Sweet Yet Sour

Third Cake’s a Charm

Thursday, July 14th, 2011 | Cooking, Wedding Cake Try-outs

As much as I love my sourdough chocolate cake recipe,  it’s the only recipe for cake that I have for my sourdough.  A few months ago I searched “sourdough cake” on the internet and disappointingly found that my own blog posts made up two of the top ten hits and none of the rest of the hits were anything of interest.

So, I decided that I would use my baking knowledge and attempt to make up my own sourdough cake recipe.  Raspberries were on sale at the grocery store and I decided to use my new batch of almond extract for a Raspberry Almond Sourdough Cake.

I fiddled around with the recipe for chocolate cake, adding butter instead of oil, reducing the amount of sugar and adding fresh raspberries and almond extract to the batter.  The cake seemed to bake up fine and I made a batch of Ganache and whipped up some whipping cream for filling and frosting.  Topped off with some more fresh raspberries the cake looked beautiful:

I was all set to cut into my cake and find a wonderful array of fresh raspberries and golden colored cake.

Aw dang! Do not adjust your computer monitor – that yellow-greenish tinge is the actual color of the cake.  I couldn’t serve a green cake at a wedding!  So, back to the pastry board…

For my second attempt at Raspberry Almond Sourdough Cake I thought if I added fresh raspberries and raspberry puree, the cake might turn a lovely pink.  I pureed raspberries, strained out the seeds and then added the puree to the sourdough batter.  I got a little nervous when I began to stir and the batter started to look a little, well, gray…  But, I poured the batter into the pans and put them into the oven hoping it would all turn out okay.

Nope.

I’m thinking if I can’t serve a yellow-green cake at a wedding, a navy/gray cake with red spots isn’t going to go over very well either…  The cake actually tasted fine, but I didn’t want to waste time or cream frosting it, so for the first time in my life, I threw my cake away.

I took leave of the cake making process for a few weeks until my bride-to-be friend was due to come to our house for lunch.  For this attempt I decided to add fresh raspberries, but also add some food coloring to the batter.  After three drops of red and one drop of blue in the batter the cake was a light pink – which is so much better than navy!  So I baked the cake layers, put ganache and whipping cream in between the layers, added more ganache on top and then frosted the whole thing with whipping cream.  Since this was for the actual bride, I spent a long time trying to get the decoration just right.  I was still delicately placing almonds on the top at 10:30 p.m.

But it was well worth it – the cake was pretty:

The cake also looked fine once we cut it and tasted great:

The only problem with this beautiful cake is that the whipping cream frosting deteriorates pretty rapidly and there were parts of cake showing through the whipping cream the next day.  I’m thinking I may have to either find a way to improve the whipping cream, or switch to butter cream frosting, which holds up better.  More attempts at the perfect cake will be necessary, yum!

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