FoodBanter.com - View Single Post - Truffle-like cake wins 'intense' chocolate recipe contest

Food Snob

Alex Rast wrote:
> at Sat, 29 Apr 2006 21:04:52 GMT in
> .com>,
> (Rusty) wrote :
>
> >Truffle-like cake wins 'intense' chocolate recipe contest
> >
> >Gigi Burton, a 35-year-old housewife from Plainsboro, N.J., decided to
> >push the envelope and create an entire cake that mimicked the soft
> >texture and rich taste of her favorite dessert candy. Her creation,
> >Triple Chocolate Truffle Cake, which combines milk chocolate,
> >semi-sweet chocolate and white chocolate, captured the coveted grand
> >prize award in the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company's "Is Your Dessert
> >Intense Enough?" recipe contest.
> >...
> >2 sticks unsalted butter, softened, plus additional for pan
> >3 cups Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
> >8 large eggs, cold
> >1/4 teaspoon salt
> >1/2 cup heavy cream
> >1 cup Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate Chips
> >2 ounces Ghirardelli Classic White Chocolate Baking Bar, chilled
>
> Obviously the judges weren't *serious* chocoholics. This isn't particularly
> intense, as evidenced by the relatively low chocolate concentration. I
> always think it's humorous when people concoct recipes with 3 different
> *types* of chocolate, and imagine that makes it more intense. In reality,
> it makes it less intense, because, as for instance in this recipe, the milk
> and white chocolate simply dilute the concentration over what you could
> achieve if you were to have used all dark chocolate. This particular recipe
> goes even further astray in that the "dark" chocolate used is semi-sweet
> (she didn't even go to the trouble of using the Double Chocolate (or 60%
> bittersweet) chocolate chips) For real chocolate intensity, you want at
> least bittersweet all the way, preferably 70% and above, or unsweetened.
> And it really needs to be more heavily concentrated. (This cake, btw, is
> pretty much nothing more than a diluted Chocolate Decadence)
>
> IIRC one of the judging criteria for the recipes was "ease of preparation"
> and OK, one must concede that if you want to publish a recipe in a popular
> cookbook it should be considerate of most peoples' finite time
> availability. For pure chocolate intensity and simplicity of preparation,
> it's pretty hard to beat the straightforward Chocolate Decadence recipe
> (easy enough to look up on RecipeSource.com). This, in fact, I think would
> have been the challenge of the competition - how to invent something
> intense with chocolate that's simple to make and hasn't been done before.
>
> I'd improve on Ms. Burton's recipe by:
>
> 1) replacing semisweet and milk chocolates with Ghirardelli 72%
> bittersweet.
> 2) probably subbing the original Chocolate decadence recipe for this one
> (original uses 1 lb chocolate for only 4 eggs and 10 tbsp butter)
> 3) using unsweetened chocolate for the shavings.

I think most people would disagree with you, just as most people prefer
lattes to straight espresso. A breve latte with a touch of Splenda
sounds really nice right now.

> 4) using *all* the ganache.
> 5) serving at room temperature (chilling mutes the flavour of chocolate)

I think a lot more things should be served room temp instead of cold,
but certainly chocolate.
>
> --
> Alex Rast

--Bryan