I baked this cake twice last week, the first time as an experiment for a friend’s birthday and clearly I considered it a win so I made another cake for my mother-in-law’s birthday that coming weekend.
The chocolate cake recipe used for this yields a big amount of batter and therefore a very tall cake – I did 3 layers of 9 inch rounds and it was still about 5 inches tall! My friend asked why we do cakes so tall, and truly… the answer is it’s aesthetics. Also cos cake is good, and why shouldn’t we want more?
I’m obsessed with this chocolate cake recipe, it’s from Magnolia Kitchen in New Zealand, and the amazing baker/author/artist Bets has been so generous in sharing this Rich Chocolate Cake recipe as a preview for her cookbook – which I have pre-ordered from Book Depository.com and am (im)patiently waiting for! It’s out next week and I’m hoping the delivery will be quick. So get her chocolate cake recipe from her book, and I’m gonna share the recipe for the Blackberry Mascarpone cream filling as well as the dark chocolate ganache I used.
For this particular cake, I made a blackberry mascarpone cream filling and covered it in dark chocolate ganache then topped with fresh blackberries for pops of freshness and also that lovely rustic look and feel. Then I went ham and added sprinkling gold leaf to make it fancy.
Blackberry Mascarpone Cream
Ingredients
- 250g mascarpone cream, softened
– 150ml heavy cream
– 3 tbsp icing sugar, sifted
– 6 tbsp of blackberries (instructions for this below)
Directions
- Cook down 350g of blackberries and 1/4 cup of caster sugar in a saucepan – bringing it to a boil then mashing the blackberries slightly. Remove from heat and drain the syrup from the mashed berries (reserve the syrup for use elsewhere). Let the mashed berries cool before moving onto the next steps
2. Whisk the mascarpone cream, heavy cream and icing sugar until stiff peaks form
3. Stir in the mashed berries gently
4. Spread in between cake layers
Silky dark chocolate ganache
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 cup heavy cream
– 600g dark chocolate
– 2 tbsp light corn syrup
Directions
- Heat the cream in a saucepan until just gently simmering, then pour over the dark chocolate in a medium sized bowl.
2. Let the cream sit on the chocolate for 30 seconds before stirring gently, there’s a lot of chocolate in this so if you feel that the cream isn’t hot enough to melt it all, just pop the bowl on top of a saucepan with a layer of water in it and let the steam rise up to keep melting it while you stir.
3. Stir in the light corn syrup (I add this for the shine), and remove from the heat. Let the ganache cool until spreadable before using. In the hot Malaysian weather, I like to finish off the cooling process in the fridge for at least 30 mins so it holds up better when I go to frost my cakes.
Ellebug 