Salted Chocolate Caramel Cake take 2!

Recently my bible study was saying good bye to one of our members, who was leaving to start a training program with Radius International. At her farewell picnic the previous weekend I asked if she would enjoy a celebratory good bye cake on the following Thursday. She like the idea but didn't know what she wanted. ESFSW jumped in and suggested I make the Salted Chocolate Caramel Cake I had made last December for a friends Post-Defense party. I blogged about this cake in one of my first couple posts. But, because the idea for a food blog hadn't come to fruition yet I didn't have any pictures of the first cake I made, so I had to grab stock photos from the interwebs. This time around I did remember to take pictures of the final product!

Cake layers out of the oven and cooling!

Final product!

The group loved it and again voiced opinions that they think I should open a bakery....maybe in retirement...

Happy Baking!

As promised...Hot Chocolaty Goodness

 

Hot chocolaty goodness (Aka Molten Chocolate Cakes) deserves its own post, so here it is. I teased at the end of my Valentine's post of this dessert and your wait will be worth it. Not only is this recipe incredibly easy to whip up, it is also sinfully delicious. Well that is if you like chocolate...wait are there people who DON'T like chocolate?

Nigella Lawson's Molten Chocolate Cakes

 

Once again this recipe hails from the awesome and amazing Nigella Lawson! I warned you I like her! I've made this once before for a friend's bachelorette gathering, but decided it was the best option for a Valentine's Day dessert, for a couple reasons. First, it is chocolate, second it is possible to whip up the batter/pudding before hand and bake it when you are ready and third it bakes super fast. And then there is the part about them be delicious and coming in cute little individual size portions!

There is not much to the recipe which you can find on Nigella's website. I will warn you that the recipe gives the weight of required ingredient instead of the usual measurements in cups, but the only real cup measurement is that 150 grams of sugar is roughly 1/2 cup. I know it may not seem like a lot of sugar but I swear it is enough. Depending on your sweet tooth you could probably leave the sugar out especially if using semi-sweet or milk chocolate chips since these are sweeten. If you decide on bakers unsweetened chocolate because that is what is on hand - you will definitely need the sugar and may need extra. I however have not experimented with this so I am not so sure what the optimal amount would be.

Deep-dish Ramekins

6-muffin Pan

 

The first time I made this recipe I did not have ramekins so instead used a 6 - muffin pan. This worked really well because it in my opinion is the perfect size for these. The problem is I didn't adjust the baking time enough so they were more cake-like and less gooey. This time due to my roommates having lots of dishes I had two ramekins that I borrowed. This however in my opinion made a dessert which was entirely too big to eat for one person. But it worked out that ESFSW and I shared one (leaving him one to take to work the next day) with a spring of mint on top and whiskey on the side, which made for an nice intimate Valentine's dessert. I swear we watched a movie that night but for the life of me can't remember what it was!

 

Salty Chocolate Caramel Cake

Back at the end of November a friend defended her PhD Thesis (whoohoo!) and I hosted a pot-luck celebration for her. I had been itching to make a cake for a while and I thought this would be a perfect excuse to try my hand in a layered cake. After inquiring what type of cake she would like I decided I was going to do a twist on a chocolate cake by adding caramel and salt to the mix! Now I thought that most of the world knew about the salted chocolate and salt caramel craze but to my surprise there were numerous people who thought the combo was a little weird until they tasted their first bite. Then it was love and rave reviews the rest of the night. While I would love to come up with my recipes I just don't have the time, so I troll the internet and browse through the few cook books I have for inspiration and direction. I found a recipe from Martha Stewart's website for a Salted-Caramel Six Layer Chocolate Cake and it sounded so tantalizing I just had to try it!

Salted Chocolate Caramel Cake from Martha Stewart

I won't recopy the recipe here, but you can click the link above to find it. I made a few changes that I will include. Now I must confess I did not really have the time to make my own caramel. I am typically "a from scratch" kind of girl, primarily because the effort rewards itself the taste and the quality. It also allows you to tweak things that you just can't in the same way when using mixes or prepared items. So I bought a jar of caramel topping, I believe it was Smuckers but my memory is a little fuzzy. The cake I made was also only three layers. I had slightly larger cake pans so the baked layers were not really thick enough to slice in half and keep their structural integrity. I did however for the first time trim the layers so that they were flat and let me tell you it makes constructing a layered cake so much easier! There is also not the fear that one of the layers will slide off. I did leave the top layer rounded to make the top of the cake seem higher. Then the last little tweak was because I had coarse kosher salt on hand I just used that instead of flaked sea-salt.

It is a little surprising with the number of people and the rave reviews that the cake didn't disappear that night. However with most fine desserts a little does go a long way. The cake kept relatively well for a couple days, the caramel definitely helped the cake stay moist. The salt did melt after the first day so the rock salt turned into little salt condensation pools, which gave the same salty effect to the chocolate. I definitely am keeping this recipe for the future. I also recommend eating the cake with a good strong cup of coffee!

Happy Baking and Savoring!