COFFEE- CHOCOLATE TRIANGLE CAKE...for an 18th BIRTHDAY!

It's my little brother's birthday and he turned 18 today. He's grown up so much from the last time I saw him. He is 6'3" now but is still the same soft hearted little boy we know. He still irritates me the same way every time I bake a cake or every time he wants me to bake a pizza for him. I was doing the swirls on his birthday cake very calmly and there he comes asking for a big piece of the cake. I told him 'NO!, you can't today!' and he goes,'I want that cake today and not tomorrow, so give it to me!'. Argh! That irritating little brother! ;) He even warned me that he will be attacking the cake while I am fast asleep dreaming of all things possible. That ended my hope of sleeping peacefully last night :-D

Oh yes, in our house we all know what cake we are getting for our birthdays because we cannot hide it from each other as we have just one fridge which is raided by all of us for some goodies or the other every now and then!
This is a technique I've been waiting to try from atleast 13-14 years now and today was that day! It's a very very simple technique and I'm up for these things anytime! You would have seen that in my Checkerboard Cake  & Honeycomb Cake . Call me crazy but I love standing near the cake analyzing how to slice it so that I can get the design I have in mind. You will find me walking around the cake, bending down to get it to eye level, standing up scratching my head...as if it's an experiment. Oh yes! all these are my little experiments :)

I saw this cake many many moons ago for the first time in my favourite little town called Panjim, Goa. It was in my dream store called 'Pastry Cottage'. Me and my cousin,Tia, the newly-wed now, went there together and I was in a complete paradise. I must have stood there and gazed at all the different varieties it had to offer and the one thing which caught my complete attention was the 'Chocolate Pyramid' cake. I stood there and wondered how on earth did the baker manage to get those vertical stripes when Amma make horizontal ones.

I got out of the store with a vision in my mind...If I ever open up a Cake shop, this is how it would be. Really, it was my wonderland. I wanted to go there this time when we went to Goa but we were so hard pressed for time with all the wedding preparations, rehearsals and above all, meeting all my family on Amma's side. We all stayed at the Panjim Inn and had a gala time. We are quite large with 75 members and still counting so you can imagine what fun it would have been to get together and stay under the same roof. I pity the neighbours! ;-)

The beautiful crockery you see in the photographs are my Grandmother's .Appan came up with this brilliant idea of searching through her crockery collection to match the cake for today :-) She has this amazing collection of the best crockery possible and this is just 1/5th of it. I inherited her craze for crockery and cooking :-) The one you see above is handpainted and Made in England and they were bought by her in late 60's early 70's.There are plenty more in her collection and some of them are so exquisite that we can never find such pieces now.I'm sure she would have been gleaming if she was alive to see this here. I bet she is the one who is pushing me into all these things that lead me to winning the title,'Pachakarani '. Even Amma believes the same :)

This cake was made in a jiffy with a sponge cake & a ganache recipe which is engraved on my brain. Wake me up at whatever time of the night  you want and ask me to bake a cake for you, I'll bake you this one :-) I must have baked this sponge some 100 times and it's worked for me always! Just make sure you beat the batter on high continuously for 12 mins...no breaks for phone calls please ;-)Let me not try and explain and then confuse you with the how-to for the 'triangular' part of the cake. I learnt this by reading a lot of material from the library all this while and finally found a link online which will make things a LOT easier for you :) I should have checked for it online instead of all the work I made my brain do :-)

COFFEE - CHOCOLATE TRIANGLE CAKE
You will need:
1 large Coffee sponge cake (Recipe source  -Amma)
1 large portion of Chocolate Ganache

Ingredients:
For the Coffee sponge cake:
6 large eggs
1 cup granulated white sugar
3/4 cup all purpose flour/maida
2 tbsp cornstarch/cornflour
1 tsp instant coffee powder

Method:
Pre-heat the oven to 180C .
In a large mixing bowl, beat together the eggs and sugar on high for 12 minutes resulting in a very thick mousse like batter. Sift the dry ingredients over it and fold it in.
Pour the batter into a prepared rectangular cake tin and bake for 30-35 mins or till the skewer inserted comes out clean. Let it cool in the tin for 10 minutes and then flip it over onto a cooling rack and cool completely.

Once cooled, cut the cake into half horizontally and then into 3 which will give you 6 small rectangular pieces of cake.

Ingredients
For the Chocolate Ganache:
250 ml fresh cream/heavy whipping cream
250 g dark chocolate

Method:
Chop the chocolate into equal sized pieces and reserve them in a heatproof bowl.
Bring the cream to a boil and then pour it over the chocolate pieces. Let stand for 3-4 mins.
Stir till you get a nice chocolate-y cream. You can chill it for 15-20 mins to get a thicker consistency which is what I prefer.

Verdict: This cake was superb! I know it's just a plain coffee sponge and a good ganache, but it was really really good. That's because the cake layers were super thin and every layer was sandwiched with a thick layer of ganache which resulted in the melt-in-your-mouth texture. I will not recommend soaking the layers for this kind of a cake because it will be super messy to cut to form a triangle. Therefore use a cake which is not dry.

We loved it! Appan said,'This cake is awesome!How did you make it so good?'. Amma asked for a second piece and knowing the cake-hater that she is, it sure must have been good. Ritchie, the birthday boy, a man of very few words stood there and gobbled up 2 pieces in a row. I had my share of this cake after the photo session was over and Ritchie found me smiling and he asked me why :-) The entire cake was cut and devoured in less than 20 mins!

