My officemate, Jacob, recently returned to New Zealand with his partner to hatch the baby they’ve been cooking up. I’m pleased for him, especially since, apparently, his desk now overlooks the ocean, rather than a quad where engineering students have barbecues and get drunk on cheap beer and economics and commerce students play loud, bad house music, smear their spray tans and get drunk on Cruisers, but I’m sad to see him go. He was a calm, hardworking, beponytailed presence in the office, patient when I had my regular freak outs, and his absence is palpable. I shall have to hire a New Zealander to come in every now and then to say things like ‘ah, stink’ to ease the transition.
Either way, I decided to make a have-fun-having-your-baby cake. I’d been looking forward to making this red velvet cake for some time, but it didn’t seem quite right. I needed a manly cake for men, especially as the bearded man to not-bearded man/lady ratio at the have-fun-having-your-baby dinner was quite high. So I decided to have a crack at Deb’s legendary peanut butter cake, the kind of cake that must be described in terms usually reserved for Hungry Jacks commercials. Imagine this in Samuel Johnson’s voice: in the original Deb cake, she made three dense sour cream chocolate cakes, layered them with peanut butter cream cheese icing, then finished it with a generous slick of chocolate peanut butter glaze, like a ganache but with, AVERT YOUR EYES, corn syrup. I made a few variations to Deb’s recipe. First, I knew three layers would be way too much for our small party, and there’s nothing sadder than unwanted layer cake, so I decided to use David Lebovitz’ excellent, and very easy, devil’s food cake, for a less extravagant two layer cake. I also roughly halved the quantities of Deb’s peanut butter cream cheese icing, but in the heat of the moment wound up using the entire 225g block of cream cheese as I didn’t want to see it wasted. I upped the sugar a little to compensate. There was leftover icing - there always is - but it’s better to have too much than too little icing.
I also made the glaze with an entire bar of this.
Now, uh, a word on the photographs. Here is a problem: I am lazy, and my kitchen is frequently cluttered. One of the light bulbs in the kitchen blew a few weeks back, so the lighting situation was completely off and I didn’t have it in me to walk down the street to buy a new one. I recently did, and it’s only a 40 watt, so the dismal lighting situation continues. Of course, that is why God invented the 580ex, but with the slightly off lighting and my largely instinctive knowledge of photography things just weren’t working. You don’t want to know how many attempts it took to photograph, ahem, a chocolate wrapper, and my computer is littered with many blurred, poorly exposed, out of focus images of cabbages, peanut butter and cakes, as though they are so many Bigfeet and I am stalking them in the wild. Moral of the story: I suck at lightbulbs and photography, and only have two pictures to illustrate this cake story. None of them include the finished thing. I did take a picture with my iPhone and upload it to the Twitter, though. Here is a better picture of the nude cake.
A note on baking order: in my brief experience making layer cakes, I’ve found it easier to make the cakes the night before, then ice and assemble the next day. I highly recommend glad wrapping the cakes before you throw them in the fridge. I didn’t, and they were a touch dry the next day, but a day-long macerate in butter and cream cheese quickly fixed that.
Mancake, for men
Adapted from David Lebovitz and Smitten Kitchen. Serves 8-10
For cakes:
- 9 tbsp cocoa. I used Dutch process, ’cause that’s how I roll
- 1 1/2 cups flour
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp baking powder.
- 110g butter, softened
- 1 1/2 cups caster sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup coffee. I made a shot in my housemate’s moka and topped it with water to make up 1/2 cup
- 1/2 cup milk
Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Sift together cocoa, flour, salt, and baking soda and powder. Cream together butter and sugar using an electric mixer, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Mix together coffee and milk. Fold half the dry ingredients into butter; add liquid; finish with the second half of dry ingredients. Butter and flour two 20cm sandwich tins and line the bases with circles of baking paper. Divide the mixture between the pans and bake for around 25 minutes, rotating halfway through baking, until a toothpick comes out clean.
Cool on wire racks. If assembling the cake the next day, gladwrap each cooled cake before fridging. My sandwich tins have irritatingly removable bottoms, but it is handy to leave the cakes on the base so they don’t get damaged.
For icing:
- 225g cream cheese, softened
- 60g butter, softened
- 2 1/2 cups icing sugar
- 1/3 cup smooth peanut butter
Cream together cream cheese and butter, then sift in the icing sugar 1/2 cup at a time, beating after each addition. You may need to add a little extra to get the icing stiff enough. When you’re done beat in the peanut butter.
To assemble the cakes, make an empty square out of strips of baking paper on a cake board or plate and centre the bottom layer in the middle of them. You may want to level the layers; I didn’t. Using an offset spatula, spread around 1/2 cup of icing over the first layer, then centre the top layer over it. Do a quick crumb boat, which is to say a thin layer of icing meant to patch the gap between the cakes and bind the crumbs. Stick it in the fridge for 5-10 minutes to let the first coat of icing set, then do a second, thicker coat for smoothness. Put the cake back in the fridge while you make the glaze.
For glaze:
- 230g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
- 3 tbsp smooth peanut butter
- 2 tbsp corn syrup (sometimes labelled as ‘glucose syrup’ in supermarkets)
- 1/2 cup cream or whole milk
Set a small pan of water simmering, then put a glass bowl on top of it. Combine chocolate, peanut butter, corn syrup, and dairy product of choice in bowl and melt together, stirring constantly. While the glaze is still warm pour it over the chilled, iced cake, allowing it to drip and pool over the edges of the cake. Return to the fridge to set before serving.
