This has gateaux work well...

Today is my dad's birthday. So today's cake had to be something pretty special in order to set it apart from all the cakes and biscuits I've been practically force feeding the family for the last few weeks. That therefore means it had to be something significantly more complicated and potentially disaster ridden. The pressure to make a perfect cake today was actually a very real and tangible, I could feel it hanging over me as I mixed the ingredients and waited the almost never ending 45 minutes whilst it slowly changed from that gloopy mix to that solid looking cake. This time though, there were so many different phases in which it could go wrong...

The first phase was making the filling. Essentially the filling was cream with white chocolate blasted into it. It needed to be heated up until almost boiling so there was the first potential disaster, it has been many a time when my version of "heated til boiling" turns into simply burning... Though this time, the first hurdle was crossed. The filling then had to go into the fridge for a frustratingly long time period (it suggested two hours, I went with an hour in the fridge and 15 mins in the freezer which worked fine!)

The second hurdle (once the cake itself was cooked) was the cutting of it. In a gateaux you cook one enormous cake and then slice it horizontally into three pieces (rather than cooking separate cakes and sandwiching them together) before spreading the middle with the desired filling. Naturally, this didn't go quite to plan... My idea of a third of a cake was obviously closer to something like a sixth... which meant I had the thinnest layer of cake between sauces I think any baker has ever done in the history of the universe. Yet, with utmost care this fragile morsel of cake remained solid throughout the boisterous spreading of a nearly frozen creamy filling - perhaps the freezer wasn't the best method of cooling after all - onto the slices and when sandwiched together it all worked out fine!

The final potential disaster was the making of the icing. It required not one chocolate bar, not two but three whole chocolate bars (and another half on top of that!) melted to make 350 grams of rich chocolatey heaven. Plus extra cream and butter just to ensure that there was enough fat to cover your "Guideline Daily Allowance" in one fell swoop. This part went well though I must say there was a significant amount too much icing (which I will reserve for my next cake tomorrow) and didn't solidify as quickly as I'd hoped - this naturally caused an untold amount of mess, I still have chocolate icing on my arm to prove it was homemade - yet in the end it worked well after a little cooling and made the end product shining with deliciousness.

The Result:

Mmmm Candle-ey

Mmmm, Layer-ey

So there you have it, a successful cake for a very happy birthday boy (well not quite a boy now in his 50s!). It tasted beautiful and to my surprise the dark chocolate icing didn't make it too bitter by any stretch of the mark, obviously the hundreds of grams of sugar in the middle of the cake balanced it out quite nicely! 

Tomorrow I shall be making another for another special birthday boy...