Let Us Eat Cake
 |
| Terrine de Gateau |
I envisioned something I was calling a "buche de printemps", a variant of the classic French dessert, the buche de Noel. I made a verjus curd, a white sheet cake, and a white chocolate buttercream frosting. The plan was to spread the curd over the sheet cake, roll it up, trim the ends to create "branch stumps", and then frost the whole thing.
Note the past tense in that last paragraph. It didn't work out that way. I rolled up the sheet cake, and created a whole bunch of long strips separated from each other. Sigh. I was annoyed and disappointed, but hey. Verjus curd, white sheet cake (even in pieces) and white chocolate buttercream. How big of a disaster could this be?
So my contribution to Is My Blog Burning is...a terrine de gateau! I put the best-looking cake pieces on the bottom of a buttered loaf pan, then smeared some verjus curd over them. More cake pieces, more curd, and a final layer of cake pieces. I doused the cake with Frangelico, and weighted the terrine down.
The next day, I took the cake from its pan and frosted it. Now here comes the big confession. Much as I love frou-frou presentation, I've never really practiced decorating cakes. In this case, however, my bare-bones effort worked nicely. Because with my "terrine" the frosting in cross-section looks like the layer of fat you'd normally find around a pâté. Flavor-wise, everything worked fairly nicely. None of the flavors really dominated but rather blended together harmoniously, though at one point Melissa gave a whoop as she hit a particularly booze-soaked piece of cake.
 |
| Frosting the terrine |
If I were doing this for a dinner party or something (and I might someday; I like the joke), I'd complete the joke by making little marzipan cornichons and olives, but this time I was unable to.
A fun event, overall. I don't normally make cakes, so this was a nice departure from the routine.
- State By State - Maryland: Smith Island Cake
I'm afraid you might begin to think I should have called this series State by State Sweets, but let me regale you with one more sweetie from Maryland - the Smith Island Cake. On Smith Island, these cakes are simply called layer cakes. They can come...
- Cathy’s Secrets To Modestly Successful Cake Baking
I have a bad history with layer cakes. I can’t count how many times they’ve fallen or broken up on me. Then, of course, there were the ones that were just plain bad. I’m also not so good at achieving a polished look to my cakes – they look...
- Daring Bakers: Has The Fat Lady Sung Yet?
I'm rather pleased with myself. I saw this month's challenge, and decided I was going to turn it into a mother's day cake for Matt's Mom. Which means...I completed the challenge weeks early! Usually, I'm scrambling the night before,...
- Post-oscar Decadence
Of all the nominations, I've only seen...two?...of the films. Ratatouille and Michael Clayton. Which is probably a higher number than past years. We decided to have a sort of 'decadence' dinner. Nothing too fancy, just foods we really enjoy....
- Test Run
It's not perfect. But, I'm baking a cake for somone this coming weekend. They want to PAY ME to bake a cake for them. I'm using fondant. I've never been crazy about the stuff, and right now, I'm 'eh'. It's useful, sure...but...