Daring Bakers November 2008 Challenge

Hosts of the month are:
Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity
(http://culinarycuriosity.blogspot.com/)
Alex (Brownie of the Blondie and Brownie duo:
http://blondieandbrownie.blogspot.com/),
Jenny of Foray into Food (http://forayintofood.blogspot.com/ ) Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go (http://glutenagogo.blogspot.com/).
The recipe is from Shuna Fish Lydon of Eggbeater
(http://eggbeater.typepad.com/) and posted at http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2006/12/24/caramel-cake-the-recipe/

CARAMEL CAKE WITH CARAMELIZED BUTTER FROSTING

First of all, I really don't like caramel. But since there often is an exception to the rule, I love 'Kouign Amann'. And I love to try out new things. So why not a Caramel Cake? Maybe there is other caramelized stuff I like?

So I went to work on this challenge.
First I cooked the caramel syrup. This part didn't seem very tricky but even as the syrup only had a light amber colour, it tasted a little bit burnt.


For the cake I choose a springform ring pan. The cake didn't rise much but was light and fluff and just right. So I had hope. But then came the caramelized butter frosting... I even used only 30ml of the caramel syrup but together with the confectioners sugar it was sweet.... way too sweet for my taste. The added salt didn't help much. I cut the cake horizontal, filled and decorated it with the icing.


At least I made some caramel fragments for decorations as I had seen at Pilles Blog (http://nami-nami.blogspot.com/2007/08/im-daring-baker-eric-kaysers-milk.html).
Therefore I caramelized some sugar, poured the liquid at a baking sheet and let it cool down. Then I only had to break the caramel to pieces and stick them into the cake.


This cake is way too sweet for our tastes. Only two people liked it as it was and my boyfriend even disliked the salt part in the frosting which he felt was too sweet, too. All of us liked the cake itself, most disliked the oversweetness of the frosting. Maybe I made some mistakes with the frosting as this cake went well with other daring bakers. So if I ever come down from my sugar high maybe I will try this cake again.
But this will probably take some time.


- bana