At a recent get together of some law school friends, we celebrated a couple of upcoming birthdays, which of course meant only one thing. Cake. Years ago, one of the birthday boys raved about a chocolate stout cake I made, so I figured that chocolate cake was the way to go. I decided on Nick Malgieri's "Raspberry Devil's Food Cake" from Chocolate, a large four-layer chocolate cake with raspberry preserves and raspberry-chocolate filling.
This is a high-ratio cake, where the weight of the sugar equals or exceeds the weight of the flour. Accordingly, it's mixed according to the high-ratio method: you sift all of the dry ingredients (cake flour, cocoa powder, sugar, salt baking powder, baking soda) into a bowl, mix in very soft butter, and then incorporate the liquid (buttermilk and eggs) in three separate additions. This method guarantees that the batter will not separate, creating a smoother-textured cake. You divide the batter between two 10-inch pans, bake, and immediately unmold the cakes to cool.
You make the filling by bringing butter and cream to a boil, removing the mixture from the heat and adding chopped chocolate, and then whisking in raspberry puree (made by boiling and reducing frozen raspberries and straining out the seeds). To assemble the cake, you split each of the cakes into two layers and stack them, spreading each layer with raspberry preserves and the chocolate-raspberry filling. You then cover the entire cake with filling.
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The chocolate-raspberry filling is quite thin when you make it, and you are supposed to cool it until thickened. Unfortunately, I was in a rush when I made this cake, and I needed to firm up the filling fast. I put it in the fridge, but it wasn't making progress fast enough, so then I resorted to the desperate measure of putting the bowl of filling inside another bowl filled with water and ice, and stirring the filling until it cooled down. That did the trick, although a bit too well. I didn't get the smooth creamy filling I was hoping for, but something stiffer, akin to chocolate butter. I was able to spread the filling, but only with some effort, and I had to use the hot blade of an offset spatula to smooth the top and sides.
The cake itself was rich, chocolatey, moist, and delicious. Raspberry is of course a wonderful pairing with chocolate, and here the raspberry preserves helped add moistness as well. I was unhappy with the filling. Not only was the texture too stiff because of my rapid cooling shortcut, but I thought it was far too bitter. This was completely my fault, because I had ignored the recipe instruction to use semisweet chocolate in the filling and used 72% instead (for no reason other than I had a lot of 72% chocolate on hand). Since the filling is mostly chocolate (it consists of 20 oz. chocolate, 4 oz. butter, 12 fl. oz. cream, and the strained puree from a 10 oz. bag of frozen raspberries), the extra-bitter chocolate flavor was striking and overshadowed the raspberry in the filling. While I found the astringency unappealing, my tasters seemed to genuinely enjoy the chocolate overload.
I enjoyed this cake, but I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I had used semisweet chocolate and let the filling cool gradually to a creamy texture. The stiff filling made the cake seem quite heavy, although I don't think this could be considered a light dessert under any circumstances!
Recipe: "Raspberry Devil's Food Cake" from Chocolate by Nick Malgieri.
This is a high-ratio cake, where the weight of the sugar equals or exceeds the weight of the flour. Accordingly, it's mixed according to the high-ratio method: you sift all of the dry ingredients (cake flour, cocoa powder, sugar, salt baking powder, baking soda) into a bowl, mix in very soft butter, and then incorporate the liquid (buttermilk and eggs) in three separate additions. This method guarantees that the batter will not separate, creating a smoother-textured cake. You divide the batter between two 10-inch pans, bake, and immediately unmold the cakes to cool.
You make the filling by bringing butter and cream to a boil, removing the mixture from the heat and adding chopped chocolate, and then whisking in raspberry puree (made by boiling and reducing frozen raspberries and straining out the seeds). To assemble the cake, you split each of the cakes into two layers and stack them, spreading each layer with raspberry preserves and the chocolate-raspberry filling. You then cover the entire cake with filling.
.JPG)
The cake itself was rich, chocolatey, moist, and delicious. Raspberry is of course a wonderful pairing with chocolate, and here the raspberry preserves helped add moistness as well. I was unhappy with the filling. Not only was the texture too stiff because of my rapid cooling shortcut, but I thought it was far too bitter. This was completely my fault, because I had ignored the recipe instruction to use semisweet chocolate in the filling and used 72% instead (for no reason other than I had a lot of 72% chocolate on hand). Since the filling is mostly chocolate (it consists of 20 oz. chocolate, 4 oz. butter, 12 fl. oz. cream, and the strained puree from a 10 oz. bag of frozen raspberries), the extra-bitter chocolate flavor was striking and overshadowed the raspberry in the filling. While I found the astringency unappealing, my tasters seemed to genuinely enjoy the chocolate overload.
I enjoyed this cake, but I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I had used semisweet chocolate and let the filling cool gradually to a creamy texture. The stiff filling made the cake seem quite heavy, although I don't think this could be considered a light dessert under any circumstances!
Recipe: "Raspberry Devil's Food Cake" from Chocolate by Nick Malgieri.
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