Tuesday, March 3, 2009

TWD Chocolate Armagnac Cake



I thank LyB of And Then I Do The Dishes for selecting this week’s recipe. Check her blog for the recipe and be sure to take a look at the TWD blogroll to see how the other bakers fared with this cake. You can find the recipe also on page 279 of Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan.
This recipe is not difficult to prepare and has so many flavours coming to our tastebuds !! I love it !!
The changes I made were: using whiskey instead of cognac (we don't drink alcohol other than beer or wine and I didn't want to buy another forgotten bottle) and I used hazelnut's meal instead of pecan's.
Last year I went to a pastry class held by a famous Italian pastry chef called Maurizio Santin and one of the many things I learned from him is to divide the amount of sugar between the yolks and the whites (add after the fist bubbles appear) so that the whites have more structure ; it's really important in this case where the whites do all the work, in fact there are no leavening agents other than them !
As you can see the cake WAS so beautiful in the oven !!!!