Unknown
Chocolate Genoise Sponge with a ganache topping & marzipan
Time for the son’s 9th birthday & his level of excitement has the rest of us crawling up walls!!! The countdown began 2 months ago, & reached a frenzy in the last week. Each morning of the last week was announced with 7,6,5,4,3,2…tomorrow, “I just can’t wait for tomorrow”!! That night a calm overtook him (as my friend commented, “must be the calm before the storm“). Dead right she was, because we were all so wound up by the end of it we were all riding waves of stormy seas…& suddenly a ‘Pirate Cake’ made quite a lot of sense!!
It’s of course another matter that I have suffered a tragedy of sorts where I have lost all the birthday pictures due to some strange 11th June bug sitting in my computer. All the pictures I downloaded during the course of the day have disappeared completely, sadly all the ones of the kids & their friends, the cake cutting…every one of them (except a couple of the cake which I had mailed in the morning).
Recipe as adapted for the basic cake from Joy of Baking. (I made 2 cakes)
Ingredients:
Hot melted unsalted butter or clarified butter – 3 tablespoons
Vanilla extract – 1
Cake flour – 1/2 cup
Cocoa powder – 1/3 cup
Eggs – 4 large
Granulated white sugar – 2/3 cup
Note: When warming the eggs and sugar, whisk constantly to ensure the the eggs do not overheat and curdle.
-
Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Butter, or spray with a vegetable spray, a 9 inch (23 cm) round cake pan and then line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper.
-
In a small bowl, combine the melted unsalted butter with the vanilla extract. Keep this mixture warm. If needed, re-warm for a few seconds just before using.
-
In a medium bowl sift together the flour and cocoa powder. Set aside.
-
In a large heatproof bowl whisk together the eggs and sugar. Place the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Whisking constantly, heat the eggs and sugar until lukewarm to the touch (this will take approximately 5 minutes depending on the temperature of the eggs and the simmering water).
-
Remove from heat and transfer the egg mixture to the bowl of your electric mixer. Beat on high speed until the egg mixture has cooled, tripled in volume, and looks like softly whipped cream. This will take approximately 5 minutes and the batter is beaten sufficiently when the batter falls back into the bowl in a ribbon-like pattern.
-
Then sift about one-third of the flour mixture over the whipped eggs and fold in using a large rubber spatula or whisk.
-
old in half of the remaining flour, and then fold in the rest. Do not over mix or you will deflate the batter.
-
hen take about 1 cup of the batter and fold it into the hot butter mixture with a small spatula. (This will lighten the butter mixture and make it easier to incorporate into the egg batter without deflating it.)
-
When completely combined, use a spatula to fold the butter mixture completely into the rest of the egg batter. Pour the batter into your prepared pan, smoothing the top.
-
Bake until the cake shrinks slightly from the edges of the pan and the top springs back when lightly pressed (about 20-25 minutes). Cool on a metal rack. When the cake has cooled completely, run a small knife or spatula around the edges to release the cake. The génoise will keep well-wrapped two days in the refrigerator or else three months frozen.
-
I sandwiched the layers with a chantilly cream, after brushing the layers with melted mixed fruit jam.
-
Topped the cake with a dark chocolate ganache, decorated it with marzipan made from scratch (eggless) & chocolate scrolls dusted with powdered sugar.
-
Recipe for ganache can be found here.
-
Recipe for marzipan can be found here.
