There is a fabulous Italian restaurant and winery about twenty-five miles outside of Austin that Mr. L and I would frequent when we lived in South Austin. It’s called Trattoria Lisina, and is seriously one of the most fabulous places to eat if you are ever in the area. And by “the area,” I mean YOU MUST STOP THERE if you are anywhere near Austin or traveling on I-35 south of Austin. It’s a bit off the beaten path, but well worth the visit. Not only is the traditional Italian fare delicious, but the setting is also beautiful.
The restaurant has a to-die-for salted caramel chocolate cake on its dessert menu, appropriately named the Torta Cicoccolata con Caramela. The cake consists of layers of moist chocolate cake with a gooey salted caramel sauce between each layer. The whole cake is covered in a ganache-type icing that, together with the chocolate cake and caramel, tastes like pure heaven.
So when I was perusing Pinterest one day and stumbled upon a picture of an incredibly decadent-looking salted caramel cake that looked very similar to the one at Trattoria Lisina, I immediately showed Mr. L, who proceeded to request (very sweetly, I might add!) that I make it for his birthday cake. Now Mr. L and I have a tradition in which I bake him a cake for his birthday every year. The first year we were married, he requested a Grand Marnier Cake with Neoclassic Orange Buttercream from Cooks Illustrated. The cake, icing, and syrup took me over five hours to make, and then we laughed at the end of it because it tasted exactly like our wedding cake, which we had been trying to chisel away for nearly a month after our wedding.
Spending so much time on a cake may seem crazy, but I love to bake and love to have an excuse to try out new recipes. I see each forthcoming year as a challenge. So, needless to say, I was excited when Mr. L requested the salted caramel cake that I saw on Pinterest for his birthday . . . UNTIL I clicked the link and realized it was a Martha Stewart recipe. Sigh. I have a love-hate relationship with Martha Stewart, or “Mar” as she is affectionately called in our family. Everything she makes looks fabulous and everything she touches seems effortless (I mean, how DOES she pour liquid ingredients into her KitchenAid Mixer without glopping them all over the side of the mixer top?!), but I suspect a lot of help comes from crafty food editors who clean up the gloops and color within the lines. I have committed a good amount of my time to some “Martha Challenges” that seemed doable and have ended up with complete duds. Craft fail.
I was horrified to learn that I would be embarking on another Martha Stewart pipe dream. Add to that horror the fact that I was three months postpartum with Little L. But the challenge was accepted, so I set Little L up in his bouncer and got to baking.
There are three components to the Martha Stewart Salted-Caramel Six(!)-Layer Chocolate Cake–the cake, the caramel, and the frosting. The cake is easy enough and actually might be one of the easiest cakes I have ever made from scratch. You basically just throw all of the ingredients into the mixer and mix and then divvy it out between the cake pans. Easy! Oh wait. Except for the fact that you are basically making THREE cakes (each of which you cut in half to achieve the six layers). I don’t know about everyone else, but my oven ain’t no professional oven. It fits two cake pans. Two. Not three. There might be a way to use two oven racks and then switch the pan positioning around midway, but I didn’t want to take the chance of disrupting the oven temperature by opening the oven door during the bake cycle. And Mar didn’t offer any solutions. So I baked three cakes, two at the same time and then the third one after the first two were done.
Then came the homemade caramel. Because of my acquired distrust for Martha Stewart recipes, I spent a great deal of time reading the comments to the recipe. Next to the fact that water should be listed as an ingredient in the ingredient list, but isn’t, there are a significant number of negative comments about the caramel sauce. A lot of people burned the sugar. There’s even a comment from a self-described Le Cordon Bleu cooking school grad who says she learned how to make caramel in school, and, according to her, Mar’s recipe is profoundly wrong. Several people recommended buying pre-made caramel sauce to save time, but I’m a stickler for making recipes from scratch. Plus, I had never made caramel before, and as a caramel lover, I figured it would be a good technique to add to my repertoire. So I turned to the Internet and found a salted caramel recipe that had “easy” in the description. I highly recommend checking out the recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction. The only problem was that I needed FOUR batches of Sally’s easy caramel sauce in order to have enough for each layer of cake. I didn’t want to quadruple the recipe because working in smaller batches helps with heating issues and is part of what makes the recipe “easy.” So I made four batches. Four. Easy. Batches. Read this as STIR, STIR, STIR! ENTERTAIN BABY! STIR, STIR, STIR! ENTERTAIN BABY! But I did it. I also made a huge mess, but the caramel tasted delicious.
