 |
| Cake is always the answer, no matter the question. |
 |
| I wouldn't lie. |
 |
| Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Even cake. Especially cake. |
Well, here I am all happy thinking cake #26 of 31 in 31 was going to be the big thing on the post today, but no... it's the meringues. I'll get to that in a moment.
Today we have a teeny tiny grasshopper cake. I used Gretchen Price's chocolate mint cake recipe. Actually, her cake isn't minty, but her frosting is. This is the first time I've made Gretchen's chocolate cake, it's outstanding. I used her frosting recipe as well, but I added tint unfortunately I was a bit heavy handed with the leaf green. I cut the mint extract quantity in half, and I'm glad I did, it's plenty minty. Although she offers a ganache recipe for her mint cake, I used my own, it's tried and true. I was under the gun to make this cake quickly, and it was done start to finish in 2 hours INCLUDING the meringues! Now, let's talk decorations. What is over the ganache is Newman's mint sandwich cookies that I crushed, and cut into quarters. The quarters are on the frosting, the crumbs are on the ganache. But the star of this show.... oh my goodness, those cocoa mint vegan meringues. They are not made using aquafaba, nope! This is the first time I've made meringues using EnerG egg replacer, wow these are among the best meringues I've ever made. I used a recipe from Pickles and Honey blog. In addition to the EnerG replacer and water, they have cocoa powder, chopped dark chocolate, mint and vanilla extracts, plus sugar. That's it. The only flaw in my meringues was that I decided to use a piping tip and bag after a few scoops with a portion scooper. Some of my chocolate wasn't fine enough to force through the large tip so I ended up stopping to clear the clogs a few times. I ended up liking the look of the small portion scoop better than the piped meringues when I was finished, but I wanted to see how each way ended up. They were perfectly stable from start to finish. I'm giving you the link to the meringues, and Gretchen's mint cake recipe is also linked. I made 2 small 6" layers, the recipe as written makes 3 6" layers; I cut the recipe in half because I had no reason to make this cake other than VeganMoFo and when you scroll down, you'll understand my urgent need to keep cakes small lately.
After I made this cake, I learned that mint chocolate cakes are referred to as grasshopper cake. I would've loved the green to have been more subtle, but I'll take what I can get. What I've not mentioned to you is that I have not had air conditioning for a week. Oh sure, all the guest rooms have AC working perfectly, no worries there. It's my area... back of the house as I call it. Nope, nada, zero, zilch, dead as a doornail. No AC and I'm making cakes. This cake was melting so fast the wee cookie bits put too much strain on the frosting mountains, within 30 seconds, it all began to wilt, there was nothing I could do to change this other than spin the cake around to hide the falling off parts for photos, and fire off as many as possible in 15 seconds. It is HOT in the kitchen this week. This is where the rubber meets the road is all I can say. It was promised way back that there would be plenty of melting cakes and that was before the AC was on the fritz. I've sure kept true to my word. No Mr. Airconditioning RepairPeople, you are not going to be among the ones getting any of these cakes lately, sorry not sorry, you promised it would be fixed last week and it's still broken. I know, I know, first world problems.
Here's the links to the recipes:
CAKE: https://www.gretchensveganbakery.com/mint-chocolate-chip-cake/
MERINGUES: http://www.picklesnhoney.com/mint-chocolate-chip-meringue-cookies/
I'll remind you now, meringues are truly not my "thing." They are so super sweet, I can't even. Trust me though when I say the recipe I link to you above will yield some of the best meringues you'll ever have, and after making so many meringues with aquafaba I think this recipe was the most stable I've ever made. Also very surprising to me is that this EnerG meringue recipe was published in 2012! So for 7 years this recipe has been lurking on the internet and I never found it, don't wait 7 years friends, go forth and make those chocolate minty meringue cookies STAT!
If this month has taught me anything, it's that life is short eat the cake (or a meringue). This cake is worth the effort.
Poof, #26 down the hatch.
xo
No comments:
Post a Comment