Marshmallows!

Chocolate Orange Hazelnut Marshmallows, to be exact. I used fresh orange juice and chopped dark chocolate which melted into the marshmallow batter creating swirly fluffy delicious.

The recipe I was riffing off of said to wet your hands and flatten the top of the marshmallow so it would set up flat, but I really liked how weird the batter looked after I got both my hands working to scrape as much sticky fluff as I could out of the mixing bowl.

In the pans, starting to set up


The first set marshmallow brick, unmolded

You can see the swirls a little better on the bottom

... went a little crazy on the second one...

Second swirly bottom

I love how these look. Why flatten the top? Seriously.

This was a super fun project! And my whole family really likes them, more I think for the texture than the flavor. The OJ made the marshmallows kind of sour, so maybe I'll ease up next time. Also, I'll have to work on stirring less if I want more pronounced ribbons of color. Still, a success all told, particularly in light of my last attempt at homemade marshmallows which, as my dear friend Chris Krovatin can tell you, didn't turn out so great. Probably because I substituted agar for half of the gelatin. Hmm. Chris, I'm sorry I hadn't found this base recipe by the time I was prepping for your birthday! Next time for realz, awesome marshmallows.

Next post: sculpting with chocolate plastique!

Clarence's Birthday Cake

There it is ladies and gentlemen, seven layers of noisette-syrup soaked devil's food cake, seven layers of dark chocolate ganache and one massive stretch of milk chocolate and coffee mousse sandwiched between two textured slabs of chocolate butter cake; all covered with chocolate ganache and adorned with noisette flavored Swiss meringue rosettes. I have to say, in terms of flavor and texture composition, this is quite possibly the most successful piece I've ever done: not too busy or incoherent, but complex enough to be engaging and totally delicious. That bit of mousse was pretty tough to get in there. I knew it was too soft to hold its shape unless I built that part separately and let it set in the refrigerator. I put one layer of butter cake in each waxpaper-lined pan in which it had been baked and then spread ganache on the sides, creating a frame to keep the mousse in place once the cakes were stacked. I piped in the mousse and pressed another appropriately sized butter cake layer on the top to seal it in. I half expected this not to work at all because the mousse was really just so soft and in such a thick layer. Well, now I know, and I'll be employing this new technique in the future!

In terms of presentation, I went with a... homier look?

Tall, dark and chocolatey, just like Clarence (uh oh, I think he follows my blog... I'll apologize on the phone). I'd promised him about five years ago that I would make him his own cake and was finally able to fulfill my promise this past Monday the fourth, a week or so after his 22nd birthday. He requested chocolate and coffee, and I obliged.

I dunno, looks pretty good from the top...

Ah, the obligatory psychotic cake-stabbing picture. You're a natural, Clarence =)

I'm fascinated by how every friend-with-cake photoshoot I've ever done inevitably includes a shot of somebody poised to perpetrate some sort of violent fantasy on the as of yet undefiled pastry. Honestly, I fully support and even encourage these expressions of what I think lies at the heart of our appreciation of intricately decorated sweets: the desire to completely eviscerate it, to destroy something delicate and beautiful with our hands and devour it, consuming all that careful construction and reducing it to human filth. Maybe that's why I spend hours and days working on a piece that can be entirely dismantled and ingested in a matter of hours or even minutes, manifesting some sort of masochistic desire to watch my labors of love suddenly brutalized and literally turned to shit.

Huh. Maybe I shouldn't listen to Behemoth while I blog. I think the metal is seeping into my narrative. Speaking of which, I swear I'm going to start including weirder cakes soon. All this cuteness is really unusual for me. Maybe I should listen to more Behemoth while I blog. And bake. Good plan.

The composition of the bottom tier was exactly the same as that of the top, with one layer fewer of the devil's food cake. The whole bottom was taken home by Clarence to be enjoyed by his family, and from what I hear it was a success! Hooray!

On a side-note, the recipe for the butter cake gave me this beautiful crack down the middle of the smaller top tier. Some cookbook authors talk about all the fancy things you can do with baking temperature to keep cakes from cracking and to keep the top of the cake as level as possible so as to minimize waste. However, going back to the rather visceral central theme of this post, I absolutely love those beautiful, rough valleys that form in the smooth cake-top while in the oven.

The texture is so appealing that tactile people such as myself could never be expected not to secretly hope for the blossoming of a crack that could by pried apart with fingers, the cake releasing clouds of chocolate steam as little pieces of crust find their way into mouths... how is that waste? Who in their right mind would try to keep cracks from appearing on top of every cake he or she bakes?

Who wouldn't want to do this to a cake right out of the oven?

Just look at that beautiful texture... Mmm, I should go bake something. I think I will. Right now.