This pandemic had taken away all joy of joining together for big parties with family and friends.
Nevertheless, as soon as it was possible we have gathered in a small company to celebrate our little nephew's birthday. And since these children don't eat anything sweet except for chocolate, I “beyond” creative with the cake.
Here you go: chocolate sponge, chocolate cream, chocolate topping, and decorations.
Ingredients:
Sponge:
350g butter
125ml boiling water
85g cocoa powder
250g sugar
4 eggs
1tsp vanilla extract
1/2tsp salt
1tsp baking soda
350g flour
200g sour cream (greek yogurt will do as well)
Cream and topping:
200g dark chocolate
100g milk chocolate*
150ml cream (35% fat)
450g 70% dark chocolate
500ml double cream
5 large egg yolks
65g caster sugar
Directions:
All ingredients at room temperature except for water.
Preheat the oven to 180C (350F, gas mark 4) and lay your baking sheet with parchment paper.
1.In a bowl mix well cocoa powder with boiling water (that's not the easiest task, so if you have someone strong on hand, let him do that);
2.Mix together butter, sugar, eggs one at a time, and vanilla extract in the end;
3.In a bowl flour, salt, and baking soda;
4.Combine half of the dry mixture with a wet one and 1/2 of sour cream;
5.Add another half of the flour mixture and the remaining sour cream. Mix until smooth and silky.
6. Distribute evenly to your baking tins and bake at 180C (350F) for about 25-30 mins or until the toothpick comes out completely clean.
While the sponge is in the oven, it's time to make a cream:
*you can decide to invert the chocolate quantities, if you like your cream sweeter, to 200g milk and 100g dark. I like it more bitter as the sponge is quite sweet itself.
7.Warm up the cream in the microwave (10 seconds at a time) until hot enough to melt chocolate, but not boiling;
8.Melt the chopped chocolate in the cream for few minutes, mix until well combined, set aside to cool;
9. When at room temperature add in mascarpone cheese and once your sponge is cool get to decorate!
In the end, this cream is perfect for decoration as well, it contains loads of fat and not too moist to crack when the sponge will absorb all the liquid.
To make a 5-shape road I've used white chocolate with few drops of black food colour and for grass just baked regular sponge with green food colour.
Cool down.
Enjoy!
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