So this month’s Daring Baker challenge was…let me get this correct…a Filbert Gateau With Praline Buttercream. My first question was ‘What the hell is a filbert?’ Unfortunately, the recipe was not much help at all, calling, as it did, for not a single filbert. It did call for hazelnuts, so…maybe filberts are hazelnuts when they’ve been cooked/baked? My second question, I have to be honest, was ‘And this is different from the Opera Cakes we made…how?’
But I figured it’d be fun to get a second try at a nut-based cake and a first try at making the other kind of buttercream and a proper carob ganache. However, based on my appreciation of the opera cake, I decided to halve the recipe (I’m afraid this sort of cake just isn’t my favorite kind of thing). I should have taken some pictures to demonstrate the scale of it because it’s quite cute, being all small and everything.
However, halving the recipe was a bit of a challenge as it called for 5 egg yolks and 7 egg whites. Rather than weighing them out and then taking half of that, I decided to sort of split the difference and do three of each…which may have altered the consistency of the cake somewhat (it was surprisingly dense – more like a quickbread than a light, airy cake), but was not untasty. Mostly I was impressed with the ganache – the carob behaved amazingly well and set just like it was supposed to.
And everyone else that I foisted this cake off on insisted that they really liked it, so it really must just be me.
And now for a couple of pictures:
Looks nice enough, right? Not from the side!
If I’d been thinking about it, I would have mushed the layers of cake down a bit more – as it was, the ganache split between the layers. So, yes, more successful cake, more successful buttercream, whipped cream (impossible to mess up, really), same for the sugar syrup – which means that it was definitely a worthwhile project.
Click on the Daring Bakers icon at the top there to see lots of other (more beautiful) cakes!
