Week 3 - Bake fest!

Banana Boston Cream Cake

This week’s choice came from sitting in a supermarket car park on my lunch hour, knowing I had to pick something quickly as I had to hurry up and buy the ingredients!  So I flicked through, and came across the Banana Boston Cream Cake.  This seemed a good choice as I’ve been looking at holidays to Boston this week - I want to see those pretty Autumn leaves, damnit!  I also love the taste of the Boston Cream Cake donuts they sell in the supermarket.  I probably should’ve looked more thoroughly at the recipe before deciding on it, as the method actually covers two pages, and I only had three hours to make it (which is a long time really, but I’m a leisurely baker), so I was on quite a strict schedule.  This cake has three elements to it essentially – the sponge, the custard/cream filling, and the chocolate ganache topping.  I hadn’t made custard or ganache before, so this was going to be a learning experience for me, good or bad!

The Bake

This week, my amendments to the recipe were limited to using margarine instead of butter, and skimmed milk instead of whole in the custard.  The sponge mix is a pretty simple vanilla sponge recipe, but with the addition of a mashed banana, and sour cream, which is then divided into two sponge tins and baked for 25-35 minutes.  While that bakes, you make the custard.  Whenever I’ve seen chefs making custard on tv, as well as using egg yolks, they’ve put in a whole vanilla pod, but luckily this one called for vanilla extract.  Simples. 

While milk and vanilla boils in a pan, you create a paste, with egg yolks.  Normally if I see that a recipe includes separating eggs, I’ll just not make it, however I do now have a very cute egg separator (see below).  You crack the egg into the chick, and then the egg white comes out of his mouth, leaving the yolk inside.  This sounds a bit weird now I’m seeing it in black and white.  It worked fine, but it was a bit laborious, and some of the yolk just refused to come out of the chick, so for the other two eggs required I had the confidence to separate them myself, just by transferring the yolk from one part of the shell to the other.  Once the milk has boiled you add the paste, then keep whisking until the mixture takes on custardy consistency.  You then pour the custard onto a baking tray (I used a brownie tin as the baking tray still had roast potato traces on it…) and cover it with cling film to cool.  Once the sponges and the custard has cooled, you whisk the custard until it’s smooth, sandwich it between the sponges, and refrigerate for 45 minutes.  I think I over whisked the custard, as it had become quite runny, and started going over the sides, so I didn’t use all of it.

While the cake cools, you make the ganache.  Last September I went to the inaugural Cake and Bake Show in Earl’s Court, London, and they had quite a few cooking demonstrations from celebrity bakers.  A common theme they had was making ganache for covering cakes, and it certainly looked impressive when they made it.  The Boston Cream Cake recipe instructed me to warm a pan of double cream until it was almost boiling, then add it to a bowl of chopped dark chocolate and stir until smooth and shiny.  And boy is it shiny!  It takes a lot of stirring, but the transformation is almost magical:

 

Once the cake has been in the fridge for 45 minutes, you put it on a wire rack over a baking tray (I used the brownie tin again, which I had washed, and I think this was better than a baking tray really as it’s much deeper), then start pouring the ganache over the cake.  The ganache was very clever in covering the cake, and only needed some teasing to cover some bits.  I think you’re meant to keep pouring the ganache over until you’ve used it all, however I thought that was it was covered, any extra would just drip down into the tin, so I just put it to one side.  I therefore think about half as much could’ve been made.

The effect of the ganache on the cake was beautiful – it’s so shiny you can almost see your reflection in it!  Once it had set, I took a big ol’ slice, and wasn’t disappointed with the taste – the sponge had a nice banana flavour, and the ganache was thick and smooth.  I think a thicker layer of custard in the middle would’ve made it even better.  So another success, however this recipe did take a long time, a lot of steps, as you can tell from such a long entry, and a lot of bowls/pans.

Happy Baking!