tip, and squeezed out a blob of icing onto each mini cupcake. Good enough.

The cupcakes went over well, even though I got the first batch a little too brown. At a bite or two of cake, max, and a healthy blob of buttercream, no problems with dryness were apparent. They didn't outcompete the homemade brownies in the dessert array but were doing a lot better than the platter of grocery deli counter cookies.

The tomato cake decorated with cookies (and red 'candle flames' this time!) was picked second in the cake walk--the first pick, made by a 7 or 8 year old, was a grocery store cake with LOTS of sprinkles. Can't beat the sprinkles!

RHC: Caramelized Pineapple Pudding Cakes

This week's cake-of-the-week is another very long recipe--if you count in the brioche pages, it rivals the charlotte. This recipe, however, was a little easier to take in stages, and in fact had some of that built in.


I made the brioche the week ahead and froze it. No difficulties there (I bake bread regularly, so no yeast trauma or anything)--as the recipe says, it's a nicely behaved dough. It seemed a little odd to not be making the classic brioche shape with the little topknots, though. I allowed myself one piece of the warm loaf (yum!) before I let it cool and got it into the freezer.

To start on the pudding cakes, then, the first step was to defrost the bread, cut an approximate chunk, and remove the crusts before weighing out the required 200 grams. It then needed to dry out some for better absorbing of the crème anglaise. I started that process at room temperature, and at the end helped it along in a low oven. I managed one lovely breakfast of brioche french toast with part of the leftover bread before the rest was snagged by older niece for a sandwich. It's bad to be reminded how lovely homemade brioche is and how easy it is to make, when it's also so high-calorie. At least when you're trying to get your weight back down. If I could just be sure that the nieces would abscond with most of the loaf, I'd make brioche more often.

Next up was the crème anglaise, a thin custard sauce that I'm not sure I'd made before, though I've made similar custards. The crème anglaise got poured into a flat dish, then the dried bread cubes were sprinkled over it to soak overnight. Here was another nice break point for the long recipe.


The next morning I started on the caramel and the pineapple. (I had peeled and quartered the pineapple the night before as another means of spreading out the effort.) First thing was to figure out which dishes to use. I didn't have exactly the right size ramekins, so I went with a smaller size than called for and made 8 pudding cakes, not 6. With the ramekins at the ready, it was time to make a light caramel sauce by cooking sugar, then adding butter. This made far more caramel that I could imagine using even in my 8 dishes, so most of it was thrown out. The caramel layer that did go into the souffle dishes mostly stayed there--as I turned out the desserts, the pudding cake and the pineapple slices (mostly) came out, but the caramel crust remained. It also seemed very sugary and was hard--not the right texture to top the delicate pudding cake and roasted pineapple. Should it have made a liquid caramel sauce and poured out over the puddings? Oh well, I left it in the dishes and we didn't miss it--the pineapple topping was all that was needed. (And I see that most of the other HCBs had similar problems, leading to the conclusion that perhaps something's not right in the recipe.)

Roasting the pineapple involved making another caramel, this time with turbinado sugar and using a skillet that would eventually hold the pineapple pieces. When the caramel reached the correct temperature, in went a can of pineapple juice and 2 pineapple quarters. That got stirred around, then the whole thing went in the oven to roast until the sauce was reduced and the pineapple was soft. Let me just say that the roasted pineapple alone would make a lovely dessert, perhaps cutting back on the amount of caramel roasting sauce--there was more than was needed to baste the pineapple and later to garnish the finished cakes.

The pineapple came out of the oven and was cooled, then sliced thinly to make a decorative layer (to become the top once the cakes were turned out) in the ramekins. Then in went the brioche soaked in crème anglaise, and the dishes went into the oven in a water bath.


I needed to hold these half a day, so I cooled them on a rack once the baking time was over, then put them into the fridge. Reheated in a water bath, the cakes rose a little above the edges of the dishes, perhaps because I got a full foil cover over them the second time around, perhaps because they just cooked more. (The recipe said 'tent with foil' and I'd used a loose sheet during the initial baking.)

The little remaining crème anglaise (only a quarter cup, not the half Rose mentioned) was cooked until slightly thickened. The cakes unmolded without problems except for the aforementioned caramel crusts, then were garnished with leftover roasted pineapple and drizzled with a little crème anglaise and some leftover roasting juices from the pineapple.

All in all, the pineapple pudding cakes are a very nice dessert, and might be possible (with some shortcuts) to make again. The smaller size (especially with more roasted pineapple on the side) was just right for us. Younger niece (who'd been looking ahead at this recipe and thought she wouldn't like it at all) tried a small bite, and pronounced it as not having much of a flavor. A few minutes later, as the rest of us praised the flavor combination, she took another bite from her father's serving. Another 5 minutes or so and she asked me to get her a full cake. I suspect none of us would have picked this recipe out of the book as something we'd really like, but there certainly were no bites of cake left on the plates at the tasting.

