Deep Chocolate Rosebuds

I received a couple of baking items as gifts last X-mas.  One of them was the rose-pan from Nordicware.  I was completely thrilled when I found out about this gift and I couldn't wait to get home and try it out.



My previous experience with rose-shaped pans was not so great and will be the subject of the next blog post, so I was a little concerned about using this one.  All of the little crevices on this pan are perfect places for things to stick and cause problems during baking.  But I figured that I should soldier on regardless.  To christen this pan, I chose to use the recipe for Deep Chocolate Rosebuds from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.



The recipe is basically a chocolate cupcake with a ganache center.  Ganache is one of my buzz words - it's all I need to hear to get really excited to try out a recipe.  Unfortunately, the ganache in this recipe refused to set up properly, which resulted in the finished cakes looking a little weird.



The dark spots on the rosebuds are from where the ganache spread to the edges of the cake.  The cakes still tasted great, but they didn't have that molten ganache center that I wanted.  I suppose next time I should try to use less cream in the ganache and maybe set it in the freezer for a few minutes before putting it in the pan.

Speaking of the pan, it worked far better than I had anticipated.  The cakes popped right out of their crevasses onto the cooling rack.  I was honestly surprised by how easy it was.




And then I packed up a few of these to take down to a wine tasting at Boordy Vineyards.  The afternoon was full of wine, chili, and tasty cakes.  A great day!

Chocolate Raspberry Trifle

Every X-mas my Mom puts together a trifle for our traditional holiday desert.  This year, I wanted to try my hand at creating the X-mas trifle.  I decided to use the recipe for the Chocolate Raspberry Trifle from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.



To illustrate how flippin' complicated this thing was, the picture above is my working copy of the recipe.  That's five index cards jam-packed with my chicken scratch.  For reference, most cake recipes that I feature on this blog take up only one to two cards.  The epic fruit cake of epic epicness required three.



It was something of a luxury to be working in my Mom's kitchen for a change.  Her kitchen is easily twice the size of the one in my tiny apartment and has TONS more counter space and an oven that actually works reliably.  She's also got way more kitchen equipment than I do, including a trifle dish.  Which, you know, is kind of necessary when you're trying to make a trifle.



The cake for the trifle is a genoise, which depends on warm egg yolks, whipped into a froth for its texture and rise.  Above are the eggs before being beaten.  And five minutes later, they more than quadruple in volume:



And then there is cake!



These cakes don't really rise a whole lot in the pan and I was a little wary about splitting them into layers, but I figured I'd give it a try.  A couple of the layers fell right apart as soon as they were cut, but I wasn't too broken up about it.  After all, they're going to go right into a trifle dish and get covered with puddin' so who cares?



The layers are covered with a raspberry-liquor syrup and then raspberry jam and then fresh raspberries and puddin' are sandwiched between each layer.  The whole thing is then topped with raspberry-flavored whipped cream.  The end result is really awesome.



So in the end, the trifle came out beautiful.  Each layer was thoroughly saturated in raspberry and chocolate flavor.  Rose's recipe for creme anglaise is also one of the best things I've ever eaten.  Seriously, I could just spoon that stuff into my face all day long.  Too bad I'll have to wait until next X-mas to try out the strawberry trifle from Rose's book.  I'm looking forward to it though!