Wednesday, September 2, 2009

A Late DB Torte

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.


Apologies for a late post. I actually made the challenge a couple of weeks ago, but I just haven't had time to upload the pictures and blog about it. The Dobos Torte is several thin sponge cake layers, all held together and smothered with a wonderful, rich, chocolate butter cream frosting, and a caramel topping.

The recipe was pretty straight forward, though the sponge cake technique was new to me. Rather than bake the cake in a pan, a template was drawn on parchment paper, and the batter was spread in the template. It was kind of fun to see this circle of batter turn into a cake layer.

For the most part, this recipe gave me little trouble. The only snag I had was the caramel. I didn't let it boil down enough (I ran into the Munchkin's bed time, and ran out of time for it), so my top layer was more of a simple syrup layer than a caramel layer. But other than that, everything went really smoothly. And...I have some left over butter cream in the freezer, perhaps for a future batch of cupcakes?

You can find the recipe on Lorraine's blog.