well, this was a rather expensive disappointment: Valerie Gordon's "Golden Butter Cake" from "Sweet"

M

marilynfl

Moderator
Disclaimers: Okay…she makes it in 3 pans and I baked it in one big pan…so that may have skewed the results. But for the overall expense, I just didn't think this one hit the mark.

Valerie owns "Valerie's Confections" in LA. The cover of her book Sweet has a beautiful glazed cake which uses the Golden Butter Cake as its base. Gorgeous cake, just gorgeous. It's iced with both a Champagne Ganache and a Milk Chocolate Glaze and then decorated with edible gold. As a going-away cake for a coworker, I made the cake, doubled the ganache recipe and skipped the rest.

It was, eh…a little too dense and flour-y for my taste. And the champagne and brandy (of which I used less than half the recipe amount) were very obvious to me. I feel like I wasted 26 oz of Belgium chocolate for no good reason.

The cake did cut beautifully. Tight crumb, sharp edges, dense…a bit too dense, actually.

I was planning on buying this book because the photos are beautiful and because she gives weights (so I know I didn't use too much flour). But the ingredient font size is far too small for these eyes.

http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/home-garden/food/golden-butter-cake-berries-and-mascarpone-frosting

 
Here's the champagne ganache and an image of the cake:

I think she uses the gelatin to set the high amount of liquid (champagne, brandy, corn syrup, heavy cream). She also skips the instruction step that explains to add the soften gelatin into the warmed cream…otherwise you have lumps. Luckily I saw that error in reviews of the book.

Honestly, if you don't like booze in your chocolate, skip this one. If you do..and you like the sharpness of champagne, go for it. I felt I wasted a goodly amount of butter and eggs and Belgium chocolate with this cake/icing, although it did look beautiful.

http://www.bakepedia.com/champagne-ganache-recipe/

 
There's too little baking powder in this recipe - it should have about 1 Tbsp for that amount of

flour. That lack of leavening would be a big reason for the dense texture.

 
I thought it was pretty small, but she bakes it in 3 pans and may not want it to rise much. Look

at her image...the layers aren't very high.

 
I think part of it is preference.I am not much of a cake person & prefer dense cakes.

I dislike the texture of airy puffy cakes, especially if they are very sweet.
I do love my unleavened pound cake though and a few other dense and not terribly sweet cakes.

I also tend to not like powdered sugar buttercream.

 
Pound cake is the texture I was hoping for, since it has a pound of butter in it. But

something was off somewhere. And it's too expensive to play around with to figure out what. I don't tend to make smaller layer cakes...doesn't work for sharing at work.

 
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