Chocolatey Birthday Goodness!

Wow, Green and Black's... Maybe it's worth it to buy their chocolate cookbook. Those chocolate hussies make one hell of a cake. See the previous post for the recipe for the Green and Black's chocolate mousse cake. The only substitution I made was using a bar of Maya Gold along with their 70% baking chocolate. Thankfully, I was on the phone with E when I was doing the math (the 70% chocolate bar was 5.3oz and the Maya Gold was 3.5oz, and I was trying to get a total of 10.8ozs. There were 30 squares in the 5.3oz bar, so I had to figure out how many squares of the second bar of 70% to use--see, baking is complicated) so she was able to talk me through the math portion of the test. Anyhow, here's what the cake looked like after I took off the spring form sides (what a great invention!).

Mmm warm chocolate cake.

Now, doesn't this look like Green and Black's photo (in the previous post)? The yellow ridge is the ground almonds used to dust the pan.

I will say one thing about the recipe, it says to fold in the eggs and then mix the eggs and chocolate until it's thick, then smooth the batter in the pan. I was a little worried because it was not brownie-mix consistency, it was much more liquid than this, so I didn't have to do any smoothing. I baked it for 45 minutes and did not even test to see if a knife came out clean since the recipe said it was done when the top had nice cracks in it, which, as you see, it does.

Also, I was worried that it would be very dense, like a brownie, but it was surprisingly fluffy in the middle, very rich, but not super dense. Maybe fluffy is the wrong word, but more airy than a brownie would be. I s'pose that's why they call it a mousse cake.

I decided to dust the cake with powdered sugar rather than put whipping cream on it and Kyle suggested I use a doily to get a cool pattern. Well, I don't have doilies, so I made this paper snowflake pattern instead.




And dusted it with powdered sugar.

And voila!

Yummy!

Prior to the eating of the cake, I took D to Craft Bar, Tom Colicchio's "informal" restaurant. We had a lovely tapas style meal and a bottle of vino. Then we took a cab home and I made him wait in the living room for the unveiling of the cake. I served it slightly warm with some coffee ice cream (though it doesn't really need this as it's so rich, just milk is great) on the side, and I did manage a candle and the Happy Birthday chorus. I got D a CycleOps bike trainer (to make his bike stationary in the house) and a meat grinder and sausage stuffer attachment for the Kitchen Aid (this was actually from my grandma, Matata, who loves him and asked me to buy something for him from her, thanks Matata!). He was very pleased with all. Yay! Happy Birthday to D!