A Cake Worth Fighting For

M y parents’ home nearly became the scene of a small riot last week, and it was all due to my brother and a cake.

The life of a budding food columnist is rough, mainly from a planning perspective. Case in point: I wanted to make a Pinterest-worthy chocolate cake to celebrate Mardi Gras, but owing to Tuesday-morning podcast-recording schedules, the cake part of the dessert needed to be completed on Monday. To complicate matters more, I would be at my parents’ house that day to see my brother (Sibling No. 3) who was in town for a quick visit.

I have a long-running habit of “destination baking,” which has seen me do things such as re-boxing and transporting my KitchenAid mixer so I could make fresh cinnamon rolls during a family vacation. Taking along all the necessary ingredients for this cake project on the hour-long trip home would be a piece of — well, you get the idea.

This week’s recipe was Claire Saffitz’s chocolate layer cake, and my personal goal was to make mine look as good as hers. This can prove tricky when you struggle with attention to detail, are icing the cake during editing sessions, and don’t fully cream the butter into the frosting as the recipe requires. Blissfully unaware of future struggles, I wrote out my grocery list and set out to spend my week’s food budget on chocolate.

Saffitz carefully crafts her recipes, making them accessible and understandable for home bakers. She also takes care to explain certain decisions, and it was a delight to follow along with her video as she told us why cocoa powder is the only source of chocolate in the actual cake, why sugar is treated as a dry ingredient here (in most baking, it’s treated as a wet one), and why the cacao percentage of your chocolate for the frosting matters. A novel ingredient, to me, was her use of crème fraiche, which I had to supplement with sour cream after not reading the amounts thoroughly and running out. Everything else was perfectly straightforward, though, and despite the recipe’s excessive amount of eggs (eleven total), I plunged ahead.

I should mention that the other reason for baking this cake at my parents’ was the cake-pan dilemma it solved. For all the baking I do, I don’t own high-sided, 8-inch pans, so I had to lean on my parents’ generosity for those. And the use of their oven. Also some oil. Oh, and a teaspoon-ish each of baking powder and baking soda. And that last dollop of sour cream.

Okay, so I didn’t bring all the ingredients with me.

While I was mixing everything together, Sibling No. 2 and Sibling No. 3 kept me company and caught up with each other — No. 2 is newly married and recently pregnant, and No. 3 is the visiting brother. Those two. You never know what’s going to happen when they’re together. This time, they managed to get themselves banished to the back room by Mom, after they disrupted a piano lesson she was teaching. So I baked along by myself, smiling from afar as they continued to snicker with each other.

The cake layers, all three of them, turned out beautifully, and, luckily for me, they were slightly domed. Layer cakes require flat components for stability and presentation purposes. I require my cake layers to be flat so I have an excuse to trim bits off and eat them. In this case, I needed something to placate my siblings, some of whom were scandalized that I would bake a cake there but not let them eat any of it — thus the impending riot, instigated mainly by No. 3. As I informed him, it’s not my fault he lives 2,374 miles away.

Cakes trimmed, riot quelled, dishes washed, and layers packed, I headed back to my apartment for a night’s rest before tackling the icing. Saffitz’s icing for this cake is drawn from a pudding-based German recipe that seems completely counterintuitive but ends up looking marvelously silky. It does, however, require you to make pudding from scratch. I’ve done this before, but I have about a 50 percent success rate — accidentally scrambling your eggs is dreadfully easy.

Homemade pudding or custard, for the uninitiated, is usually some combination of milk and sugar, heated until hot but not boiling. You then carefully pour half that mixture into a bowl wherein your egg yolks, flour, and probably more sugar have been whisked into submission, and you stir vigorously. This is supposed to “temper” the egg yolks and keep them from scrambling when you add the whole lot back into your pot on the stove. From there, you stir constantly until the mixture is “thick and bubbling” (this heating period gives the flour time to work its magic), and then you pour it over the chopped chocolate in your mixer’s bowl.

From there, all I had to do was beat the pudding until cool, then incorporate 284 grams of room-temperature butter and some vanilla.

You want to start frosting soon, since the butter you spent all that time creaming in will eventually harden. Besides, this was the part I’d been waiting for. Taking the precautions Saffitz recommended for keeping your cake stand tidy, I set to work centering, dolloping, smoothing, and stacking my cake and frosting. Off-set spatulas and bench scrapers are a cake decorator’s best friend, but even though I used them and did a crumb coat on my creation (a thin layer of icing around the cake to lock in crumbs), it still looked a bit freckled. Drat.

Enter the chocolate shavings, which both saved the day and added an air of elegance. After another quick trip to the fridge to firm up, the cake rested at room temperature on the counter, awaiting the evening’s festivities.

It was a success. I’d asked my invitees to bring a fun drink to share and told them I’d provide the chocolate cake. One of them took the time to research what went best with said cake and showed up at my door with Guinness. That, good friends, a game of Scattergories, and delicious chocolate cake was the perfect way to ring out ordinary time and prepare ourselves for the solemn season of Lent.

Oh and yes, the cake made it full circle — I brought the leftovers home the following weekend. No riot this time. Just lots of satisfied sighs.