A cake fitting for a Canadian's Birthday

Can you say hockey puck?

So Dave P. had his birthday yesterday. It was a small gathering...OK...basically the usual Dutch Blitz cadre of Dave, Torey and I, but I wanted to whip up something tasty for the occasion. The Westside B & B had treated me right on my birthday, and I wanted to return the favor. Since Dave doesn't eat much wheat flour, I thought what could be better than a flourless chocolate cake?

I got some high quality Callebaut bittersweet chocolate from Russo's (courtesy of a gift card, thank you very much P & A), brought it home, and started melting it. Here's where things went south. I added Costco unsalted butter, which I've decided is unacceptable. My butt's been burned by their butter one too many times--I think it has way too much water content to be good for anything other than sauteing veggies. Regardless, the butter didn't mix and blend with the chocolate very well, which usually happens fine, as long as there's a high enough fat content in the butter. Problem number two: I used Splenda, because Dave avoids sugar in his diet. I think Splenda must have a shelf life, because this stuff is about two years old, and it hardly dissolved at all. Made a crumbly, crackly mess of the chocolate mixture. I knew things were not looking good, so I whisked it like crazy, hoping for the best.

I went ahead and got the eggs whipped up, and went to fold them in. The chocolate mixture was looking awful, and it looked like it had "broken," which means that the emulsification between the fat and water had come apart. This has never happened to me before, and I'm convinced it is the Costco butter, combined with the use of Splenda. I trudged on, trying to mix the eggs into the chocolate. Now, if the chocolate is successfully emulsified, it will mix very easily with eggs, which are naturally emulsifying agents. They're essentially water, protein and fat, already emulsified. If a sauce is broken, they won't mix as readily, and that's what happened. The only way to mix it all together was to grab the whisk, and whip it all together. That deflates the egges, defeating the purpose of whipping them, which introduce millions of tiny air bubbles into the batter, preventing hockey puckdom.

The result if you are forced to whip them in rather than fold them? Dave's birthday cake, as seen above.

I bought him a bottle of Chimay Grand Reserve beer, and two Aruturo Fuente Gran Reserva cigars instead. Which made everybody very happy, me included.