Give The Cake A Martini

First cake of 2006!

January 19, 2006
Occasion: An End, and A Beginning
Name of Cake: Chocolate Souffle Cake with Orange Caramel Sauce
Constituents: Duh.

This is a recipe from some foodie mag Zetta was looking at. It is pretty similar to RLB’s chocolate truffle cake in that it is a flourless chocolate cake, but there are some serious differences in ingredients and method:

1. same amount of butter and eggs BUT only 9 oz of chocolate, instead of one whole pound
2. extra ingredients like sugar (?) and salt. Why more sugar?
3. you put a pan of hot water in the oven BUT you don’t use it as a hot water bath.
4. you bake it for one full hour; the top should crack and look dry at the end of the bake.
5. you don’t need to refrigerate it for 5,000 hours before serving

I departed from the recipe in the following ways:

1. I melted the butter and chocolate in a double boiler, instead of right on the stove. Didn’t want a burnt chocolate soufflé cake with orange caramel sauce.
2. I used lightly milled cane sugar instead of white sugar. Mostly because I thought the molasses in the cane sugar would marry well with the orange caramel sauce.
3. I folded the egg whites into the chocolate mixture; stirring them in would have been stupid.
4. I added about ¾ of a seventh egg yolk, because, you know, the egg yolk conspiracy.

Seriously. Adding sugar to the cake and then serving it with caramel sauce? It sounds really freakin sweet. But we shall see. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

So when this cake came out of the oven it was as tall as the springform pan (3 inches) and after letting it cool for 10 minutes it fell 1 ½ inches…and it looks all sad and deflated now. I know it is supposed to deflate, but the poor cake looks like it had a grueling day at work. You want to put it's feet up on the ottoman and give it a martini and a shoulder rub.

(1/20) So the soufflé fell. A lot. It was a tiny, dense little disc this morning when I took it out of the refrigerator, maybe ¾ inch high. I guess I didn’t beat up the eggs enough. Or do you think it has to do with the pan running out of water? Probably the eggs.

However, this sucker was mighty tasty. Even though it was a dense little mass it tasted very light and chocolately, but not too much so. Not too rich, not even too sweet, surprisingly. Quite nice. It would make a good breakfast cake.

The caramel orange sauce. I used the milled cane sugar for the caramel, and as soon as the sugar melted in the pan it began to smell burnt—like it should—so I thought it was pretty much done—it had the characteristic caramelly brown color—so I went ahead and added the orange zest and after a bit the orange juice and stirred it up like I was supposed to and poured it out of the pan to let it cool and then we tasted it, and it was very bitterly orange, and not so caramelly.

Will have to work on that I guess.

Okay. I just found a picture of the cake on the epicurious website and their cake is a tiny little disc too. I guess that’s just how its supposed to be.