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Sunday, December 5, 2010

HCB - Chocolate Genoise with Ganache Glaze (rewind)

Before I begin my HCB post, I have something fun and exciting to share: my State Fair baking adventure of this past summer is featured on Rose's blog alongside Woody's first State Fair entry!!!! Thank you Rose and Woody for your kind words about my baking. You can read all about it HERE.


This week's cake for the Heavenly Cake Bakers to bake is the Chocolate Velvet Fudge Cake. Almost exactly a year ago to the day, I made this cake as part of a super awesome Volcano Cake for a close friend's daughter's 11th birthday. Click HERE to check it out!! So this week, I opted to do a rewind and make the Chocolate Genoise that the HCB-ers made a couple weeks ago. I used regular ganache instead of the prescribed Peanut Butter Ganache. The other change I made is substitute an equal amount by weight of corn starch for the flour and I threw in a handful of toasted almonds, which I chopped finely in the food processor. My inspiration for this change comes from Hector. A while back, he mentioned experimenting with corn starch in the Genoise to make the cake gluten-free. His reasoning for this change is that a Genoise gets its structure from the egg foam and not as much from the proteins in the flour.


I used my standby recipe for syrup which consists of sugar, water and orange juice. The cake's texture is super soft. It's melt-in-your-mouth tender. I thought it was moist enough for a Genoise (I used about 1/2 cup of syrup). The chocolate flavor was just right and the ganache was very smooth. Unfortunately, the cake formed a thin layer of dense and rubbery mass at the bottom, which I had to cut off prior to serving the cake. Other than that, the cake was fine, and I would call this a successful gluten-free experiment.

7 comments:

  1. i love the way you decorated your cake. those subtle swirls are very appealing.

    congrats on trying a gluten free version of a genoise! do you know about the basic GF flour mix? i bet it would perform loads better than cornstarch: 2 parts finely ground white rice flour, 2/3 part potato starch flour, 1/3 part tapioca flour. some people use finely ground brown rice flour instead of white rice. the key is finding a rice flour that truly is finely ground--should feel like cake flour or cornstarch.

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  2. Oh, Hanaa, this is gorgeous! Your syrup sounds delicious. I'm earmarking it!

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  3. Hanaa - you are amazing! I love what you did and the syrup sounds so fresh with the chocolate. I love the pattern on top - it looked Asian to me, kind of like overlapping lily pads. Lovely.

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  4. THe pattern on top of your cake is very pretty! I love how moist this cake looks along with a deep chocolate brown, absolutely finger-licking good!

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  5. Haana your cake looks amazing. I heart chocolate and would love a piece right now. The pattern on the top is lovely!

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