HCB: Chocolate Bull's-Eye Cakes and She Loves Me Cake

Another weekend of two-fer for me...

Chocolate Bull's-Eye Cakes

Marie has said, this cake is very easy to make, even though the instruction is 4 pages long. And she was right. And as I discovered, while putting this cake together, I could recite how to make this cake from memory. I don't remember the amount of any of the components, LOL, so I still need to look at the recipes, but I know the method by heart.

First you make beurre noisette, which smells so heavenly (or orgasmic, as Raymond would tell you). Then keep it warm while you heat up the eggs over simmering water. Beat the eggs until quadrupled, then sacrifice a quarter of it to the beurre noisette. Next, fold in the flour cornstarch mixture into the eggs in 2 addition. Finally, fold in the beurre noisette mixture.

While the cake was baking in the ramekins, I made the sugar syrup. Nothing to it, just boiled some sugar and water. I don't have Navan or vanilla liquor so I used Grand Marnier instead.

After the cake is syruped, apply some apricot glaze all around the cake. Opening the fridge, I realized all I have is raspberry fruit spread, so that's what I used instead. I just mix it with some water, didn't add any alcohol as I suspected the cake is boozy enough already with 3 Tablespoon of Grand Marnier.

Next, make the chocolate cream filling. This is very easy also. Melt some chocolate in heavy cream, pour into egg yolk sugar mixture, then heat up the whole thing until almost boil and thick. And as I am typing this post, I realized I had forgotten to add vanilla to this cream. Oh well. It's too late by now *grin*.

Then make chocolate glaze by melting some chocolate with cream over simmering water. Or you can do like me and be lazy and melt some chocolate instead of making the glaze.

And finally, adorn with a chocolate butterfly. Melt some chocolate and fill a parchment cone and pipe. This part is not hard. The hardest part is piping the chocolate to look like butterfly. I find I had to do several tries before getting the shape that I like.

Tasting impressions:
Oh man oh man. This is so good. The sponge cake is so moist and boozy it's so good. The cream filling is so yummy and fit so well with it.

She Loves Me Cake

This cake, according to Rose, feeds 16 people. So I made 2/5th of the recipe. Why the complicated math? Well, there are 5 eggs, so I thought I should make fractions of 5. I know, I know, I'm nuts. But that's how my brain works yesterday. Blame it on the sleep deprivation. I stayed up for new year's and got up early.

2/5th of the recipe, I discovered, made 8 cupcakes (40 grams each). There are only 7 in this picture. The 8th cupcake didn't make it to the picture table, it ended up in the photographer's tummy.

This cake is so easy to make as well. Even easier than the Bull's-Eye. The hardest part is weighing the batter into each cupcake wrapper. I do not like this weighing business. I'd much rather pipe decorations. But I wanted to have even size cupcakes, so weigh I did.

First, mix the egg yolks with vanilla and 1/4th of the milk. Then combine all the dry ingredients in the mixer, add the butter and the rest of the milk and mix until combined. Then add the egg yolk mixture in 2 additions.

While the cupcakes were baking, I made the lemon curd. Also 2/5th of the recipe.

I made some royal icing and pipe the individual cupcakes. My icing was pretty thick, or so I thought, but it ended up a little runny by the time the photos were taken. And as you can read from the writing, I just had a birthday a couple of days ago.

Tasting impressions:
YUM! This cake is really good. We love the tangy-ness of the curd. It fit well with the moist cake.