Chocolate. Rum. Almonds. Could we really ever go wrong?
I’ve made a few Victoria sponges in the last week or so and for my mum’s birthday, I thought it would be nice to make a foray into the realms of true patisserie: an extravagant, rich, expensive ingrediented creation called a Panama Torte.
Unfortunately I didn’t know that I would be doing it when my mojo was on the blink.
It’s not just MY mojo to blame though. A while ago I shelled out a sizeable chunk of money on a sizeable chunk of cookbook, called The Fundamental Techniques Of The Pastry Arts, produced by the French Culinary Institute in New York. It looks like a textbook. It feels like a textbook. It was the price of a textbook, but when it comes to “fundamental” there are a few pieces missing.
Like them telling you you can bake pastry – puff, croissant, danish – in a moderate oven (180 deg C). Let me set everyone straight right now, THIS DOESN’T WORK. You get a rotten rise/puff because there is not enough steam created between the layers of pastry for it to push up the layers. Thence, the butter that you have carefully laminated between the layers leaks out. Yuk.
Like them leaving out quantities for ingredients here and there.
Like them taking photos of the products being put together that somehow bear only a vague resemblance to the photos of the finished product, or indeed the description.
This is an advanced text indeed. You need to apply your own knowledge to the directions. Such as, in the case of my Panama Torte, dusting the surface that the cake is turned out onto with icing sugar. Quite a lot of it.
No. Not just MY mojo.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
What’s a Panama Torte?
Well, its a chocolate almond sponge base, sprinkled with dark rum syrup and layered with chocolate mousseline (more on that later).
With a twist. It’s also a roulade, placed on its end, so that when it is cut, you have concentric vertical layers. Groovy.
So it looks like a regular cake until you cut into it. And then, it just looks like patisserie heaven.
And look at the ingredients… Actually, before I show you the ingredients, I’d better issue a health warning, and also tell you that Shark Fin tablets do NOT remove cholesterol.
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| Ground almonds, melted chocolate, unsalted butter, more chocolate… |
The sponge is not difficult, but very step-oriented. There are a lot components. There is a lot of beatings. My lovebird, Hola Bella Margarita likes recipes like this – she sings along with the mixer, and the mixer was working overtime on this sponge.
First, a French meringue is made – this is a mixture of egg whites and caster sugar, whipped up til peaks form. I say french meringue, because actually, there are three meringues – French, Italian, and Swiss (despite my earlier trashing, this is one of the many genius gems which The Fundamental Techniques Of the Pastry Arts actually does impart. In patisserie apparently, you have to take the grainy with the powdered). French is the straight egg whites and sugar. Italian is smoother with egg whites and hot sugar syrup. Swiss, ever rigorous and complicated, requires egg whites and sugar, beaten together over a gentle heat to a specific temperature. Now you know.
The second step is to beat egg yolks (heaps of them!) with sugar until that is pale, fluffy, and creamy. Rum is added to this. A whole lot of melted chocolate is added to this. It smells divine!
The third step – fold the chocolate yolk mixture into the meringue.
Finally, fold ground almonds and flour into the rest.
This mixture is spread out over baking paper on two cookie sheets to make a flat, thin sponge.
A few minutes in the oven = gorgeous.
Mousseline. I know you are impatient to find out about this. You should be!
I never knew about this before The Fundamental Techniques and I met. Now I do, and we are Best Friends Forever.
I talked about french buttercream in my blog on the raspberry cake during Wedding Cake Week. That was hot syrup into egg yolks, followed by butter. Mousseline is one step further.
First, you make a sweet custard with egg yolks, milk, sugar and a little custard powder (yes, there are places in french cuisine for custard powder and even cornflour! Who knew??).
Broken up chocolate is added to the hot custard and beaten until the mixture is just warm. Then, an OBSCENE amount of unsalted butter is gradually added, and the mixture whipped until pale and fluffy.
And. Oh. My. Light, smooth, chocolaty. It’s not sweet, and it’s not fatty, and it’s not… bad for you…
…
…
.
Okay, it’s so bad for you. But on the tongue, it just melts away, a one way ticket to a happy place.
So. Now we get into the theory of what happens next. I’ll give you the theory stepwise. And then the reality.
First, though, a disclaimer. I might not actually describe the FULL horror. My ego won’t stand for it.
Theory:
Turn the sponges over onto clean sheets of baking paper.
Reality:
This works, until you want to lift them back off the baking paper. I will sprinkle liberal amounts of icing sugar onto that baking paper before turning the sponges out next time. Failure to do so led to issues I would rather have not had, described below.
Theory:
Generously brush rum syrup on sponges.
Reality, I forgot, and slapped some mousseline on the sponges before I remembered this. I scraped the mousseline off and repaired the situation. I’m not however convinced that the word “generously” was really appropriate, as over-wetting the sponge might have assisted with issues I would rather have not had, described below.
Theory:
Spread a layer of mousseline onto the sponges.
I am happy to report this was not outside the reaches of my mojo.
Theory:
Cut the sponges lengthwise into 7cm strips (or the required height of the finished cake).
Reality:
I, in my ultimate wisdom, fancied that a 13cm high cake would be rocking.
