Luckily other flavours just fall in your lap. Pistachio + Victoria Sponge (Pound Cake to you american types) = heaven.
A Victoria Sponge has equal quantities of butter, sugar, eggs, and self raising flour. To this I only needed to add a touch of pistachio essence (smuggled into NZ from Melbourne), and a packet of pistachio nuts, pulsed in a mini food processor with a little icing sugar until they are finely ground.
The cake is lovely, a slightly green gold colour, which I tinted up some more for eye appeal with a touch of green colouring.
Combined with pistachio flavoured buttercream, the double Pistachio Victoria Sponge is apparently keenly anticipated. The mixture also makes gorgeous cupcakes!
You can add ground pistachios to the buttercream for the topping of the cupcakes – and if you don’t have a planned trip to the Essential Ingredient in Prahran, a combination of vanilla and almond essence will suffice.
My star chocolate cake right now is the Chili Chocolate Cake. Or Chocolate Chili Cake. Or Mocha Spice cake. I can’t quite decide what to call it. I originally made this cake – based on a mudcake recipe (lots of butter, chocolate and cocoa) with milk chocolate, which is pretty good too. The spices are chili powder, ground coffee, nutmeg, cardamom and cinnamon. The combination is a secret!
I love the way chili adds a zing to dark chocolate.
On my Somethings page on facebook, I use this cake as a base for my Break Up cake, its a little bit firey and comforting all at the same time.
Everybody knows about chili and sour cream. Not everyone knows that you can use sour cream to make chocolate ganache. Just the same as you would make regular ganache, equal parts of cream and chocolate, heat the cream til nearly boiling, remove from heat and add the chocolate, let it sit for a bit then stir carefully until smooth. Carefully – sour cream ganache can split if you’re too enthusiastic.
Chili chocolate cake and sour cream ganache… I think its a little mexican. Mexican style hot chocolate is spiced and sometimes contains coffee, so this cake must be Mexican Chocolate Cake!
Back to the wedding cake process.
Here are the tiers, layered, filled, and coated thinly. Cute huh?
The raspberry layer is 10cm, the pistachio is 15cm, and the chocolate is 20cm. Peggy Porschen, cake maker to the rich and famous and author of the gorgeous book Cake Chic, says that a well proportioned tierd cake has tiers which are about 8.5cm high, including the cake boards that they sit on. These ones are 9cm total. I am proud of myself because the boards are only 5mm thick. That means we have 8.5cm of cake action in each tier. A “tea party” type portion of cake is 2.5cm x 2.5cm. This cake is going to make 16 portions of Crumbled Raspberry Maderia, 36 portions of Pistachio Victoria Sponge and 64 portions of Mexican Chocolate Cake. IF its cut with “Monica From Friends” precision. The problem is… how many guests will there be like me – who needs to sample every flavour? After all, research is essential.
That remains to be seen.
Next up – icing
