Chocolatea Cake

May 12, 2015

What’s funny to me is the serendipity of life because recently I’ve been brewing up a lot of Earl Grey Tea with Chocolate flakes, and it was perfect for this cake. For the ganache I used an orange/lemon black tea and it imparted a sultry/citrusy flavour. Together, this chocolate cake has such interesting and delightful flavours, it’s indescribable. – Earl Grey and Chocolate Tea from David’s Teas: Being that my friend Karen was celebrating her birthday (and me too), I carted the cake up to her BEAUTIFUL four season “cottage” on a clean, clear tranquil frozen lake (this is no slouchy place) and served it while playing a game of cards. The cake was warmly and enthusiastically received. After all, how often does someone bring you a beautiful chocolate genoise, syruped with black tea and covered with a citrusy chocolate ganache? It was a real treat.

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Ingredients

Volume Grams Ounces

Instructions

CHOCOLATE GENOISE BATTER

I’ve had those little hard chocolate seeds develop in the baked genoise. Is this technique a way to avoid them? Very interesting.

Folding in the flour to the cooked chocolate.

BEAT THE EGGS AND SUGAR

I always fight my tendency to take for granted adding sugar to eggs. I mean that I often walk away from the eggs when they are beating and this has proven to be a mistake time and again. It’s possible to beat whole eggs way past their firm stage and when I do this, the batter doesn’t fold well and becomes very fragile in the oven. Now I never take my eyes off whipping eggs.

Fold in the chocolate and flour mixture into the eggs.

Lightening the chocolate and flour mixture.

BAKING AND UNMOLDING THE CAKES

The cakes baked in the shortest time period and literally fell out of the pans (intact) leaving the parchment behind, so I couldn’t keep the parchment in place.

When they were cool, I wrapped the two layers and refrigerated them overnight. I find working with cold cakes is much easier than when they are at room temperature.

MAKING THE TEA GANACHE

I don’t typically make chocolate ganache in my food processor, but because I used 33.3 grams of tea (!!! I didn’t get the memo that this was a typo). Still, the tea strained out easily and imparted a gorgeous brightness to the chocolate. Really. I loved it.

COMPOSE THE CAKE

The ganache was luscious and smoothed onto the cake super easily.

Smoothing on the ganache on the first layer.

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