I'm pleased with the photographs here because none of them were edited! :-)

WE TURNED ONE...It's time to celebrate! :)

It was our 1st wedding anniversary on the 15th, yes, time sure flies! If you have been thinking that's the reason for my absence here, no,it was because our laptop battery and charger decided to die almost on the same day so we had to get it replaced.Now getting back to blogging is quite tough...I was slowly comfortably getting used to not typing a hundred words in one minute :)

I still remember the confusion and stress I went through on the same day last year when I iced our wedding cake! Ah, I think I should tell you all that story! I think I drove everyone around me crazy...I think sometimes I'm the 'Monica' (FRIENDS) types in my family. I can be really rude at times and give orders without even thinking what the other person might think or feel. When I look back at it, it was fun, for me :) It was Amma's dream that I bake/decorate my own wedding cake which later got into me and became my dream as well :) Amma and I baked the cake the previous day and kept the icing part for the big day. It's not that we didn't know it would drive us nuts but it was just a prevention from driving us nuttier! You see, I have a HUGE family of no less than 100 people (counting immediate family only ;)We had our engagement and wedding back to back (14th Feb and 15th Feb) so we had a houseFULL of people ALL the time. It included infants to 80 year olds. We didn't worry about anybody elder than 12 years, but it was the younger ones that we were scared of. Imagine your nephews and nieces licking off bits and pieces of the buttercream roses that you painstakingly piped out one by one ? :) Whatever it was, no matter how many told us...we (Amma & I) knew that I am going to do it, all by myself. People around me thought we were crazy, but we know the fun we had! I wouldn't have missed it for anything!! Given a chance, I would still do it :)

If you were thinking what cake it was...it was Amma's Honey Soaked Date & Nut Cake.I decorated it with buttercream and piped roses in different shades of pink (I told ya I love pink!! ;) It did suffer some injuries while transportation but it was still in one piece :-D

Coming to the present scenario, I was throughly confused as to what to bake for the BIG day! Whenever I logged into FB, I had 100's of questions to answer to about the same thing and I had absolutely no idea as to what it would be :-D It's because I can do things only in the last minute.I'd start planning maybe a month back but I know myself very well...in the end when the time approches I would do something very different from what I though I would do before! This time it was no different. I knew one thing for sure...I'd be baking a cake, a layered cake. That's it. I had no further idea as to what to do with that piece of cake or what flavour it would be.This thought haunted me since January. I think of it day and night. I breathe it day and night . I dream about it so much that I wake up feeling tensed! Anyhow,on the day I was supposed to be baking, I wrote down a recipe and started with it. But I couldn't go on...I wanted to do something of my own and I did. That's what you just saw above :-)
Do you feel like reading more about my wedding prep? Click here!

Haven't I told you all that I love trying out different techniques? I actually search for them...I find that challenging.This is probably the only challenge that I go forward with without any hesitation, baking/cooking. Somehow I've always been able to produce a decent thing out of it.The anxiety that I go through when I cut through it is something I cannot explain using words...you should feel it for yourself :) It's FUN and I love it, totally!

CHECKERBOARD GATEAU
Recipe source for the sponge- Amma



Ingredients:
For the vanilla sponge:
3eggs
1/2c sugar
1/2 c flour minus 1 tbsp
1tbsp cornstarch/cornflour
1tsp vanilla extract

For the chocolate sponge:
3 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 c flour minus 3 tbsp
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1tbsp cornstarch/cornflour
1tsp vanilla extract

1 portion soaking syrup
11/2 heavy cream,whipped (If you wish,you can whip it up with some sugar to taste, too)

Method:
For the sponge (Vanilla & Chocolate)
Preheat the oven to 350F/180C
Butter and flour/line a 8' round cake tin with parchment paper.

Sift the dry ingredients together.Reserve.
Beat the eggs and sugar together till mousse like and almost tripled in volume. This will take about 10-12 mins of beating on high using an electric beater. DO NOT skimp on this as we are not using any leavening agents (baking powder/baking soda). Otherwise the cake WILL NOT rise.
Fold  the dry ingredients into the egg mixtures, carefully. The mixture will deflate a little,don't worry.
Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 28-30 mins or till the top is springy to touch and the skewer inserted comes out clean.
Cool in the tin for 10 mins and then invert it onto a rack and cool completely. 

To make the checkerboard pattern:


First of all, you need 2 round cakes, one dark and one light.
Instead of cutting it horizontally, this time you need to cut it vertically.

Imagine a cake having 2 more concentric circles in it .Cut accordingly. I used a round cookie cutter for the innermost circle and my saucepan lid for the middle circle as the template. So now, you have 3 rings out of one cake. Similarly do the same with the second cake.

Now, interchange the middle ring. While you do so, be careful and try to spread some whipped cream/jam/ganache so that the rings sticks together.Now you will be left with two black and white cakes.
Place one cake (with the interchanged rings) on the serving plate and soak it using half the soaking syrup.
Spread some whipped cream over it and place the second cake over it.
Spoon over the remaining soaking syrup over it.
Cover the top and sides with whipped cream and decorate as you desire.

This whole process is made so much easier if you happen to own a 'checkerboard pan' which I don't. I don't think I would want to because this method is really simple and with another tin, I will have to throw away some stuff to find a place for it in my cupboard!

Verdict: A very soft and spongy cake with perfect sweetness. We really loved it. I served it chilled which I feel is always better when it comes to gateaux.
We were away for the weekend so basically we gorged on all possible food,both junk and healthy.That way when I look at this cake I'm happy, it's butterless and  you wouldn't even miss it!