Chocolate Biscuits with White Chocolate Buttercream Filling

I mentioned in my last post that there was some white chocolate buttercream left over after making my birthday cake, so I decided to use it to sandwich together some chocolate flavoured biscuits.

This also gave me the chance to try out my new embossed rolling pin - a lovely birthday present from my daughter.

I chose a recipe which I've been using for many years, as I knew it didn't spread in the oven, but to be on the safe side, I also left out the small amount of baking powder which is usually added, as the instructions with the rolling pin stressed that recipes without leavening agents should be used. It was only a small batch of dough, but this was just a trial to see if the recipe worked. The amount of dough in the recipe below made 12 x 6cm diameter biscuits.

To make the biscuit dough, rub 50g butter into 75g plain flour, 25g cornflour and a pinch of salt. (1/2 a teaspoon of baking powder is usually added at this stage). Add 50g caster sugar and a level tablespoon cocoa. Add a teaspoon of coffee essence and enough milk (I used about 50ml of milk with a teaspoon of instant coffee dissolved in it) to make a stiff dough. Knead lightly and roll out on a floured surface with a plain rolling pin, to about 0.5cm in thickness, then roll over once with the embossed rolling pin. Cut into desired shapes and transfer to a baking tray lined with parchment. Try not to handle the surface at this stage. Bake at 180C for 10-12 minutes, then cool on a wire tray. Sandwich with chosen filling.

It took a while to work out how hard I needed to press with the rolling pin, and some of the first biscuits didn't hold the pattern well, but I got enough well-defined biscuits to use as the top layer. I think my dough was a little too sticky initially, as the re-rollings, after flour had been sprinkled about, were the best.

The white chocolate and mascarpone buttercream was very rich, and overwhelmed the flavour of the biscuits somewhat, but that didn't really matter - I got to practice with my rolling pin!

Chocolate Cake with White Chocolate and Mascarpone Buttercream

My son and I both have July birthdays, and we are both chocoholics, which makes decisions on birthday cakes very easy. What's not so easy is finding something new and 'special' to make each year. I was in the process of looking for this year's cake when this recipe from Dan Lepard popped up on my Facebook page. I still miss Dan's weekly column in the Guardian newspaper, so the fact that he has new recipes appearing occasionally on Australian Good Food is very exciting for me. Even though I'm not a big fan of white chocolate (neither eating it nor using it), this cake seemed just what I was looking for, so I was prepared to try white chocolate once more.

My first problem, after reading the recipe, was finding solid-based deep sponge tins. After finding only one brand in my local cookware shop, at £10 a tin, I went for a cheap supermarket brand. I bought 3 tins for less than £10 - my thinking, which proved correct, was that they weren't very deep, so I would probably need to make three layers, rather than two. Incidentally, another surprise, while shopping, was to notice that silicone bakeware has almost disappeared from the marketplace. I've never been a big fan of silicone for large cakes as the early examples were too flexible, and bulged in the wrong places, but  I thought those problems had been overcome. I didn't realise the trend had passed altogether!

The second problem was that the three cakes didn't rise very evenly, probably due to uneven heating. Although I was using the fan oven to cook all three cakes at the same time, two of the cakes were on the same shelf and quite near to the walls of the oven. These irregularities were overcome, when assembling the cake, by slicing an off-centre bulge off one cake, carefully positioning the bottom two cakes so that the overall effect was level, and choosing the best cake for the top layer.

Apart from that everything went smoothly, even though it was quite an unconventional recipe. I decided to use sunflower oil rather than olive oil, but that was the only change I made to the ingredients. Once the cake batter was made and divided between three tins, using scales for accuracy, they only needed 25 minutes in the oven.

I was really careful when melting the white chocolate for the buttercream, as I've always had problems in the past. I used Green and Black's White Cooking Chocolate, as it had the highest levels of cocoa solids of all the brands I could find. I put the bowl of chocolate over a pan of just boiled water and removed it when the chocolate was about 2/3 melted, so that it didn't overheat. I was also careful not to overbeat the mixture when adding the mascarpone and white chocolate to the basic buttercream, as mentioned in the recipe. The recipe made more than enough buttercream to fill and top the three cakes - I still had leftovers, even with the additional layer! Just to finish off, I topped the cake with a dusting of grated 100% cacao

I was very pleased with this cake; the cake layers were dark, rich, tender and very moist - everything you want in a special occasion chocolate cake! The buttercream didn't seem as sweet as I expected, possibly because of the addition of the mascarpone, and complimented the bitter notes of the cake very well. Green and Black's White Cooking Chocolate contains quite a lot of vanilla, and this additional flavour worked well in the buttercream too.

I'm sending this cake to July's We Should Cocoa event, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme. Choclette also has a July birthday, as do many of her friends and family, so wants participants in this long-running event to just celebrate July with chocolate! Anything goes, as far as a theme is concerned, as long as it's celebratory, so my birthday cake should fit in well!

Chocolate Speckled Sponge Cake

I made this cake for the small children who visited over the Christmas period, but it was the adults who seemed to appreciate it more. Several remarked on the flavour of both the cake and the frosting.

The cake was a simple 'all-in-one' 3-egg Victoria Sandwich mixture with 75g of chopped chocolate flake bars (3 bars from a multi-pack) folded in. I baked it is a 9" square tin, but I think it would have been better in an 8" tin to give a slightly deeper cake. The cake took about 45 minutes to bake at 160C. The frosting was a basic butter cream - 100g softened butter, 200g sifted icing sugar, 30g cocoa, 1 tablespoon milk - beaten until light and fluffy with a hand-held mixer. This gave a thin layer of frosting over the cake - I find too much buttercream can  make a cake too sweet and feel too fatty in the mouth. I sprinkled over some sugar coated chocolate balls and some seasonal sugar snowflakes, but any decoration would be suitable; the cake would make a good children's birthday cake as it's not too rich with chocolate.