midlife crises

this is the torte i made yesterday. i took the recipe from 9th november 2008's sunday times, and it comes from a michael lau. it's a torte with three elements: a flourless chocolate sponge cake, chantilly cream, coffee ganache.

since there wasn't a proper name for the assembled product in the newspaper report, i'll just call this a chocolate chantilly torte. (a cake is slightly different from a torte in terms of what you expect. in a cake, you just have cake - filled and iced. in a torte, there are more elements in the layers - maybe a sabayon, or a bavarian cream.)

i made the cake layer first. the recipe given is a flourless sponge cake which uses no ground almond to add bulk, just more meringue, so as to keep the sponge cake soft.
a meringue is first made, then egg yolks are whisked into it. then a chocolate-milk-butter emulsion is folded into the eggy mixture to form the batter. and that's all there is to the batter. the hardest part is keeping as much air in the batter as possible before sending it into the oven.
the cake rises a lot in the oven, but deflates after baking, causing the top crusty layer to break and peel away from the cake. but after assembling and icing, it won't be seen.
this is the chantilly cream. it's just a whipped cream flavoured with vanilla and whisked with more sugar to a firmer texture that allows better slicing when assembled into the torte.
and the coffee ganache made by heating cream with coffee powder, then poured over chocolate until everything melts. stir in a knob of butter to make the ganache shiny.

then on to assembling the torte. i seriously do a bad job at icing and decorating cakes/tortes/cupcakes. and it's not as though i keep making the same mistake. it's like every time i assemble/decorate a cake, something different goes wrong.

once it was the lack of a piping bag. then once i used the wrong sugar in the icing and it became gritty. then once the cake layers came out uneven and difficult to ice. then once the buttercream was too oily. and this time the palette knifes refused to slide out from under the cake.
i had a perfect sponge layer at the base, then i spread the chantilly cream on. then the shit hit the fan and the second circle of sponge meant for the top broke. so in the end the top layer was a patchwork of broken cake pieces.
nevertheless, the coffee ganache spread on top could cover the flaws below. i then froze the entire thing for an hour, as directed by the recipe. after unmoulding, you can see the layers in the almost-complete torte.
and then i finished icing the entire torte with the ganache. then the shittiest thing happened: after transferring the torte from wire rack to cake board using the palette knifes, they refused to come out from under the torte. and when they finally did, i had major restorative work to do on the icing.