Do you believe in Chocolate Nirvana?This week's Heavenly Cake Bakers selection - Baby Chocolate Oblivion cakes from Rose's Heavenly Cakes by Rose Levy Beranbaum.
All I can say is WOW - one tiny bite is every bit as good as the finest chocolate truffle. They absolutely melt in your mouth and evoke audible groans of deliciousness from all who sample them.
If you're a chocolate lover, you're going to adore these!
This recipe is so wonderful, yet so easy. Like getting a 4-star dessert from boxed mix.Start by by melting chocolate, butter, and sugar in a double boiler; set aside. Easy.
For the record, the recipe calls specifically for 60-62% cacao dark chocolate, but I used good ole Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate chips and they worked perfectly well.
Now we whisk the eggs over the same pan of water until the eggs are warm to the touch. This takes only 2-3 minutes. Again, easy.
The eggs are then whipped in the stand mixer for 5 minutes until they triple in volume. Really easy.
The last step is to gently fold the eggs into the reserved chocolate mixture.
That's it - I told you it was easy!
I poured the batter into a gallon zipper bag so I could easily fill the pans.
The recipe calls for placing a rack into a 9x13 pan before adding a silicone pan with twelve 4-ounce cavities, but after reading reviews from other Heavenly Cake Bakers, I was confident that my 2-ounce silicone financier pans would be the perfect size for my family. I had to scale the recipe down to 3/4 so I could make eighteen 2-ounce cakes (easy to do if you weigh the ingredients in grams).
My 2 pans were larger than the single pan Rose suggested, but they fit nicely in a 14x17 turkey roasting pan. I had to tuck the 4 outer corners down, but silicone pans are very flexible and they popped right back into shape when I removed them from the roasting pan.
I snipped a hole in the corner of the zipper bag and easily filled the pans without any mess. The outer roasting pan is then filled with hot tap water until it reaches 1/2 way up the side of the silicone pan. Then the whole thing goes into the oven for a total of 15 minutes; the baby cakes are uncovered during the first 5 minutes of baking...
...but during the last 10 minutes, a foil pan is turned upside down and placed over the roasting pan. I imagine this creates a steam bath of some sort which must keep the baby cakes moist.
Here they are after just 15 short minutes in the oven. Their internal temperature was exactly 150F, just as written in the recipe. They were left on the counter to cool for 45 minutes before heading off to the fridge to chill for a minimum of 4 hours.
I have this nifty covered half sheet pan. It's not airtight, but it kept my baby oblivions well protected during their overnight stay in the fridge.
The next morning I tried to remove one of the baby cakes from the silicone pan, but I quickly realized angled corners are not as friendly to delicate chocolate oblivion cakes as a round silicone pan might be, so I threw the pans into the freezer for 2 hours....
That firmed the baby cakes up a little, but not quite enough, so back into the freezer for an additional 4 hours and that was the perfect amount of time needed to make the removal of my half size baby cakes fool proof.
I dressed them up with a little piped decoration made from equal parts chocolate Italian meringue buttercream and softened Mascarpone cheese - a divine combination!
Hmmm... I like the idea of a Mocha Latte version of these little guys... topped with chocolate covered coffee beans. Amazing and dangerously addictive!Update - I had to send these to my son's office so I wouldn't keep eating them - they were dangerously delicious!!!
As most of you know, the recipes reviewed by the Heavenly Cake Bakers are not shared, but they can be found in Rose's Heavenly Cakes by Rose Levy Beranbaum.
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