Freckleicious

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There comes a time in a baker’s life where she has seen about the interwebs such culinary hilariousnesses as the Polka Dot Cake and has herself become ready to move into the realms of Very Silly Insides.

I’ve done marble cake, and don’t get me wrong, I love it.
I have also already dabbled in what I like to call the Internal Cheetah cake (right), which is created by strategically placing blobs of chocolate pound cake within vanilla pound cake. Pound cake is good for this sort of thing because it isn’t too runny. However, the baking process creates convections of its own which means no matter how round your blobs started, they won’t remain so.


 
You can see some batter convection in the Internal Cheetah cake, but I re-learned this lesson in quite a dramatic way the first time I made buttercake rainbow cupcakes. Th.e cross section completely belies the technique that I used to make this cupcake, where originally carefully layered colours turned into a riotous (and tasty) volcano of hues! I doubt I could recreate this colour combination even if I tried.
By the way, the frosting on top is Butter Roux frosting, which I am led to believe is the real true original frosting for Red Velvet cake, and is seriously my favourite.

So clearly to avoid batter convection, and the difficulty of colours mixing in unbaked batter, the only answer is to cook the colours first.  Thank you, polka dot baker.

There is always an impetus for innovation. In more industrial areas, such an impetus might be war. When cake is your thing, its birthdays.

A good friend of mine has a certain, very well known proclivity for an antipodean chocolate known as Freckles. They consist of a blob of chocolate sprinkled liberally with hundreds and thousands (or rainbow nonpareils for you posh foreigners). I am not a fan, in general terms. This is because freckles are by and large made with the crappest compound chocolate known to man.
My friend does not care about my chocolate distinction, and has been known to eat a bag at a time, generally with a bottle of wine on a Friday night. And she was the birthday girl.

 

What do you give a woman who can eat a bag of freckles at a time?

A Freckle Cake.

But an ordinary cake, covered in (flinch) commercial freckles… well, it seemed like cheating.
That’s when I decided that there should be freckles on the inside.

Here’s how it happened:

One batch of cake mixture is divided into six and coloured up! I used square pans because I was planning on cutting the cooked cake into little cubes. 
Funniest ingots ever.
I cubed up the coloured cakes and carefully mixed them together, trying to avoid creating excess crumbs. After that, another batch of white cake mix (I used Betty Crocker’s white cake which is made with eggwhites only, and I made it from scratch – no boxes of cake mix in this house, unless its for cake batter ice cream, which is another blog in itself!). I spooned a thin layer of white cake mixture into the pan, sprinkled it with cubes, then repeated twice more, finishing with a white cake layer. And then into the oven!
Here is the finished product with its top levelled off. The confetti center looks amazing. To amp up the chocolate component, I layered the confetti cake between two layers of devil’s food cake – Betty Crocker again, that old cookbook is so wonderful! Ganache was the filling of choice – see here for a recipe)
What does one do about freckles when one hates compound chocolate with the fire of a thousand suns? One uses Lindt milk to make one’s own. I spread melted chocolate onto a large sheet of bake paper and sprinkled a ton of hundreds and thousands over, then left it to set hard. Then, I cut it into rectangular shards. It was a bit breaky – that many little pearls of sugar can cramp chocolate’s style, but no matter!
The tops of the cakes were covered in Ganache and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. Then the sides were also ganached and decorated with freckle bark to create the very silly freckle castle you have seen above.
 
 

And there it is, sliced in all its rainbow glory! I still have no idea how the photographed piece managed to have four orange confettis all in a row!

The twice baked part of the cake was still as moist as its surroundings, and obviously, the hilarity of the confetti center was worth all the effort!

Happy birthday to Freckle lovers everywhere!

XXX
K

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