Devil’s Food Cake
I made this Devil’s Food Cake (i.e. v.v. rich and chocolately cake) for Christmas after seeing Nigella Lawson make it on TV a few days before. It was a fiddly recipe to follow, but I can see why – the sponge was still really light and fluffy a few days after it was made. The recipe is easy enough to follow and it was interesting making it – chocolate ganache is something I’ve not tried making before, but I think I’ll most likely be making it again in the future, it tasted too good!
Chocolate sponges came out quite nicely (8″), the picture shows the bottom of the cake because it was easier to work with, being slightly flatter than the top of the cake.
The two sponges were sandwiched together with chocolate ganache. I’m never sure how thick to make the middle layer because I always worry about not having enough leftover to cover the rest of the cake – but after this time, I know I can definitely use more ganache in the middle as I had more than enough left over for the top and sides!
The chocolate ganache sounded a lot simpler to make than it actually was.. the recipe mentions that you have to leave it for an hour or so, so it can get thicker in consistency, which I did follow… but it was still pretty runny after an hour, as you can see from the photo.
I decided to leave it a bit longer but when I came back, the mixture got even worse! Turns out the “fat” (butter) had separated from the rest of the ganache (“broken”) and it just looked like a layer of fat on top of the chocolate (not tasty looking at all). I decided to google my predicament… but by the time I found out how to fix it – split mixture in half, heat one up and cool the other down, then mix together again – the mixture had somehow, as if by magic, turned into a thick and spreadable ganache (yay!).
The ganache was easy to work with, a lot stickier than the standard buttercream consistency, but I used a spatula and managed to spread it around quite easily. It’s not an easy spread to make it smooth and flat, so I stuck with swirling the spatula around to make the pattern of the cake.
It tastes really good with cream – and if you heat it up in the microwave for about 30 seconds. YUM!
Recipe can be found here
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