Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The Great Ganache Fiasco

As promised here is the story of the great ganache fiasco, or why the TallMan shouldn't listen to me.

Saturday night the TallMan and I hung out at my parents house with my mom. I figured it would help settle the cats in, it did, we'd keep mom company, and I could have TallMan move somethings. After the delicious dinner that I described yesterday TallMan and I made a cake for the friend that was going to help me move on Sunday (or rather, help TallMan help me move). TallMan was very skeptical about the chocolate cake recipe that I insisted we use. It calls for vegetable oil instead of butter, and TallMan didn't approve of this.

The recipe came from the back of the Hersheys cocoa box, and it is my favorite chocolate cake recipe. (Hersheys is not paying me to make this statement, though I'd be happy if they wanted to.)

TallMan makes a mean ganache, and the friend likes chocolate so I thought we'd make him chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache icing. Well. This is where I opened my mouth and asked TallMan to include some semisweet chocolate so it was a sweeter icing. He is a wonderful boyfriend and did as I asked, despite his reservations.
TallMan is a chemist and could probably better describe what happened next, but my understanding is that the heavy cream replaced the fat in the semi sweet chocolate and all the cocoa butter floated to the top. It was pretty gross. So we tried to skim it off. That didn't work, we just got chocoaltey oil everywhere.

We ended up scrapping the ganache project because it was so oily and gross. (I frosted the cake with the icing recipe on the back of the Hersheys box. So it was a very Hershey cake. And the icing was delicious.) But because we didn't want to waste chocolate wanted to see what would happen to the chocolate we put the oil accumulating on the top in a jar, and the rest of the chocolate "ganache" in another.

The next day this is what they looked like:
The one on the left is the oil, it got very very hard and it looks like white chocolate. Don't worry, I tasted them to see what we were dealing with. It tastes like a creamy cocoa powder, but kind of bitter like cocoa powder. I think this is cocoa butter. The one on the left is chocolatey and delicious and soft. It tastes like the inside of a particularly decadent truffle.

The cool thing about the one on the left is that the cocoa butter/oil/white stuff is marbled all through out it. (There was some hope that we could separate it out and still use the ganache, but nope that's not going to happen).
This picture isn't great, but you can kinda see the marbled quality to it.

I'm hesitant to throw the ruined ganache away, it tastes amazing! Any ideas on what to do with it?

No comments:

Post a Comment