Making the frosting was a fairly straightforward process, but it was also a mess thanks to the elusive pour-the-melted-chocolate-into-the-mixer-without-getting-it-all-over-the-mixer technique. Add one baby, and you have a partridge in a pear tree.
The “icing on the cake” was the fact that the finished product looked like the Leaning Tower of Piza. The caramel warmed up while I was trying to frost the whole six-layer monstrosity, and it started to lean. I did the best I could to straighten it out (and, let’s face it, it was a great excuse to have chocolate frosting on my fingers), but there was no stopping gravity. And fluidity. Let’s just say physics was not on my side that day.
And then we tried it. Aaaannnd we didn’t like it. While each individual component was amazing, all components combined were just too rich. You felt sick after taking just one bite. Everyone who tried it felt horrible about it. Mr. L knew I had slaved away all afternoon baking the cake. For it to turn out inedible was a travesty.
But all was not lost. The next morning, Mr. L called me over to try a piece of cake he had sliced for breakfast (yeah, we do that). He had sliced it super thin (like a 1/2 inch). And it tasted delicious. THAT was the key to the cake. The cake is so decadent that it must be experienced in moderation. It just doesn’t taste good if it is served as a traditional cake wedge. It is amazing if sliced thin. So the hours I labored away baking the six-layer cake from you-know-where were not in vain. But after the whole ordeal, I stated that I would never make the cake again. Mar strikes again.
Fast forward one year. Mr. L’s birthday is approaching, and we lament how we haven’t been to Tratorria Lisina since Little L was born and how he really misses that cake. And then he does it. He ever-so-sweetly asks if I would consider making the salted caramel cake again for his birthday this year. He knows its a lot of work, he says, but it was just so good and blah blah blah. And because I’m a sucker for compliments (and, let’s face it–chocolate), I agree to do it.
Despite the fact that Little L is now mobile and that I had to squeeze the entire cake-making process into his tenuous nap schedule, it actually wasn’t too bad the second time around. And the odd thing is, it didn’t go more smoothly because I somehow remembered the process from last time. Here’s what I did to turn things around:
- First, I came to terms with the reality that a six-layer birthday cake is just ridiculous. Indeed, I’m not sure when a six-layer cake is EVER ok if you’re baking it yourself. So I reduced the cake recipe by 1/3, which resulted in two cakes (four layers), oven space, and a non-leaning cake. (I should also note that I did not reduce the caramel and frosting recipes, but I could have. My logic was that one cannot have too much caramel and chocolate frosting. You’ll have a lot left over, but they make great ice-cream toppings). Also, I made the cakes the day before and refrigerated them overnight in plastic wrap. Here’s the reduced ingredient list if you want to do the same (see Mar’s instructions and the full recipe here):
2 c. flour
2 c. granulated sugar
1 c. cocoa powder (I used Hershey’s)
2 tsp. baking soda
2 and 1/3 egg (I know. Annoying. I beat the last egg in a bowl and then poured in a third of the beaten egg)
1 c. buttermilk
6 tbsp. + 1 tsp. safflower oil
1 tsp. vanilla
- Second, I took a leap of faith and went with Mar’s caramel recipe. Four cups of sugar in one big batch. And oh my gosh it was amazing!!! I will admit that it is a bit tricky to determine when the sugar has reached the “dark amber” color (better to pull it sooner than later), and I’m pretty sure you need a gas stovetop for the caramel to reach the desired temperature by Martha’s estimated two-minute mark, but I DID IT. I made the caramel from scratch. (Sorry Mar for doubting you).
- Third, I actually read the part in the instructions that recommended refrigerating the cake before frosting it. This helps keep the cake in one solid piece and stops the caramel from oozing out the sides.
Now I don’t know how to get the cake looking like the one in the photo on Martha Stewart’s webpage, but I’m chalking that one up to the food editor fairies. It’s cake. If it’s worth eating, then you don’t have to look at it the whole time. And, in my opinion, this one is worth giving a go.
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