Baking Addiction 2: Fruit Tart and Chocolate Indulgence

A few days ago, my friend invited me to her place at Bukit Antarabangsa for house warming. I promised her that I will bring some desert. And since that day onwards, I had read hundreds of recipe and planned the execution of the desert in my head to every minute of detail.

In the end I decided to go with my version of Secret Recipe's chocolate indulgence. 

If you never have this cake before, then I tell you you have yet to know what a good chocolate cake truly means. My sister and I absolutely love secret recipe's chocolate Indulgence. It is made of great chocolate cake, layered with chocolate and cream ganache, and finally covered with chocolate glaze. The contrast of the texture and the depth of different types of chocolate will definitely send you to the moon and back. 

Back in those days, my sister used to travel very often to KL for training. Whenever we met up, one thing which we never failed to do was to have a piece of Secret Recipe's Chocolate Indulgence. Sometimes we will packed a piece of the cake and brought it to the hotel room, then shared it together while lying on the bed and talking. Even when Secret Recipe finally expanded their cake business to Miri, the habit of sharing a piece of Chocolate Indulgence whenever she is in KL still holds true. I guess what truly precious is the moments of sharing something great with the love ones.

I've attempted this cake once. My extended family loved it although i find it a great challenge to slice through the chocolate cake into two layers and then re-assembling it back with chocolate and cream ganache in between. The first time I've managed to make 3 layers, but this time I only did 2 layers, as the cake is a bit brittle.

I used a simple moist chocolate cake mix for the cake layer but added a few teaspoon of dark cocoa powder to increase the depth of the chocolate.  The more difficult part was the ganache, I've adapted the recipe from a food blogger, see here. 

Light Whipped Ganache Filling

• 113gm dark chocolate (i used Beryl’s Dark Compound Chocolate)
• 58 + 174gm whipping cream
• ½ tsp vanilla essence

1. Place mixing bowl in freezer 

2. Place dark choc with 58gm whipping cream in a container over some hot water to melt the chocolate in cream. Make sure the chocolate has fully melted in the cream and let it cool down, but still fluid.

3. Remove bowl from freezer and beat whipping cream until traces of beater marks shows distinctly. Scrape in the chocolate mixture and vanilla and beat until cream mounds softly (like whipped cream). 

Now the challenge here is to not over whipped, as it will turn grainy. Which was exactly what I did. It still tasted great, but less presentable. Next was the whipped cream frosting. GOSH IT WAS A MESS. It involve simple ingredients of 240ml of heaving whipped cream, 1/2 teaspoon of vanila essence and 20 grams of granulated white sugar. Whipping was made easy with hand mixer, however to pipe and spread the whipped cream over the cake was horrible. I end up messing the entire kitchen counter.

Well, this was not my favourite piece but it was ok. If I can do it better than Secret Recipe then they better hire me k. ;)

At last minute, I've also made a super easy and  foolproof fruit tart. I saw this prepared tart crust from the baking store and cant resist to bring it home. Basically there is only 3 components, the crust, cream filling and fruits.

You can actually get all the ingredients off the shelf from the baking store, there is even this just-pour-in-water-instant-custard-mix. But I  end making my own custard cream and I didnt regret the decision. It was simple plus I can tweak the recipe according to the taste I like. Again, i followed the recipe from joyofbaking.com. Now this is what you need. 

Pastry Cream 

• 300 ml milk (whole or 2%)
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla essence
• 3 large egg yolks
• 50 grams granulated white sugar
• 20 grams all-purpose flour
• 20 grams corn starch

See the video below for the demonstration. Its has an elaborated procedure, however I find it was foolproof and seriously, its only custard, not rocket science. 

Well, again, assemble everthing once the cream cool off. You can basically add any fruit which you like, but I only have preserved peach with me. Keep it refrigerated to solidify the custard filling further.

Mini fruit tart, simple yet satisfaction guaranteed. ;)

Till next time!