Dobos Torte

It's been fricken month's since I posted on this thing which sucks but oh well. I figured since all my friends are busy, I got some time now to post something new lol! so bored and ronery :P

So my Boobie recently had his sweet sixteen, so I decided we had to do something special and make a cake. And if anyone knows anything about shit, they know that a cake is a minimum two man job so I enlisted my second right hand Stefy to help me lololol

Dobos Torte
From a cake book in chapters... I stole recipe lolol I wish I knew the name of it

Sucks I didn't get a picture of the cake on its plate without the wax paper and excess nuts at the bottom lol

The cake we made is called a Dobos Torte and is named after the Hungarian chef that created it. It's a multi-layer sponge cake with chocolate buttercream with a hazelnut and walnut crust. It is garnished with cake slices covered with caramel and dipped in chocolate on top. Or as my pal Fricke describes... slices of pizza on top lol! Basically, thank god this cake isn't a fucking meringue cake jesus christ lol! Also, this cake (like any cake Shtack and I make) is so bad for you lol! 1 slice might actually kill you.

Ingredients
For the Cake:
Typical shit like cake flour, salt, a million eggs, icing (confectioners') sugar, and vanilla
For the buttercream:
bittersweet chocolate, icing sugar, unsweetened cocoa powder, vanilla, and a million sticks of unsalted butter

Notes to ingredients
- Chocolate: A while ago I bought Callebaut Semi Sweet 51.8% chocolate for the other cakes I made. This time I used Lindt Semi Sweet 49% chocolate and I liked this one way better I think. I'm just nerding this up hard. I KNOW whoever would read this doesn't care about that at all...moving on
- Cake flour: So I hang out with a lot of lazy and/or cheap fucks and no one I know is as precise about cooking as I am. Point is, there is a huge difference between cake flour and all purpose flour. I cringe when I imagine a situation where someone doesn't have cake flour and they will substitute it with all-purpose cuz they are too lazy to go out and buy a new bag of cake flour. Basically, all flours have a certain % of protein content and that affects the gluten present in the flour. That gluten determines the elasticity of the product and controls how chewy it is, how much the batter/dough rises etc. Cake flour has the least amount of protein content and is much finer. Therefore they are perfect for cakes and cupcakes as it minimizes how much the batter rises when it cooks and makes the cakes "light" and "fluffy". All-purpose flour is good for bread or cookies because you need a chewy consistency and you need a dough that rises (with the help of water, yeast and kneading).
TL;DR...use the right fucking ingredients!

Cooking
Making the Sponge Cake:
- Always sift the flour when you put it in the bowl... Stefy
- We had to beat the yolks until pale and thick. Pretty generic so we had to guess what that should look like
- Then we had to mix the egg whites with some sugar until stiff peaks but I didn't get it to make stiff peaks after so long so I just gave up when it seemed thick enough lolol There's a lot of generic instructions that you have to power through. Stupid cook books.
- We only had 2 9-inch cake pans and had like 7 layers to make. Luckily these layers were so thin it took like 5 -8 min to bake.
- Protip: A lot of people just butter the pans before putting the batter in. You gotta butter AND flour the pans. The butter tends to stick and prevent cakes from rising properly so the flour helps with that. Just sift a small handful of flour on your cake pans after you butter/grease them
- Protip: Smack the cake pans on the table to get the air bubbles out. I did it but I was a scrub and didn't do it enough. You have to bang like 20 times and you can see like a hundred bubbles rise to the top. Your cake will be very flat and pro if you do this. We only did this with the last layer... the first 6 were so shitty lol!
Melting Chocolate
- As easy as it sounds you can still make mistakes. Haters out there might be so offended that I'm even writing about this lololol
- What I mean is there there are typically two methods people choose when they melt chocolate. Double boiler or microwave. Double boiler is when you steam some water and put a heatproof container like a metal bowl top of it and use the heat from the steam to melt the chocolate. This method is fine, except for the fact that you have a great chance of having steam get in contact with the chocolate and when that happens your chocolate will seize, meaning it will become hard and lumpy. Plus with a double boiler you need to constantly stir so it doesn't burn. The microwave is my method of choice because no water is involved. Just put your microwave at 50% power, melt it in 30 second intervals, take it out, stir and mix it up and keep doing it until it is melted. Make sure there is no water in your bowl or spoon or whatever :D
-Also, melting chocolate is easy when  you have even pieces. So if you have a block of chocolate then you gotta take the extra step and shave the chocolate so it is even
Making Caramel:
- Caramel is usually water and sugar but this time it had butter and lemon juice and that made it a slightly different experience lol. I hate making caramel so Stefy gave it a shot and he did it pro! He is now the caramel master.
- We had to cook it until it was "caramel" colour lawl. It took a while to cook the caramel at medium heat so we turned it up and it changed colour faster so make sure you don't over cook or it dries out really hard
- Protip: When you make caramel, it dries in your saucepan really fast and makes it hard to clean out. Just put water in it, bring it to a boil and pour out the water when the caramel dissolves. Just remember, caramel is just water and sugar :)

That's about it. Assembly is pretty easy. Maybe not but this post is long enough already. That reminds me, I need an icing spatula lolol. Sorry for the ridiculously long post. There was a lot of shit to talk about and as you can see... it was all gold :)