Ease of Making:
Ok, so this cake was a bit more complicated than the other cakes. I mean, it wasn't hard, not even particularly time-consuming, but definitely not as straight forward as the other recipes.
The other recipes, I simply had to melt the chocolate/butter/liquid combo, wait for it to cool and add the flour/eggs/vanilla. Done. This one, I had to melt the chocolate/butter/liquid combo, wait for it to cool, sift the sugar into the already sifted flour combo, whisk the eggs/vanilla/buttermilk separately, stir the egg/vanilla/buttermilk mix into the flour/sugar combo, then add the melted chocolate mix in 3 separate batches.
One of my concerns with this recipe is that the sugar isn't required to be dissolved into the mixture at any point. When doing my research on mud cakes (because I research everything to death) I came across a few comments that one of the most important things with mud cakes is to ensure that the sugar is completely dissolved before baking. I don't know what the difference is but each of the other recipes instructed at some point to dissolve the sugar, whether it was with the chocolate/butter combo on the stove or after adding the sugar/butter combo to the flour.
Also, after I mixed everything together the batter seemed quite thick compared to the other batters which were very runny. It just didn't...seem quite the same as the other recipes at all.
The Exclusively Food website provides ingredient quantities for several different size pans. In cut back on costs I only made the smallest size they provided the quantities for, a 6" round. I have a 6" round pan but the recipe said to use a deep pan, generally a 3-4" high pan and I only had small pans about 1" high so I decided to bake the cake in a larger pan to compensate for the smaller height. I ended up baking the cake in a 10" round pan that was only 1" high. I probably should have used the same pan as I used for the other cakes though because the cake rose way higher than the edges. In fact, I thought for a few moments that the pan was going to overflow but luckily the edges were cooked just enough to keep the batter from overflowing. I also used a heating core in the cake so that may have helped stop it from overflowing.
So the final cake doesn't quite...look right. It didn't dome on top at all, and is very very flaky on top compared to the others and felt like it was falling apart as I was wrapping it up to put it into the freezer. I should have taken a photo but was a bit too concerned to remember!! In fact, I didn't remember to get ANY photos while making this cake!
So we'll have to see whether this cake turns out or not. It's the same recipe I used for last months baby cake so I know what the final result should be like so I'll have to take that into consideration when tasting it. However, I don't know if this cake would be the winner of the scratch-off anyway simply because of the slightly more complicated mixing process. It also ends up being pretty middle-of-the-road, cost-wise...
Cost:
So obviously the cake I made was quite cheap in comparison to the other recipes since I only made the 6" round, but I used the ingredient quantities provided on the site to calculate the cost of a cake the same size as the other recipes and it came up to $7.16AUD, putting it smack in the middle of the pricing test. To be honest, the taste would have to pretty much blow me away for me to prefer this recipe over the others simply because I thought the other recipes were simpler and more reliable. This recipe also used buttermilk which I don't ordinarily use, and it only used a very small amount of buttermilk which means the rest of the carton would go to waste. At least this would be true if I hadn't worked out how to freeze the rest of the buttermilk in ice cube trays so now I probably have enough buttermilk to last me the next 5 years (especially considering this was the first time I've ever bothered buying buttermilk!!).
Once again, no photos. I know. I suck.
No comments:
Post a Comment