Filbert Gateau, who? The Daring Bakers Round Two

This post is really late, almost 9pm! I needed a program for photo editing and resizing because my last one just sort of stopped working.

Onto July's challenge of the Daring Bakers, number two for me. Back when I first saw Chris's post my first thought was shock, followed with disbelief. Swiss meringue butter cream, gateau, chocolate ganache, praline butter cream!? I had never met these folks in my kitchen before, but I was up to the challenge.

First things first, I bought Great Cakes by Carol Walter. I got a pretty good deal on amazon, and thought it might be good to own a book with such a title. She wasn't lying this book is filled to the brim with great cakes. Fantastic, impressive, delicious looking cakes. Its also filled with some of the best baking tips I've ever come across.

I'm getting sidetracked here, but this cake was an adventure for me. I don't know how I made it through this. I look back and have a good laugh about every step, every mistake, every cover-up. I knew this would be Josh's birthday cake. I read the instructions about ten times and realized I had very few of the ingredients or tools required. I got the hazelnuts about a week in advance from some little store down the street where the guy gives me free gum or fruit. I started out with over a pound of hazelnuts and by the time I was ready to make the cake I noticed that I mysteriously only had over a cup of nuts left.

I couldn't blame him, it was his birthday and he offered to buy more, but I didn't have time. So I made the praline with hazelnuts and walnuts for the cake. I bought the only pan I could find at the store was an 8x2. The recipe called for 10x2. I bought a little cake decorating kit for $5 too. It is plastic and basic, something you'd give to your child when they're having fun in the kitchen. Or someone like me.

Friday evening I started the Praline, it took forever to get the sugar to melt so I turned the heat up. I poured the mixture onto a lined cookie sheet and realized that the nut to sugar/brittle ratio was off. So I heated up some more sugar. This should have been where I stopped, but melting sugar was so fascinating to me. The sugar melted much faster this time and got a little to dark, but I poured it over the hazelnuts and brittle and let sit.

At this time I started putting the cake together. What I did to the almighty egg is something I never thought an egg could do. Ribbony yolks and fluffy egg whites. Egg, you're amazing! I made two mistakes, well three, I used walnuts, I didn't use cake flour, and I used 7 egg whites instead of 5. The recipe called for 7 yolks, my brain got confused.

After the batter was mixed, I poured it into the cake pan about 3/4 full and following the advice of my fellow bakers and poured the rest into cupcake tins. The cake didn't rise much at all, which seemed to be pretty common among the other daring bakers. It didn't fall, but it was a little over an inch and a half tall. I wrapped everything up and figured I'd deal with it in the morning.

Saturday morning around 6am I woke up to battle with the praline butter cream. Basically you turn the hazelnut praline into a paste and then add it to the swiss butter cream, it was amazing. What a genius idea! Seriously, who came up with that? Anyway, I read some of the madness folks were having with this butter cream so I prepared to deal with issues.

I got out the eggs for the great separation and got a little yolk in my egg whites. I simply thought "not a problem". Keep in mind I've never made a meringue before and was totally unaware of the sometimes picky nature of eggs getting fluffy. I found this out the hard way. I was beating and beating away, and they never ever formed peaks. Thank goodness for the internet and youtube, I quickly realized that in order for the meringue to form there must be no yolk or fat in the egg whites. Yup, that was it. This time I let the pure whites sit out for a bit and put a pinch of salt into them and got back to beating again. It worked! I made my first meringue! I folded in the butter and kept on beating with my old hand mixer from the 70's (thanks mom!). It was perfect, it came together like magic.

I put the praline paste into the butter cream and there is was: praline butter cream. Now, I just had to deal with making three layers out of my seriously short cake. I cut it in half, and it was wobbly and uneven and sad. I could just leave it like that. I couldn't give Josh a 2 inch tall cake on his birthday. What did I do? I put the flat cupcakes in the middle right between the layers, sandwiched there pretending to be a third layer. I built it up with the sugar water and apricot glaze and just merrily went along like it was normal to do it like this.

But, I took it a step further. Seeing as how the cupcakes were rounded it was leaving a rounded trianglular shaped gaps around the edges, so I did was any normal person would do and cut up more cupcakes to fill in the "voids". That was a total of, oh, 11 cupcakes used. And they were thicker than the other layers. Just in case you can't quite picture this sad incident, I took some time to create an illustration:


At the time, I was in a certain mindset where this seemed liked a completely normal solution. I get everything together and put it in the refrigerator and got ready for the chocolate ganache. The ganache was wonderful, very easy to put together and it flowed nicely over my uneven and slightly unfortunate cake.

The cake was lopsided and bumpy, nothing that butter cream dots and star can't cover up! I scrawled happy birthday right across the top in my best icing writing. And showed it to Josh while I watched my butter cream starts start to slide down the side of the cake.


We ate a piece right then, and I will say it was interesting. We both agreed "interesting" was the right word. It was edible, but the texture was different. Both dense and fluffy at the same time. I'm confident that it would have been better if I used hazelnuts instead of walnuts in the cake, everything else seemed to work out individually, but together were just very awkward. I wish I could have tried someone else's cake to get an idea of what this should really taste like.

All in all, I'm really glad I tried this cake. It was daunting and mocked me the entire time. I learned how to make ganache, melt sugar, whip up meringue and so it was a good learning experience if anything else. Check out the other Daring Bakers for some really great looking cakes!