mix, mix… stir, stir

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking adventure really surprised me. I saw the photo in the book and it looked beautiful, but registered with me as run of the mill, predictable, I thought I knew what I was going to get.

photo by David Peterman

What I didn’t count on was a velvety soft brownie cake that was the perfect balance to the chewy caramel peanut topping. This simple cake worked so stunningly well primarily due to the excellent combination of textures. I took the caramel pretty dark to keep it from being overly sweet and ensure it delivered a nice strong caramel flavor; then I added a little kick to the topping in the manner of 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne pepper. It was a perfect little swell of heat at the end of each bite. The nice thing about cayenne is the heat hangs back for the finish so the chocolate, caramel and peanut flavors can all be enjoyed before it is detected.

The only difficulty with this cake was cutting it after it had been sitting for a few hours. The darker caramel is cooked the stiffer it is when cooled, which I knew, but didn’t expect this to cause any problems because it was still a rather loose caramel topping. Interestingly this was only a problem for the knife. After cutting the first piece I thought the topping was going to pull everyone’s fillings out, but much to my happy relief, it was very easy to bite and chew. I think the knife had difficulty because the soft layer of cake under the caramel provided no resistance to cut against. The nature of the brownie-style cake had a good structure which made it easy to eat out of hand and the topping was soft and very easy to bite through, just difficult to cut with a knife. I cut a left over portion of cake into pieces by flipping it upside down so the caramel was against a cutting board making it was easy to cut perfect litle pieces. Turn them pretty side up and serve, but this technique would only be applicable if the caramel has set enough not to fall off the cake or stick to the counter. 

I took a lot of process shortcuts in making this. All of the recipes I have made so far in Dorie’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours have been very efficient and streamlined, but this one just seemed unnecessarily complicated. I simply turned the cake out, trimmed off the high edges as it sunk a bit in the middle, flipped it over so the perfectly flat bottom became the top and poured on the caramel topping. Because I made a rather stiff caramel and let it set up a few minutes in the pan, I was able to spread it on the cake without needing to put it back in the springform pan.

I defied Dories warning against making half a batch of the caramel and did so with no problems. It was the perfect amount for the cake topping.  I make caramel fairly often and prefer to add the butter once the caramel has cooled a bit, and then I stirred in the peanuts once the butter was in and the caramel had cooled even more. Once it was set enough not to run right off the cake, I spread it on.

Thank you to Tammy of Wee Treats by Tammy for selecting a recipe that I might not have gotten around to making on my own. I loved this week’s result and will be making it again in the future.