Blackforest Cake for CNY

I got a request from my sister to bake a black forest cake for chinese new year. I made something simple and since I did not have chocolate shavings, I made do with this simple chocolate design wrapped around the cake. I would love to do something with lacy for the top but unfortunately the plastic sheet that I have is not tall enough :-( I will probably do to that in my next project :-)

This is my favourite recipe from Jodeli with minor changes.

Ingredients
Part (A)
3 egg yolks
110g low-gluten flour (eg. Top flour, cake flour)
½ tsp baking soda
20g cocoa powder
60g castor sugar
50g oil
100g milk
1 tsp chocolate emulco/ paste (optional)

Part (B)
3 egg whites
¼ tsp cream of tartar
60g castor sugar


350-400g non-dairy whipping cream, whipped till stiff
A small can of dark pitted cherries, drained and keep the syrup
8 maraschino cherries, with stem

METHOD:

Chocolate chiffon cake:
Preheat oven at 180 degC.

Sift flour, baking soda and cocoa powder into a mixing bowl and put aside.

Whisk egg yolks and castor sugar till sugar dissolved, add oil and milk to the egg mixture and stir till blend.

Add the flour mixture and gently mix until just combined. Add more milk if the batter is too thick 1 tbsp at a time.

In a separate mixing bowl, whisk egg whites with cream of tartar at medium speed until formy. Add sugar and continue to whisk on high speed until soft peaks form. Turn to medium speed and whisk until stiff peaks just form.

Use a large spatula to fold 1/3 of egg whites into egg yolk mixture. Fold gently to not deflate the egg whites, then add the remaining egg whites to the mixture and gently fold till well combined.

Pour batter into a 8 inch round cake pan which has been lined. Do not grease the sides of the cake pan.

Bake at preheated oven for 40-50 minutes or until skewer inserted into centre of cake comes out clean.

Remove cake from oven. Invert cake pan immediately on a wire rack and let cake cools completely before turning it out of the pan.

Once the cake is cooled, cut into 3 layers.

Brush each layer with the syrup from the dark pitted cherries.

Frost the layer with whipped cream and put a few pieces of cherries and place the second sponge layer and brush it with syrup and top it with whipped cream. Place the remaining cherries on it and cover it with the third layer.

Frost the sides and top with the remaining whipped cream and decorate with maraschino cherries and chocolate shavings or rasps.

Wrinkly Upin & Ipin cake

This cake was made for my dear niece in the month of January. This cake was not my best as you can see the wrinkly icing sheet :-( . I was very unhappy about it but I was really short of time to do any other changes. In fact, this is the first time I am encountering such problem and I suspect that I might have overwhipped the cream and introduced too much air into the cream. I used non-dairy whipping cream and probably took it for granted that the cream will not breakdown .. *LOL*

Anyways, the Upin & Ipin characters were made of chocolate and filled with piping gel. This is how I did:

1. Print the character in mirror image
2. Take a piece of tracing paper and place it over the printed image. Best is to have a cake board underneath and tape both the papers to it.
3. Melt some chocolate and let it cool a little bit before you start tracing the outline. If you use while it is still warm, the chocolate will be too runny to use for tracing.
4. Once you have done the outline, chill it in the refrigerator.
5. Melt some white chocolate and let it cool a little bit
6. Fill up the spaces and the outline with the white chocolate and chill it till it hardens
7. Prepare the piping gel and add colours to them
8. Gently peel the chocolate off the tracing paper and place it on the cake
9. Using a mini off set spatula, cover the white spaces with the gel

I hope the above is easy enough for you to visualise :-)

Happy trying !