In about 4 hours, a dozen people will ocnverge upon my apartment for a surprise birthday party for one of my best and oldest friennds. I am in charge of the birthday cake, and I’m in a bit of a fix. After spending most of the day making bittersweet chocolate ganache, seedless raspberry puree, and what was supposed to be a very elegant, deeply chocolate layer cake, I find I need an engineering class.
When I unmolded the 2 layers of cake, half of each one of them stuck to the pan. I tried to camoulflage by patching together pieces of cake, and the bottom layer looked alright; I figured I could even things out in the middle easily enough, and so I hastily whipped up some cream as cement, with raspberry puree in the middle.
But when I plunked down the top layer, it cracked into (more or less) three very uneven pieces. I can’t get the smallest piece to stay put, and the top is hopelessly uneven. I’ve put the whole thing in the fridge for the moment, hoping for help from some culinarily inclined Dopers, before I waste the ganache as well; I don’t think it’s thick enough to do the job. How can I salvage this mess? This has never happened to me!
Maybe you could crumble it more and serve it in bowls instead? No idea how you could get it to resemble a layer cake at this point. How about frosting it as is and laugh about it?
Is your cake firm enough to try nailing it together with toothpicks? If you ran them through the smallest piece and into the the bigger pieces, it might hold well enough for you to cement it and fill in gaps with whipped cream, then you can hide it all with the ganache.
Good ideas so far; keep 'em coming! I might try a combo of the two; see what I can accomplish with toothpicks and ganache, and then try to make light of the whole thing (it should taste pretty darn good anyway!). I’d even bought a joke tombstone-shaped candle that plays a funeral march; maybe the cake will just end up looking like a cemetery?
In the meantime, maybe a nap will help clear my head; I’ve been up since 5 a.m. Maybe others will post additional ideas in the meantime.
Line a bib loaf pan or angel food cake pan with waxed paper, then plastic wrap, THOROUGHLY. Take your “cake parts” and mix them with a bit of the puree and the cream. Make layers of this mess, with the whipped cream and the puree which you’ve stirred together. Press down firmly and refrigerate for as long as you can. Unmold, cover with the ganache, let it stand to set and serve. Good luck, and try and keep a straight face.
Quiltguy hit on something here…if you don’t have a big loaf pan, use a 13x9 inch sheet cake pan and crumble up the cake and mix it with the other ingredients and press it into the pan like he said. Shape it like a mound for a grave, with the tombstone at the head. If you have some flowers, put them on the grave. Viola!
Oh, and definitely cover it with the ganache like Quiltguy154 said. If you are going to put flowers on it, then do it at the last minute to keep from getting the chocolate all over them (don’t know how sticky the ganache is).
Make lots of thick frosting and cement everything together. Oh, and make sure everyone has had at least 2 glasses of wine before cutting the cake. Works for me.
Knowledge of architecture, engineering, and strength of materials comes in handy at the most random moments.
Cold things are firmer than warm things.
Ganache does not stick to whipped cream.
After my nap, both the cake and the ganache had firmed up considerably in the fridge. So much so, in fact, that I had to warm up the ganache a bit to spread it. In the meantime, I stuck a couple of strategic toothpicks into the cake and cleaned up the whipped cream a bit with a frosting knife.
The I spread the ganache over the top of the cake; it was pretty level by the time I was done. It was a bit more difficult to do the sides, because of the aforementioned ganache/whipped cream nonadhesion issue. With practice, I managed to get the layer of ganache to stick to the sides of the cake around the whipped cream without making too much of a mess. In fact, from the outside you can barely tell I had the breakage problem to begin with! I’m pretty damn proud of myself right now. Now I just have to remember to warn people about the toothpicks…
Good job, kiddo. Sounds like you won’t have to speak the words I have to speak over 4 out of 5 cakes I bake: “Well, I’m sure it’ll taste better than it looks!”
Oh, and I almost forgot Lesson #5: when you receive advice from someone who has written an award-winning cookbook (Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible), you should probably pay attention.
In particular, I speak of the advice in which she tells you for this recipe to cover the bottom of the pan with buttered wax paper, rather than just buttering the pan. My wax paper got lost in my move, so I thought I could skip this step rather than making a third-Saturday-afternoon run to the store; it always worked fine before! Ah, the dangers of culinary hubris…