RHC: Chocolate Tomato Cake with Mystery Ganache

This week's cake is another of the many chocolate cakes in Rose's Heavenly Cakes. Don't get me wrong, chocolate is a Very Good Thing, but this one seemed to go a bit far in looking for novelty in chocolate cakes. However, from the introductory text, the sequence was not "what odd thing can I do to chocolate cake", but "how can I put Campbell's soup into a cake, to mark a corporate anniversary". And so, Chocolate Tomato Cake with Mystery Ganache, containing Campbell's condensed (I assume--the recipe actually doesn't specify) tomato soup, added to both cake and ganache.

The cake is made with cocoa, and is a butter cake. It has a very thick batter and needs a little special handling to not dome excessively--Rose tells you to press the batter against the sides of the pan when spreading it out. Mine came out fine, though I perhaps underbaked slightly (still had a few crumbs on my cake testers when I pulled the layers out). I again did a half-size cake and was baking in 6" cake pans, so I watched the timing pretty carefully. Results: the moistest chocolate cake I've managed yet from RHC, and perhaps the moistest period if you leave out the Tres Leches. :) Adding veggies to cakes is pretty common as a technique for adding moisture at fairly low fat content, and this one really worked for me.






The ganache, however, was less successful. A little additional canned tomato soup was added to the cream and chocolate, to give what Rose describes as a tang and presumably also for an added bonus for the Campbell's birthday. I can live with "tang" as a description of the taste, but everyone in my family found it an objectionable sort of tang. My brother said he could taste the tomato only on some bites, but that perhaps that was because he had been told the mystery ingredient--nonetheless, he was not a fan of the ganache. I'm not sure I would have been able to identify the taste as tomato, but it was odd and unpleasant. At the end of our taste-testing, the plates had little piles of peeled off ganache and (at least on mine and some others) the Pirouette cookies. When even the two teenage chocoholics leave ganache on their plates, something is off. After a quick look at the early posters from the HCB, I'm really surprised to see that no one else found the ganache to be objectionable. Did I have super-strength Campbell's soup??!

Let me digress on the cookies, now that I've mentioned them. I rarely buy cookies these days, and when I read the recipe I thought I knew what the Pirouette cookies were--lovely crisp cookies rolled into a hollow tube. I was upset to find that today's Pepperidge Farm Pirouette cookies are much larger than my memory, are all filled with some variety of flavored cream-like substance, and more resemble a baton than the crisp little cookie I recall. I don't find that this adds anything positive to the cookie at all...but then, I don't buy cookies often enough for Pepperidge Farm to care what I think. The main thing to note from a decorating standpoint, I guess, is that the vanilla-filled cookies are lighter in color and give a better contrast to the dark ganache than the "chocolate fudge" ones I used. And maybe that unless you really like the new-style Pirouette cookies, this cake would be better without them. They give a cool effect, but as I mentioned above, we mostly left them on the plate.

The finishing touch for the cookies was supposed to be little icing flames on the top of each one. I didn't have any premade frosting tubes on hand, having pitched my old collection a while back when I realize how old some of them were. Sister-in-law's one tube of red was too stiff, so I decided it looked fine without.

Final note: we used about half of the 6" half-cake I baked for the first round of tasting. I took the remains, threw away the cookies, and peeled off the tomato-tainted <g> ganache. Freshly frosted with a plain dark chocolate ganache, I had a very nice chocolate layer cake half with no strange flavor.

RHC: Apple Caramel Charlotte

7 pages of recipe...this one is not on the easy list, for sure. I tackled it in stages, but still found the process pretty exhausting.

I baked the biscuit the weekend before, got it cut into the required pieces, spread with the strained apricot preserves, and into the freezer. No real problems following the diagram to cut out an 8" circle and 4 long rectangles of biscuit, but I should have alternated ends when I was spreading on apricot preserves and making my stack, as the not-completely-even-thickness of my biscuit was exaggerated by stacking 3 of the 4 layers the same way. I had one issue with the recipe: the "strained apricot preserves" recipe never says to strain the preserves--I'm guessing that an editor removed a line or two to not make this an 8-page recipe, and so you need to infer that you start with 1 cup of preserves, strain them, and end up with about 2/3 cup. The "recipe" starts off telling you to heat the strained preserves, skipping all that.





Next up, on Thursday night, was poaching the apples with their peel (to get a nice pink color). I got a nicely pink liquid, but somewhat splotchy colored apples. The final effect was nice, though, perhaps because I had plenty of apple slices and could pick and choose the prettier ones. I might have left the apples a tad undercooked despite paoching them a good bit longer than the given time. The charlotte was hard to serve as the knife sometimes dragged a slightly toothsome apple slice partly into the charlotte. Anyway, the apples were left to cool overnight in the fridge.





Friday was Charlotte Day: the rest of the recipe has to be done sequentially, as best I could tell, with no places to put stuff in the fridge or freezer and come back later (or not much, anyway). It took me all afternoon to get the charlotte into the mold--4-1/2 hours or so, with a little time out to make the weekly challah. I also dirtied more dishes than I can recall using on a single project, ever.

