Has anyone tasted a traditional Dominican Republic cake (wedding cake)?

M

marilynfl

Moderator
I'm making a small one (6") at the request of a coworker for another coworker who just got married this weekend.

The cake is done. It's a citrus-flavored butter cream cake baked with fresh pineapple jam on the bottom of the pan. I could not bring myself to use the margerine called for in the recipe, so I guess I've already skewed its authenticity. When you flip it out (very difficult..should have used parchment), you put the pineapple tops together to make the inside filling.

BIG QUESTION: The online recipes coats the cake wtih Royal Icing. I've decorated GBH's with it, but it's soooooo sweet that I hate the idea of coating a nicely flavored cake with the stuff. However, I'll be authentic if that's what it calls for.

Just wanted an opinion.

 
Marilyn, Did you look at the cake on this site? (more)

This person tops it with a meringue frosting. _And you probably could use just about any light, fluffy frosting you wanted to.

This looked good and exotic. I will save for future use.

--Wait, My BAD! Meringue is the same as Royal frosting, no? I'd go for a light fluffy something or other. . .like I said up above.

http://www.dominicancooking.com/1001-bizcocho-dominicano-dominican-cake.html

http://www.dominicancooking.com/1001-bizcocho-dominicano-dominican-cake.html

 
Thanks, mistral. i think I'm going with a basic meringue or swiss buttercream rather

Royal icing. It actually makes my teeth hurt to think of biting through a crust of that stuff. One site seemed to be making Italian meringue, but then STILL added a bunch of powdered sugar to the final product. So...boiling sugar syrup PLUS powdered sugar? Yikes. I have to wonder what the cavity expectancy is like in the DR.

Although...Royal icing does last forever, as seen on our local bakery wedding cake models. You can actually knock on the cakes.

 
I like that idea of baking the filling WITH the cake!! How clever! LOVE love love pineapple smileys/smile.gif

 
Mistral, this IS the cake I made in three 6" pans. I used Swiss Meringue with orange oil and zest

added for the outer icing. Pineapple is on the inside.

Both cakes were baked (Deb's chocolate made three 8" and one 6" pan--two will be for the groom cake) and I had the swiss meringue whipping, the chocolate peanut butter truffle filling melting on the stove (for the groom cake) and the cream cheese cocoa icing beating with my smaller mixer.

Then I got the phone call.

The girl who asked me to make the cakes said our newly-married coworker was going to take TODAY off...so could I hold off bringing in the cakes until Wednesday?

This ran fingernails down the blackboard of my spine. Against the instructions in the recipe ("Dominican cakes must be eaten at room temperature and should be eaten the day they are made"), I made the DR cake on Sunday so it would be cool enough to decorate it yesterday and deliver it today. Same with the chocolate cake.

And my small packed refrigerator is filled with an over-zealous amount of fresh cilantro, so I can just imagine how the delicate meringue icing will suck up that odor.

And I can't wrap the cakes.

Now I'll be delivering a cake 4 days old with potential eau de cilantro, which goes against everything I believe in when it comes to home-made cakes. Especially untried recipes that say "should be eaten fresh."

 
It did turn out nicely, but LINE the pan with parchment. The pineapple jam acted like

glue AND a vacuum, so both layers cracked as I pulled them away from the sticky pineapple. But it did taste wonderful.
(I made three 6" pans and kept one for us to test.)

 
e, it's pretty much an upside down pineapple cake...flipped up. I do like the idea

of putting the two layers together to join them.

 
go to a local store with a bakery that sells layer cakes. . .

out here the large chains all sell layer cakes if they have in-store bakeries. Beg one of the tall cake holder w/cover from them, offer to buy it, go to the store manager if they "don't have a price" for it, and if worse comes to worse, buy a cake in one. Then place your cake in it, seal it and there you go. Triple wrap the sucker in plastic wrap and store in the fridge.

If the cover is not tall enough, use aluminum foil crumpled around the top to make it taller, and make sure there is enough room inside for the cake to fit. Put cake on bottom, place foiled lid over, press carefully to make sure foil conforms reasonably to base, then super wrap the thing in lots of plastic wrap.

