Grasshopper Cake from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking

I've never had a grasshopper cocktail (equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao (white), and heavy cream)... mostly because I stay away from creamy cocktails as a general rule. However, I fully support Matt and Renato's transformation of the neon-green minty cocktail into a cake. Mint desserts often stray over the line into too sweet or too minty territory, but thankfully, the Baked duo are incredibly skilled in the art of flavor balancing. Mint chocolate is one of my favorite dessert flavors and this grasshopper cake is a perfect balance of dark chocolate cake, minty dark chocolate ganache, and minty ermine buttercream. It's like the ultimate peppermint patty, transformed into a refreshing cake.

Having become a (slightly fanatic) convert to weights instead of cups, I converted all the volume measurements given in ingredients list to their gram equivalents using King Arthur Flour's table as my standard. This might be the first Baked cake I've made that hasn't called for both all-purpose and cake flour, but otherwise it seemed like a pretty standard Baked chocolate cake. With the addition of cocoa powder+sour cream+hot water as the liquid component, this cake batter reminded me a lot of a Devil's food cake or Brooklyn blackout bake batter: super fluffy and almost pudding-like in texture and appearance. It took me a while to make the batter - almost 45 minutes, but it wasn't complicated. I divided the batter into three increments of 590 grams each, then baked the 8-inch cakes for 39 minutes in my convection oven. I love a cake that gently pulls away from the sides of the pan to tell me it's finished baking.

One of the benefits of baking along through a series of cookbooks with a group of great bakers is I know I'm not the only person in the world who struggles with the Baked buttercream. Their cooked milk (ermine) frosting worked perfectly for me the first few times I made a Baked cake (beginner's luck?), but every cake since has been a roller coaster ride of "will it or won't it break on me?" emotion.

I was reading Erin Bakes Cake a while ago and noticed that she uses a different technique for making her cooked milk frosting. Namely, after cooking the milk+sugar+flour (okay, she uses cornstarch), she refrigerates the custard for about 30 minutes (with plastic wrap on top to prevent a skin forming), then takes the custard out of the fridge to let it come to room temperature. Meanwhile, she beats her room-temperature butter for 5 minutes, and adds the room-temperature custard, a few tablespoons at a time, to the beaten butter. Total reversal in process! Curious, I did some googling and found similar approaches on other blogs. Soooooo.... I figured it was worth a shot, and decided this grasshopper cake was the right time to try it out.

Since my fridge was super full, I first beat the cooked frosting for 10 minutes until it had cooled, then poured it into a tupperware container (with a piece of plastic wrap on top), covered the container and let it continue cooling while I got the butter ready.

Every time I make a Baked cake, I try not to think about the quantity of butter I am using. It's worse than the quantity called for in Tartine's croissants, so I compartmentalize the butter into the individual components of the cake and pretend like the slice I'm eating at the end is somehow unrelated. I actually had to make a specific trek up the hill to the grocery store for more butter because I, subscriber of backup butter in the fridge always, didn't have all the butter I needed for this cake. Anyways... back to the ermine frosting. The reverse method failed me too. It looked promising in the beginning, but my frosting eventually split like many of my Baked frostings in the future. I preserved, hoping that the final step of beating it for 5 minutes would bring everything together. Caleb peered into the bowl and commented, "Is it supposed to look curdled like that?"....No... thanks for asking.

Since I don't drink grasshopper cocktails, or any other cocktail that calls for crème de menthe, I decided to follow the sidebar "child-friendly" option for both the buttercream and the ganache. No purchasing of a bottle of crème de menthe required - just a tablespoon of vanilla extract and a drop of food coloring in the buttercream and a simple omission in the ganache. My only bottle of green food coloring at home, rather unfortunately, is an electric green color which turned my buttercream into an oddly yellow-greenish color. I decided not to push it any further and left the color as it was.

Fortunately for everyone, the mint chocolate ganache was easy to make. I chopped my dark (70%) chocolate finely, brought the heavy cream just to a boil, poured the cream over the chocolate, let it sit long enough to snap a photo, then whisked it together starting from the middle and moving towards the outside of the bowl. A touch of peppermint extract is all I added at the end (since I opted not to buy a bottle of creme de menthe just for this cake).

To assemble the cake, you spread a thin layer of the minty dark chocolate ganache on the (leveled) base cake layer, chill this for a minute or two to help it set, then top the ganache spread with 1-1.5 cups of minty buttercream. This process is repeated for all three layers, then you crumb coat the whole cake, chill it, and finish frosting the cake. It was actually pretty simple, although I did have some trouble with my cake tilting a little as I built up the layers and I discovered that my cake stand doesn't rotate so much as it unscrews. Fortunately, my cake survived that adventure.

I skipped the use of chocolate cookies to decorate the top since A) I hate chocolate wafer cookies and B) I would have needed to cover up all my split buttercream to make this thing pretty.

All in all, I did really like this cake. If I had had a pint of vanilla ice cream handy, and some surplus chocolate ganache, I probably would have liked it even more. Mint chocolate can be a difficult flavor to do well, but this grasshopper cake is perfectly balanced and I'd definitely make it again for a group of people who all really like mint. For the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of this grasshopper cake, head over to Baked Sunday Mornings.