Week 5: Linzer Torte

This week's cake was a very traditional Austrian cake, a Linzer Torte, that is known to be the oldest cake in the world!

The torte, which we made in a regular 9" cake pan, is like a crumbly dense spice cake with jam sandwiched in the middle.  I didn't think I would enjoy it from the description the instructor provided, but it was quite yummy.

The linzer torte can be expensive to make since it contains a lot of ground nuts, but we made it a little more affordable by substituting some of the nuts with graham cracker crumbs.  I couldn't taste the difference, but not sure if that means anything, since I've never tasted a Linzer torte before tasting the one I made :p

I found the spices to be a little strong for my liking, so if I was to make this again, I would reduce the amount of spices from 3g each to maybe 1-2g each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.

For the filling, we used an off the shelf raspberry jam.  I found this worked well to give moisture to the slightly dry consistency of the cake.

The batter for this cake is pretty traditional in terms of the way its made, it's butter/shortening creamed with sugar, eggs mixed in gradually and then dry ingredients gently mixed in.  The batter was spread on the bottom of the greased and lined pan, then the thin layer of jam evenly spread on the top.  The remaining batter was piped onto the top to form the lattice.  Since I only had a #6 tip for the piping, when the cake batter baked, it expanded and closed in some of the lattice top.  The lattice would come out much nicer with a #3 or #4 tip.  For decoration, we put a few almonds around the border.

This is an interesting method to make a cake, with putting jam in the middle and piping the lattice top on.  I'm interested to see if it would work on another type of cake batter.

Week 9: Black Forest Cake

This was a busy week, since it was our first week making an entire cake.  We baked the cake, torted, filled, masked and decorated it. 

I found out that my partner has dropped the class, but another person was partnerless for the day, so we paired up.  As a pair, we made three devil's food cakes.  One each and a spare incase something went wrong.

Devil's food cake is just a special name for moist chocolate cake.  The recipe was straight forward and yeilded 3 - 7 inch rounds.  Once the cakes were baked, we immeditely flipped them out of the pans onto cake rounds and put them into the
blast chiller.

While the cakes were cooling, we made the whipped cream for the icing.  We had the choice of using commerical grade whipped topping (what we used in Week 4), whipping cream, or a mixture of both.  I chose to use mainly whipping cream with a little bit of whipped topping for sweetness and stability.

When the cakes were sufficiently cooled, we leveled the top of the cake, cut it into 3 layers (torted) and brushed each layer with a kircsh flavoured simple syrup.  This helps keep the cake moist and adds more flavour.

We piped multiple concentric rings of icing on each layer and filled the gaps with cherry filling.  This was done twice and the top layer was inverted to get a level top.  We used a ready made cherry filling, but if I was to do this again, I would make it from scratch.          

Then it was time to mask the cake.  We didn't actually spend too much time on this step as most of the cake was going to be covered anyways.  A big block of chocolate circulated around the room and we each used our knives to make chocolate shavings.

Since our spare cake turned out well, we decided to decorate it as well and each take home half.  Here's how it turned out:

It's too bad my half didn't last the drive home...oh well, I think it still tasted good.