I.
Was.
Wrong.
More on that later.
Theory:
Roll a first strip into a tight roll.
Reality:
Nooooo! The sponge is what I like to refer to as achy-breaky and every rolling attempt leads to another break. Eventually I had to slice the paper the sponge was sitting on so that I could do a sushi-type rolling action with this seriously crumbling sponge. This, a palette knife, and a whole lexicon of colourful language, at least got me into some semblance of a roll.
Swear and repeat.
Theory:
Pick up the next strip and wrap this around the first roll.
Reality: Yeah Right.
I had to continue sushi style with an ever increasing 13 cm long squishy breaky nightmare, my hands coated in mousseline. There are no photos of this. Thank goodness. Though there were breakages, read: there weren’t really any parts that didn’t break, the thing did actually come together.
ONLY IT WAS TOO LONG!!! it looked ridiculous at 13 cm long and about 12 cm wide. I stood it on end. It gently began to sag.
At this stage it seemed reasonable to enter into a phase of all-out panic, and this I did. For those who know me, I do all-out panic with some aplomb.
Theory:
There was no freaking theory for this. I had to theorise on my own, and FAST, before there was a major catastrophe. 400grams of Lindt was tied up in this disintegrating tower of Pisa and it wasn’t on special when I bought it either. I needed rescue. I cursed The Fundamental Techniques, and not just because its guidelines for evaluating your success only extended to the soft flexibility of the cooked sponge (check) and the smoothosity of the mousseline (check). There were no guidelines saying “The cake doesn’t break up like a co dependant relationship when you try to assemble it”.
Theory: (mine this time)
The thing was too tall, so the only remedy was to chop it in half. With enormous trepidation and some more speaking-in-tongues I took my biggest knife and did this. Not too bad. I stood one half on its end, and wondered how to get the (mostly broken) other half to be friends with it.
There aren’t any photos of how this happened. I was up to my wrists in mousseline and bits of cake. Lets just say, I carefully peeled, mousselined, and reapplied as much layerage of one half as I could to the other.
Too soon to tell, but I have medium hopes at this point that it will still cut quite well.
Of course, the inner part of the roll was unteasable smoosh at this point, and the only good thing I can think about this fact is that it was seriously tasty.
Muttering and trembling (okay not really but I want to instill some kind of drama here) with residual adrenalin, I shunted the cake into an 18cm tin to help keep it together, and refrigerated it awhile. I was super (super) delighted to discover the mousseline intended to set quite firm, making the next task, coating it and making it all smooth easier.
Now we can have some more visual documentation. Here is the cake with its full mousseline coat. You would never know what happened to get what is underneath.
At this stage, I shall pause for a little more Fundamental Techniques Frustration.
This book shows the cake, coated with mousseline and then (probably) a good 5mm coat of whipped ganache. It is then sprinkled lightly with cocoa.
The description however, mentions no mousseline coat and suggests that you should sprinkle cake crumbs (WTF kind of decoration is that for such a sexy cake?) on the top and press them on the sides. How you are meant to get the crumbs to stick to an un-mousselined exterior is beyond me. Anyway even if I was minded to go with their lame description rather than the seductive picture, I had had enough of crumbs.
Ganache it was. Bar and a half of lindt, equal hot cream, melt, stir (boy, I sound like Gordon Ramsay).
I thought with the richness of the cake already that whipping cooled ganache would result in a lilly-gilding effect – too much chocolate. Yes, there is such a thing.
Instead, I poured the cooled but liquid ganache over the cold cake, letting it ooze down the sides (the cake is on a wire rack so the leftover ganache just drips through, and if you have been smart enough to put a plate underneath, you can reuse this collected ganache. Yes, I was that smart).
A word to the wise. I don’t really think that the cake you pour ganache over should be refrigerator cold. I think (albeit in hindsight) that it should be room temperature, just like your ganache. A cold cake will cause the ganache, particularly on the sides, to set too quickly, which leads to sides with oozy drip marks. Marks which you then have to try and smooth. Very boring. Best to have everyone the same temperature to avoid this.
If you ever come across gold or silver powder (real metal, it’s edible – or perhaps I should say its not inedible, because as a chemist I hold no belief that the body actually does anything in particular with it), I recommend you buy it. It’s not all that expensive (less than 10 dollars for a little bag) and is very cool. Not only can you mix it with a little vodka and use a paintbrush to apply it to icing, but you can also “blow” the powder onto unset ganache, where it spreads over the surface and gives a perfect liquid metal look. Just try not to sneeze while you’re doing this!
Here is the finished cake, ganached, gold and silvered, and decorated with sugarpaste flowers. The wavy lines were made with a nifty cake comb, a piece of plastic with grooved edges which you can use to put texture into icing.
Just for the record, sugarpaste flowers do absorb moisture, and will eventually collapse, so its best not to put them on until just before serving the cake. Not that it matters, because although they are technically edible, I wouldn’t eat one. They are made of food, but they are not really Food.
But the proof of this pudding is in the cutting. Chocolate cakes do best when cut with a hot knife, and in this case, I am definitely not going to pussyfoot around with a cold one!
And here she is – vertical layers of deliciousness.
