When I apprenticed at Taillevent in Paris, the pastry chef spiked his chestnut cakes with vintage rum. I prefer to drizzle them with melted chocolate or eat them with chocolate ice cream or Milk Chocolate Sorbet. The dense, rich consistency of these mini cakes may remind you of flourless chocolate cake—except they’re less sweet. They keep well, so the recipe makes three. Wrap the extras tightly in plastic and stash them in the refrigerator for up to 4 days or in the freezer for up to 2 months for a ready-made treat when a friend drops by for coffee. Unwrap and pop them into a 350°F oven for 6 to 8 minutes before serving. Chestnut cream is a sweetened chestnut puree. It’s available—as are candied chestnuts (marrons glacés)—from gourmet shops and online sources including amazon.com, which carries my favorite brand, Clément Faugier chestnut spread with vanilla.
Don’t be intimidated by the fancy name—chocolate ganache is just a mixture of chocolate and cream. A good chocolate ganache recipe is incredibly versatile. It can be infused with herbs and spices to create vibrant and flavorful fillings for truffles, or even melted into milk to make a rich cup of cocoa. When liquid, ganache can be used to glaze a cake; when set, it can be whipped and used to fill or even frost cakes.
For a cake that boasted deep chocolate flavor and color, we used a combination of Dutch-processed cocoa and melted bittersweet chocolate; the cocoa offered pure, assertive chocolate flavor while the chocolate contributed complexity as well as fat and sugar. Neutral-tasting oil allowed the chocolate flavor to shine. To minimize cleanup, we mixed the wet and dry ingredients directly into the saucepan where we’d melted the chocolate with cocoa and milk. A milk chocolate ganache contrasted nicely with the deeper flavor of the cake. To make the ganache thick, rich, and creamy, we added plenty of softened butter to the warm chocolate-cream mixture, refrigerated the frosting to cool it quickly so that it would spread nicely, and gave it a quick whisk to smooth it out and lighten its texture.
Recipe by Maria Speck | Introduction by Food52's Kristen Miglore
A hot-milk sponge cake made a good base in our Boston Cream Pie recipe because it didn’t require any finicky folding or separating of eggs. Baking the batter in two pans eliminated the need to slice a single cake horizontally before adding the filling. We used butter to firm up our pastry cream, and we added corn syrup to heavy cream and melted chocolate for a smooth glaze that clung to the top of our Boston Cream Pie and dripped artistically down its sides.
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