First up was dealing with the cake shell, as it must be ready to receive the charlotte mixture. Slicing the semi-frozen stack of biscuit/apricot jam layer cake was not too difficult, but I made the mistake of lining up my slices in a long row (touching), then realized that I had to pick them up and place them vertically around the ring from my 9" springform pan. Once stuck together, though, the slices separate only by pulling the crust off the attached layer, and it was hard to get them back together without a noticeable defect. It was equally hard to pick up a 10-inch or so piece of striped cake pieces and get it over to the cake plate and into the ring without the whole thing falling apart. I moved some 6 inch sections into the pan without too much mess, but this effort perhaps explains why some of my vertical stripes of cake crust and apricot jam are a little wavy. Call it an "artistic effect", please.


On to the filling, with three major components: an apple caramel custard made from the apple poaching liquid, an Italian meringue (just call these my nemesis), and whipped cream. The caramel making was OK, though the caramel cooled and solidified while I grabbed for the hot apple-poaching liquid and then took forever to dissolve. No problems with the rest of the custard, or with the whipped cream. The Italian meringue, though.... We've made Italian meringue several times by now, and (unlike genoise) I still have trouble with it. Attempts with the stand mixer had resulted in globs of sugar syrup in the egg white, either from being flung on the sides of the bowl or not beaten in fast enough. Using a handheld mixer works somewhat better for me, except that I need at least 3 hands. This time was fairly typical--as I tried to add the sugar syrup slowly to the egg white without getting any in the beaters and while continuing to get the mixture evenly beaten, the syrup hardened in my glass measuring cup. Reheated in the microwave, only a quarter of the remaining syrup could be persuaded to flow and be added to the egg whites. A repeat microwaving didn't help. I finally decided it would be fine if the meringue was less sweet than intended given my family's preferences, and that it probably wouldn't make much difference structurally. I notice that it was the meringue making that stopped my photography, and I jumped from the custard to a shot of the finished charlotte mixture. No wonder!


However, the charlotte was finally glopped into the cake shell and smoothed out, then went into the fridge to firm up while I went next door for dinner. After dinner, I tackled the final steps: slicing the apples thinly, then arranging the slices atop the charlotte in a flower design, then making a glaze of the last bit of poaching liquid thickened with arrowroot and brushing it over the top. My apples were a little small, perhaps, and so when they were cored many slices were pretty thin in the middle. Still, by picking and choosing I got a reasonable flower look, brushed on the glaze, and went to bed. Long day...this was a lot of effort for a cake.

Taste results: It's a hit, though having heard my description of the steps involved, both younger niece and sister-in-law questioned whether it was worth it. Co-workers scarfed down the slices that went into the office on Monday and raved over the taste, in between asking "what is it?" I guess charlottes are no longer very common.

In summary, it's a beautiful presentation, no question about it, but I don't think I'll ever repeat this one as a whole. Younger niece would like the poached apples alone, I'd certainly use the filling in some other dish (but there are simpler recipes I like about as well), but the full apple caramel charlotte is going in the "glad I tried it, but won't repeat" camp.

RHC: Ganache-Covered German Chocolate Cake (free choice week)

I actually baked this German Chocolate Cake the same week as the Gold Ingots, taking advantage of my college-age nephew coming to town for a football game to get another taste-tester for cake-of-the-week. The other advantage of his trip was to send lots of calories off with him when he left, especially as he was traveling with his two roommates. College-age males, or at least that subset of them, can afford the calories.

The cake part of the German Chocolate Cake is the same as we made for the ice-cream cake. It's an oil cake, not butter, for better texture when refrigerated (which the topping requires), and that also makes it easy to mix up. It also yields a disconcertingly thin batter, but luckily Rose warns about this in the recipe. All went smoothly with the mixing and baking, but I had a little trouble getting the cake out of the pan--a matter of coordination, not really an issue with the cake. One layer missed the rack a little and was damaged, but the crack was completely hidden with topping once the cake was finished. I'd already planned to make the option with ganache covering the sides of the cake for better storage, and the ganache also hid the damage on the sides.

Rose suggests the Dark Ganache from the True Orange Genoise recipe, which had given me problems when I made it back in February. No problems this time around, though--perhaps it was the different temperature in the kitchen, or more experience, or even that I didn't use the food processor this time and just poured hot cream over chopped chocolate in a bowl and stirred until it was smooth. I made the ganache well in advance of when I needed it, too, which probably also helped.





Then it was on to the topping, the critical part of German Chocolate Cake. A mixture of sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, and butter is cooked until slightly thickened. Mine...got a little too thick. Let's call it "stiff", even, once I had stirred in the coconut, pecans, and vanilla. I had to warm it slightly to be able to spread it on the cake after it had cooled, and it was a little hard to cut when just out of the fridge, but the taste was just fine.

Tasting results: Very well received. Younger niece would have liked more coconut flavor, but did like the caramelly tones of the topping. College-age nephew said "this is really good" repeatedly. Next-door nephew and older niece chowed down without much comment besides "this is good". My brother doesn't like coconut and sister-in-law is restarting her diet, so both of them skipped tasting this one.

I liked it as well. The chocolate cake is moist, the topping (if a little stiff on mine) is the classic sweet combination, but as it is limited to filling and topping it's not as overwhelmingly sweet as if the cake was completely covered with it. The dark ganache frosting on the sides also helped balance the sweet topping. Put this cake in the winner column.