For Christmas I bought Drew a Hungarian cookbook (he wants to be a chef). It has the most basic Hungarian foods in it, from gulyas leves, Jokai bableves, rakott krumpli, paprikas krumpli, turos csusza,
szilvas gomboc, to Dobos torta. Of course there are many more things in there, but these are the ones that pop into my head right now. Now, Drew is not a person who likes sweets a whole lot, but Dobos torta immediately stood out for him. Perfectly understandable. For those who are not aware of what this is, it is a layered sponge cake with chocolate mousse type of filling in between the layers and on the outside. It is topped off with a layer of hard caramel. Incredibly delicious if it is done correctly.So, Drew and I decided that we will try to make Dobos torta. We went and bought the eggs (we needed 11!) and began. Since we didn't have 6 23cm round pans to bake each layer, we decided to adapt and do it twice and cut each cake into three layers. (It seems like adapting to the situation is something we do very often here at Casa Cares.) When we poured half of the batter into the pan, it seemed like a very little amount, so we poured the entire thing and decided to cut that into layers, not necessarily 6. Well, when it baked, it had a huge bubble on the top, that did end up deflating, but it was still very thin! So we skipped the whole cutting into layers and decided to just quarter the cake and have a very small cake. Now comes the filling. The recipe said to melt the chocolate and cocoa powder together. That wasn't happening. It was this clumpy mess that would not melt into smooth chocolate. So we put it in to microwave. It still wouldn't melt. So we just put it with the butter and finally it was a smooth liquid. I think the only thing that we did do right was the egg white part. We had to whip it with sugar into stiff peaks and fold it into the chocolate and butter. Now we had the filling. But it was definitely TOO much for that little cake. So we put as much as possible on the inside and outside and we still had at least half of the icing left over. I am currently working on licking the bowl, but it is soo rich! It takes like chocolate marshmallow. I have a glass of milk next to me and the bowl, so we shall see what happens. (We have normal milk now! Elisa introduced us to actual milk and Drew and I also bought some more of that today. The milk we normally have is not so great.) I might not be having dinner tonight...
When the cake came out of the oven, it smelt a lot like eggs. It smelled fine to me, since it was supposed to be piskota, but Drew was concerned. Hmm. The "cake" was to thin to slice into several layers, so we just quartered it and stacked them on top of each other. We spread the icing on it and called it a cake. We stuck in the fridge to set and went to get Rike (she spent the day in Florence, so she didn't get to experience this mess!). After we ate dinner, we decided to try the cake. Oh goodness. Our reactions were simply priceless. Eating a "cake" that tastes like frittata (basically, an omlette) that has the texture of polenta (a corn meal dish) covered in chocolate? You be the judge of that. The picture of the Drew and Rike explains all:
As we were attempting to eat this concoction, tears were rolling down from our eyes, because we were laughing so hard. We ended up throwing it out because we were afraid of eating more of this and getting sick. Plus, the original plan was to take a slice to Paul, who is in the hospital recovering from a hip surgery, and we simply can't take something like this to him (he LOVES pastries!)!We had plenty of the cream left over, but that was fine. We all kept eating it, either alone or with some cookies as a cookie sandwich. I even put it in my coffee. It was like eating chocolate marshmallows. :)
Making of Dobos Torta-Attempt #2
We felt so awful for the previous disaster, so we just had to try again! We looked up another recipe online, which claims to be the original one, and decided to go with that. But, it's not that easy. For lunch Drew made deviled eggs. We needed 15 eggs for that recipe and he left 14 eggs by accident, using too many eggs at lunch. So we decided to use the "original" recipe for the dough and the cream will the same as last week, so we were fine the number of eggs. Everything turned out fairly ok this time. The dough was nice and fluffy, the way it should be. Now the only problem was how to bake them. We decided the simplest way to do them would be like making crepes. So we put the batter into the pan and cooked them. We couldn't spread them completely into the pan to get a perfect round shape so we came to the conclusion to make individual one. So we cut little rounds with a cup and spread the chocolate cream in between. To get the hard top, you have to melt sugar and spread it on one of the layers. Well, I melted the sugar and poured it on top of the individual tops. Since this is caramel, it hardens quick! And that is exactly what happened. I was able to get one of the rounds off the plate before the sugar hardened completely, but the others stuck! We tried to get them out by using a sharp knife, but that only broke the sugar and the layer along with it. So, we stuck it in the microwave to melt the sugar a bit so we could get it off, and that was perfect! Rike frosted the layers in between, Drew the outside, and Rike again with the tops. The results were wonderful. Here are some pictures of the entire process.
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