Sweet and Salty Cake

People sometimes ask me what my favorite thing to bake is and I never know what to say. Usually, my answer is, it depends.... depends on how much time I have, what I'm in the mood to eat, etc. After spending all night making the two batches of Baked cakes (the Classic Chocolate cake base for this Sweet and Salty Cake, plus the strawberry cake base for the Strawberry Supreme Cake), hours the next morning wrestling with the Baked vanilla frosting for that strawberry cake, and hours that evening making the salted caramel and whipped chocolate caramel ganache for this Sweet and Salty Cake, I can say with certainty that one of my least favorite things to make is a layer cake.

In the header for the Sweet and Salty Cake in Baked: New Frontiers, Matt and Renato declare this to be their most requested recipe. Going in, I had pretty low expectations that I would feel the same way, but the rave reviews from Caleb and all my co-workers may have proved me wrong. People went crazy for this cake.

The base for this chocolate cake is the Baked classic cake, so it's the same as the one we made earlier this year for the Grasshopper cake. I remembered feeling kind of "meh" about the cake at the time, but maybe I just overbaked it that first time? Or maybe I was angry about my buttercream splitting and I took it out on the cake. It's hard to know for sure. Anyway, most cakes deserve a second chance. The cake batter is easy to make: it's a pretty standard cream shortenings - add eggs - alternate mixing in a sour cream-cocoa mixture and the flour. Bake.

I did make a couple tiny modifications. For all chocolate cakes now, I add 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder to "up" the chocolate flavor. In this case, since we had a huge surplus of yogurt, I replaced the plain nonfat Greek yogurt in place of the sour cream. Yogurt in place of sour cream will shorten the shelf life of the cake (based on my experience with the coffee cake, which dries out a lot faster if you use yogurt), but my plan was to serve it all at once anyway. My cakes baked in about 33-35 minutes instead of 40-45, but I left one of my cake pans at a friends, so I was baking only 2 pans at a time.

Once the cakes are made and cooling, it is time to prepare two batches of caramel: one a salted caramel with a sour cream-cream base to give it extra body and the other a high-percent cream caramel used to make the chocolate caramel ganache, which forms the base of the whipped chocolate caramel ganache buttercream frosting.

I found it a little silly that you are essentially making exactly the same caramel base twice, once for the salted caramel sauce and once for the ganache. It seems like it would be a lot simpler to make twice the volume of caramel, then split that into two. You'd have to know the volume/weight to split into, but then you could pour your caramel into two separate pans of warmed cream (set on a scale for accuracy), while whisking constantly... maybe I'll try that next time and see which way is easier.

When making both of my caramel batches, the caramel seized pretty quickly upon addition of the hot cream. I was able to rewarm the caramel sauce gently to re-liquify most of the seized caramel to get a smooth sauce.

For the sour cream sauce, it seemed to take ages for the sour cream to completely whisk in. In fact, I worried it would never fully incorporate into the caramel. Finally, after about 3-5 minutes of dedicated whisking, the sauce became uniform. Adding all that precious fleur de sel to the caramel sauce seemed a little crazy, but it's there for a reason. You need the salt to accent the flavor of the chocolate and bring some of the underlying sweetness forward. So do add it all.

The process of making the whipped chocolate ganache reminded me of making the salted caramel buttercream from French Patisserie (which could have been good if I hadn't slightly burned the dry caramel, I think) as well as the satiny fudge frosting from the San Francisco Cooking School cupcake class I took. In both of those recipes, you use an immersion blender to emulsify the fat into the sugar-y base. I might try using an immersion blender for the next Baked frosting rather than waiting about 40 minutes for the base to cool sufficiently (slowly beating the ganache in a stand mixer for most of that time to help it cool) then patiently adding in a few butter pieces at a time over the course of another 30 minutes. At least this frosting didn't split! It was gorgeous and super silky from all the butter you add, but honestly, I would never have known there was caramel in there if I hadn't been the one making it.

I wish I had remembered at the start of making the chocolate caramel ganache frosting how much extra frosting I had when I made the Grasshopper cake earlier this year. I loooooove frosting, but I wound up with enough frosting for a five layer cake, which is just too much frosting. I felt compelled to use as much as I could all because 1. an entire pound of pricey dark chocolate and 2. four precious sticks of butter went into it, plus 3. I'd spent close to 45 minutes making the ganache. I should have used the extra to pipe little decorations around the top and base of my cake, but after spending close to 4 hours making the caramels and ganache frosting then assembling the cake, I punted and mostly piled the excess on top of the cake. You can tell from my photos that I have basically an entire layer of frosting on top of the top layer of cake.

In both reading the directions and now in hindsight, it makes no sense to me that you would skip the caramel layer for the second tier, but then douse the final layer in salted caramel, at least 150% the amount used for the first layer, right before you do the crumb coating. I had waterfalls of caramel shooting out from beneath my crumb coating, taking both caramel and ganache frosting away to puddle at the base of the cake. I think perhaps this is a case of the directions not being entirely clear - the text only describes spreading the second layer with caramel frosting, then sprinkling sea salt over that, which seemed clearly to indicate only the caramel ganache frosting, not the caramel sauce... The recipe should read "top with caramel sauce, followed by caramel ganache frosting, then sprinkle with sea salt".

My cake layers came out perfectly flat, but my frosting skills are not so great that by the time I make it to the third tier, my tower of cake is also completely flat. Bearing my amateur cake decorating skills in mind, next time I make this, I think I will pour the salted caramel over each cake layer while the cake layers are still a little bit warm, so the caramel is absorbed into the cake and doesn't flow down the sides to ruin my crumb coat. [I had so much extra frosting, I was able to disguise it by adding another 15 minute refrigeration step to stop the flow, but still... not ideal. I also refrigerated the cake overnight before transporting it anywhere, which I'm certain helped it stay together.] The next time, I would also make a smaller (three-quarters) batch of the whipped caramel ganache frosting. 

Even though I couldn't taste the caramel in the chocolate ganache frosting, I did enjoy eating this cake, and I thought the salt-sweet balance was perfectly done. Caleb, as a general rule, doesn't like layer cakes, and he happily devoured this one. I had brought the strawberry supreme cake to work the day before, and people seemed to like this one about 1000% more than the strawberry cake (which they liked too). So, to summarize, when you're willing to dedicate a day to a cake, the Sweet and Salty cake from Baked is a great choice!

Head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of this cake.