You might want to check out some turkey roasting bags for the double wrap as they are very large and should fit over even a large cake in a container, OR you might be able to place the cake without a container in the bottom, inflate it with air, twist the top over and then fold over and twist-tie for air tightness and the inflation should keep it off the frosting.

Gee, I bet you are having fun, no?

 
Good suggestions...I just might try this smileys/smile.gif Pineapple upside down cake is one of my faves.

 
Wow! This post should go DIRECTLY to TIPS. Fabulous advice, mistral.

Of course, I didn't read it until I left home and by then the cake had already been sitting overnight uncovered and exposed to the internal odorific elements of my refrigerator.

The cake is at work now, set up on a glass cake holder. It's a base of Deb's chocolate cake 8" diameter / 4" high, iced with chocolate icing and filled with peanut butter chocolate truffle on the split layers and white Swiss meringue in the middle with Swiss meringue stars piped around the bottom border. That is topped with a 6" white DR cake with stars around the bottom border and finished with a huge hot pink flower from my Valentine's Day bouquet on top. I put several layers of parchment between the cake & the flower to avoid any contamination. It looks rather pretty, although the chocolate icing is dull because it is cold. I'm hoping it will soften in appearance.

Stuff I did wrong >> LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES!

Used 6" pans for the upper DR cake and set it on a 6" cardboard base. Then I piped Swiss meringue around the base to cover the cardboard. THIS makes it very hard to move around without touching the border icing. In truth, my fingerprints are all over that icing. Luckily, they're already loaded in the FBI ADIS database. I should have glued the 6" cardboard to a 7" cardboard round and worked with that to have some clearance zone.

Same icing border clearance problem with the 8" chocolate cake. Rookie mistake.

I should have greased/floured the DR pans and then STILL added a greased parchment because the pineapple jam ends up like glue and suctions the cake to it. This made it extremely difficult to get out of the pan. And it did crack.

And while I remembered to bring the large off-set spatula to lift off the top layer and the needle-nose plyers to pull out the 4 heavy lollipop sticks holding up the top layer and a faux ivory cake blade to serve, I forgot to bring a big knife to cut the darn thing.

I've realized that while I love, no...LOVE baking, I don't enjoy the stress of producing "on demand." This morning I was constantly worried that the cake would move in the van ride to work (packaged it in a Xerox box with that non-slip grippy shelf-liner stuff and I'm still worried that it will taste stale and smell like cilantro.

PS: Stuff I did right: Last night I mixed the remainder of the Swiss meringue icing with several heaping TBLS of the extremely thick peanut butter chocolate truffle filling. HOLY COW...was that fabulous! It's light and ethereal with a hint of peanut butter and an even slighter hint of chocolate. I could eat buckets of this stuff.

 
Marilyn, I gotta ask: Why does your fridge smell of cilantro. . .

Are you able to get WAAAAY better cilantro than we can get her in California? How are you storing it? Is it cut in a jar of water? In a bag? Are the roots still on?(boy, I wish I could get cilantro with the roots on, it would keep better, I think, and I have Thai curry recipes that call for cilantro root that I would like to try).

With the cilantro here, I cannot smell it if it is in a plastic bag, and we are lucky if we can smell it when we *buy* it, or when it is *out* of the plastic bag. Dang, sometimes the stuff is so wuss that I can hardly smell it when I CHOP it!

 
Yep. Roots are on and BIG. Leaves are huge! I found them at two different farmer's markets and

bought three huge bunches because this is the only way they last for me and I can't usually find them with roots. Plus, as you mentioned, some Thai recipes prefer the roots.

Plus I went my normal crazy and also bought huge bunches of kale, kholrabi, swiss chard, Napa cabbage, carrots, lemongrass, red bib lettuce and romaine. The inside of my frig currently looks like our yard.

Check out organic farmers...that's who brought these to the market.

By the way, we just had the chocolate cake and the small border of Swiss icing smells like the orange oil/zest I added to it--not cilantro. DR cake will go to the newlyweds uncut so I have no idea what that might taste like.

 
Cilantro is easy to grow.

It reseeds readily so volunteers are always appearing but it doesn't seem to spread very far. It bolts rapidly in warmer weather so I always have seeds - would you like some? One year I tried cleaning the chaff off of the seeds to use as coriander but it was a huge hassle and not worth the effort.

 
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