Chocolate Raspberry Cream Cakes

And so we're back! I've been saving this recipe for a while now - wondering when I would get the chance to make it. A long while back I was browsing through tastespotting.com and found this post for chocolate raspberry cream cakes. You should definitely check out that link because the step-by-step pictures are so much better than mine! It was one of those recipes that I wanted to try just once, knowing it would be too complicated to become a "stand-by" recipe. Amy left Saturday to help medical relief efforts in Haiti, so we had the family over for a Bon Voyage dinner Friday night. It was the perfect occasion to bust out this dessert. Luckily I had a whole day at home to prepare it...

Here's the recipe:

Devil’s Food Cake:
-3 cups granulated sugar
-2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
-1 1/8 cups cocoa powder, sift if lumpy.
-1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
-2 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
-1 1/2 teaspoons salt
-3 large eggs
-1 1/2 cups milk or buttermilk
-3/4 cup vegetable oil
-2 teaspoons vanilla extract
-1 1/4 cup hot coffee
-1/4 cup rum or brandy (if you opt out of the booze then use equal parts coffee)

1. Combine all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl and whisk.
2. Whisk together, eggs, milk, oil and vanilla until well combined. Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients and whisk until smooth. Slowly add the hot coffee and rum to the batter and whisk until totally blended and smooth, about 2 minutes. The batter will be quite runny.
3. Bake in 2 Sheet Pan Half Size lined with parchment. Bake about 20 minutes or until set.

Raspberry cream:
1 cup heavy whipping cream
3 tablespoons raspberry preserves

Chocolate ganache:
1 pound bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
1/2 cup apricot jam, heated and strained if there are chunks of fruit
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup corn syrup

1. Cut the devil’s food cake with a Heart Cookie Cutter. Depending on the size of your cutter this will get you about 12 2-layer cakes per sheet.
2. To make the cream: whip the heavy cream until soft peaks, add the raspberry preserves and continue whipping until stiff peaks. Fill a Pastry Bags, fitted with a round pastry tip and pipe the cream on half of the heart shaped cakes.
3. Top the cream with another layer of cake. Cover the cake with plastic wrap and refrigerate while you make the ganache.
4. Make the ganache: Heat the apricot preserves in a sauce pan over medium low heat until melted. Add the cream, milk and corn syrup and heat until just about to simmer. Remove from heat. Dump in all of the chopped chocolate, swirl the pot to make sure the chocolate is completely covered by the cream. Let sit for about 3 minutes and then gently whisk until smooth.
5. Pour about 1 cup of the hot ganache into a shallow dish and refrigerate for 10 minutes or until slightly firm, but still spreadable.
6. Leave the remainder of the ganache in the pot to keep it pourable.
7. With a small Spatula, spread the refrigerated ganache over the sides of the cakes. The goal is to fill the gap between the layers of cake and make them smooth. We want a smooth surface so that when you pour the ganache over the cakes you will not have any bumps.
8. To pour the ganache on the cakes you will need to set them on a cooling rack that is over a sheet pan lined with parchment. You want to do this to catch all of the dripping chocolate.
9. Slowly pour the ganache over the cake, starting in the middle and working outward. Be sure to check all the sides as you go. As you can see there will be a lot pooled up on the parchment, but you will scrape that up and be able to remelt and use again.
10. If your ganache starts to get too thick, return the pot to the stove and heat on very low heat, just for a moment.
11. Allow the cakes to set at room temperature for about 20 minutes. If you need to refrigerate them, they will loose their shine. Once you return them to room temperature and they warm up the shine will come back.

Here's the batter in the pan. I didn't have a sheet half size pan, so I got a disposable pan at the grocery and used it twice. Cooking and cooling two cakes was one reason I needed to start so early Friday morning.


The two finished cakes - this made more than enough, and the recipe could be simplified by just making one sheet. I think I got 15 cakes total.


I didn't have a heart cookie cutter, but I did have a star from a Christmas pack. I tried that for a while, but they weren't turning out great. So then I got a glass and tried to make circles, till I broke the glass :( Finally I used a bigger plastic cup and made big circles. As you can see, at the end I had a good variety of shapes...


This left a lot of cake left over (all the scraps). I thought I might make Bakerella cake pops, but the cake itself was so good, I found myself just snacking on it while I worked (and the rest of the weekend). My dad took home a big bowl to have with coffee the next morning (this is where I get my sweet tooth), so now it's almost gone.

Here are the cake sandwiches waiting in the fridge as I made the ganache:


Ok, the ganache was the most challenging part. After heating it, you put some of it in the fridge, and use that portion to fill the gaps between the layers. This wasn't really hard, just time consuming to do for 15 cakes.


Then you pour the warm ganache over the cakes. From the pictures on the recipe site, I don't think my ganache was thin enough. It didn't cover very smoothly. Still tasty, but not quite as pretty.

What the end product was supposed to look like:


My end product:


Haha, it looks so thick and gloppy. But it was shiny!


So, here's the review. The elements of this recipe were delicious. I don't even like chocolate cake, but that Devil's Food Cake recipe was amazing. I think it was the combination of the hot coffee, buttermilk and rum...I'm not sure, but it was moist and wonderful. The ganache had apricot jam in it, and that was just a nice subtle touch (probably not even noticable if you didn't know it was there). But all of these things combined to give the cake a really rich, complex taste. Almost everyone loved the dessert (too much chocolate for Brent, but he hadn't been feeling well so he only took one bite). My mom even said it's the best dessert I've ever made. That's quite a statement.

Now, logistically, I don't think I'll make these cakes this way again. Too time consuming, and not even that pretty to look at (well at least my version wasn't that pretty). But the cake, cream and ganache are too good to forget. So I think maybe it would be easy to make cupcakes instead of these cookie cutter shapes - cut them in half, pipe cream on the middle, then pour ganache over top and maybe put a raspberry or something on top. Or, as my mom suggested, just make the sheet cake, cut into squares, and stack them with cream in between and ganache on top. Definitely worth a try!