Daring Baker's August Challenge: Cake! Cake! Cake!

Look at me, I actually did the Daring Baker's Challenge on time this month!

Blurb-o-the-month: The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonfulof Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

What is a dobos torte? It's a fancy chocolate cake, basically. It has a trillion layers of cake stacked and smothered in buttercream and covered with crushed nuts. Caramel is also worked in but I chose not to do that, as you'll see.

So because Brian doesn't live with us anymore and I can no longer trick him into eating 90% of my baked goods, I decided I would halve the recipe. And then I invited my bestie over to watch Top Chef and force fed her cake.

Still figuring out the lighting in my new apartment!

Except the halving the recipe thing didn't go as plan because I am physically unable to read a recipe all the way through. This is what happened: recipe said to mix egg yolks and sugar together. No problem. La la la, sugar and egg yolks beat together. Next step says: add the rest of the sugar... and I go, "What do you mean the REST of the sugar?! I just added all of the sugar to the egg yolks!" and so to even things out I had to make the full recipe. Thank god I tried to halve the recipe otherwise I would've had to make nine dozen cakes to even things out.

Rebel that I am, I didn't follow the recipe exactly. This torta things calls for you to make caramel and drench wedges cake in caramel for decoration. But this thing already looked so rich that I couldn't bring myself to do it. Oh, plus I'm lazy. I also didn't make the buttercream recipe because I saw a lot of Daring Bakers were having trouble with it. Plus, I have a long standing love affair with French buttercream, which just beats the pants off of all other frostings. So obviously I had to make French buttercream (I based my chocolate version off of this version). I also threw in some raspberries in between the layers of cake for extra deliciousness. You can see from the photos that I ran out of raspberries about half way through but its the thought that counts. Or something.

This recipe is about 800 pages long so I won't post it. I'm really sleepy.

This cake wasn't too hard, just time consuming. It probably wouldn't has taken so long if I had common sense. I decided to decorate the top of the cake with melted chocolate. The chocolate didn't temper right so it wasn't drizzling very well. So I thought I would be clever and just pour the chocolate over the top of the cake. And I did. And then all my beautiful chilled frosting immediatly melted under the chocolate. Commence panicked noises while my brain shut down and Joe frantically told me to put it in the freezer and I was able to salvage it after the frosting and chocolate set up again.

Anyways, this isn't something I would make too often because it takes awhile and as a college student, I don't have many reasons to bake a 900 layer cake. It would be good as a special occasion cake though, I liked it quite a bit more than I thought I would so I'm glad I tried it.

Stay tuned for a few more recipes I've yet to post!