Hello everyone and welcome back for Week 13!
This week, I tackled the longest recipe yet (two pages!) – a Chocolate Mousse Cake! This cake has two layers of light and fluffy cake with a layer of mousse in between, which sounds right up my alley! I’d never made mousse before, so I was a little nervous, but still excited!
This recipe has three main parts to it: 1. The cake itself, 2. The mousse filling, and 3. Something called a “caraque,” which I had no idea what that was. We’ll get to two and three in a minute, but let’s talk about the cake first.
I, again, found myself in a dilemma concerning the baking tin I was supposed to use. It calls for a 9-inch loose-bottomed tin, but the only loose-bottomed tin I have is that leaky springform that screwed me up in Week 10. I tried to figure out where the leak was and if I could possibly put parchment paper up the sides to stop the leaking, but all my attempts with water were futile. So, I decided to just use one of my 8-inch regular pans and hope it worked.
This was definitely not a dump cake, considering I had to whisk eggs and sugar together, sift the dry ingredients separately, melt butter separately, and then slowly “fold” them together. As a reminder, folding dry ingredients into wet helps keep the mixture light and airy. I do have a confession to make: I very, very much dislike having to fold things together. The process just seems to take forever and every time you do a fold it seems like there’s more dry ingredients that you’ve missed and it’s stressful trying not to knock all the air out of the mixture… ugh. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s keep going!
There was enough batter that I worried it would overflow while baking, but I put it in the oven anyway and crossed my fingers. The recipe calls for 35-40 minutes. I checked it after 25 and it was still completely raw, but an extra 8 minutes did the trick! The cake did end up being very light and fluffy (I could tell because it had a slight wobble when I took it out of the tin), so I was very happy about that!
The recipe tells you to wash out the cake tin, and when the cake is completely cooled, cut it in half and put one of the layers back in the tin. This will be the base of the three total layers. This part kind of freaked me out, because I’d be pouring the mousse on top, and I didn’t know how I was going to get it all out once the mousse had set. I decided to wrap parchment paper along the walls of the tin, and hope for the best.
Now, the time had come to start the mousse. It seemed a little intimidating, considering I’d seen so many bakers on The Great British Baking Show mess up their mousse time and time again, but I tried to keep good thoughts and do the best I could!
There are several steps to the mousse. The first is to melt chocolate with a little bit of brandy with a double boiler. Easy peasy. Then, you have to dissolve powdered gelatin, whisk double cream (aka heavy whipping cream) until it’s thick and stands in soft peaks, and whisk egg whites until stiff. All separately from each other, so you end up using quite a few bowls. Then you add everything together in order… by folding… ugh again.
Once everything was combined, I poured the mousse mixture on top of the layer of cake then topped it with the remaining cake. The recipe says to put it in the fridge “until set,” but doesn’t give a time, so it’s almost like I’m doing a Technical Challenge from the show! For those of you who don’t watch the show (why you haven’t already, I have no idea), the Technical Challenge is the second challenge of the day where bakers have a limited recipe that usually doesn’t include times or temperatures. I decided to wait two hours before checking it, just in case. I’d rather it be sitting in the fridge already set than pull it out too early.
Now, I mentioned that there was something called a caraque involved in this recipe. This was an optional extra decoration, but essentially, it’s just melting chocolate, letting it cool, and then using a knife to make shards or rolls of the chocolate. It’s a really easy decoration that adds an extra oomph to your bake!
I ended up leaving the cake in the fridge for 2.5 hours, and thankfully, it turned out great!! The mousse set up wonderfully, and getting it out of the pan was a lot easier than I thought! For the frosting, you just have to whip up some heavy whipping cream and put it on the cake, and then decorate with your caraque and some extra chocolate if you’d like (which I obviously opted for!).
Overall, I’d give this cake a 4/5! It tasted wonderful, and it’s my best-looking cake so far, but just because it took literally all day (9:00am-3:45pm) to make, I had to doc one point. If you have enough time set aside though, I’d highly recommend it!!
The cake had a nice, light chocolate flavor, and the mousse was heavenly! It was light and airy and the brandy came through just enough to taste it, but not enough to be too strong. This would be a great cake to make for a dinner party, birthday, anniversary, etc.!
That’s it for Week 13, the Chocolate Mousse Cake! Thank you for following along with me, and, again, if you have any questions, feel free to use the “Get in Touch” feature on my “About Me” page and subscribe to get updates on posts!
See you next week!
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