Sweet Yet Sour

Caramel Peanut Topped Disappointment

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 | Wedding Cake Try-outs

While flipping through Dorie Greenspan’s book, “Baking: From My Home to Yours” in search for another cake for the wedding cake try-outs, I happened upon, “Caramel Peanut Topped Brownie Cake”.  Sounds delicious, no?  You should see the pictures too! It looks delectable!

I decided to try it because it looked fun, not to mention yummy, and I have a fear of caramel that I’m trying to get over.  What better way to do that than to make some and throw it on top of a brownie cake?  And I thought it might be nice and casual for an informal wedding…

But, as you can see from the title of this post, in the end I was not happy with the results.  I think it was a combination of factors that induced my disappointment: A) I didn’t change the brownie cake recipe for the altitude because I wanted to see how it did without altering it, and B) I got a little over zealous on the caramel and may have laid it on a little too thick.

I’m sorry, but I won’t be sharing the recipe either, because frankly, for something that sounds like it’s just a brownie cake with caramel and peanuts on top, it was pretty complicated (the entire recipe took up two pages in Dorie’s rather large book).  Suffice to say there’s some melting of chocolate, butter and sugar, whipping of eggs, corn syrup, etc., some dry ingredients and voila! (Not really.) Here’s a nice picture of when I added the melted chocolate mixture in with the eggs:

After the cake baked, during which it unsurprisingly rose and then fell, I had to let it cool, flip it out of its spring form pan, clean the pan, remove the parchment paper from the bottom of the cake and then replace the pan around the cake.  See why this took two pages? And we haven’t even gotten to the tricky making of the caramel…

The caramel, which I watched like a nervous hen, did turn out nicely. And I learned a new trick, to test the color of the caramel to make sure it is a deep amber by putting some of it on a white plate.  After the caramel was done, I threw a cup of peanuts into the caramel, stirred them around, spooned them onto the cake and then dripped more caramel on top of all that.

It looked lovely and inviting, but it was 4 p.m. and there were kids to feed and put to bed. The picture above, by the way, was pretty close to the cake pictured in Dorie’s book, except hers seemed to have a lot more peanuts.

So we tried the cake about 8 p.m. after it had been sitting for several hours.  That’s when the real disappointment began.  The cake was not terribly moist and the thick layer of caramel had become pretty hard and chewy; it was very difficult to eat.  We actually decided that we didn’t want to eat any more of it and it sat for several days untouched until I gave up and threw it out.

For me, this one is not a wedding cake contender, although I do think I could make it better the next time by modifying the ingredients for altitude and not being so heavy-handed with the caramel.  It was difficult to make and took up most of an afternoon – which was fine since Mike was home – and didn’t seem to stand the test of time.  Although I may be able to make a cake on the day of the wedding, I’d rather not; I’d rather have the ability to make at least one of the cakes the day before and not have it disintegrate into a denture wearer’s nightmare…  Thoughts my readers?

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