I'm serious when I say this: I think my head may pop off or explode from so many school-related things in my life.
The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffes of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.
Yes, I'm late. Don't remind me. Between falling asleep in Government to trying really (I mean really) hard not to giggle during Career Strategies (my teacher has a way of wording things hilariously that I have to avoid my sisters' gaze who is also in that class, lest we burst out in a fit of laughter yet again) to trying to figure out what the scientific balance of my glaze experiments for Ceramics class are to reading 100+ pages of text after text after text, to volunteering a weekend at a camp kitchen, feeding 400+ hungry people, to God knows what else, I barely have time to even peek at the blogging world anymroe.
This morning I'm sitting in the computer lab at school, and I think to myself, "Hey! I got an hour! I'll write my blog!" so here ya go.
Well, now I'm distracted by the Russian dude talking to one of my professors across the room. His accent is fascinating and reminds me of the old Rankin Bass Christmas Cartoon "Jack Frost".
Alright, on to the food! When I saw what the challenge was I was pretty excited. It looked delicious and I was fascinated with the whole process and how the whole thing comes together. I made it slightly earlier in the month than I normally can get to them, so that was cool too.
First I started out with the sponge cake layers. Ho hum, not much interesting to comment about them. I've made sponge cake once or twice before in the past, as well as developing my own recipe for sponge cake about a year ago, so it was fairly uneventful in itself. I used an 8 inch cake pan, lined the bottom with parchament paper, baked one layer in each pan, turned the cake upside down out of the pan, then peeled the parchament on, re-used the parchament to make the next layers, so on so forth. I ended up with about 10 layers, as the recipe called for. I made one a bit thinner than the rest, to use for the caramel layer on top.
Ah, yes, the caramel. What a disaster. After rumors flying all over the forums about how much of a beast the caramel was being, I was fairly apprehenzive, though still determined to get it right. No such luck. I boiled the hell out of my sugary syrup, I swear it must have been on the stove at least an hour. Nothing happened except a giant mass of clear bubbles spewing out everywhere in all directions, slowley but surely covering that area of the stove. I eventually lost my patience and threw the syrup over the wedges I had cut from the sponge cake, but to no avail. The cake soaked the syrup up and swam in the remaining syrup which was quite a lot. It wasn't thick like it should have been, it wasn't amber like it should have been, and its extreme lemon flavor seemed a bit akward to go with the rest of the cake even if it had turned out right. So, ah well, I moved on to the buttercream.
I was very optomistic about the buttercream. I followed the recipe almost exactly and it turned out spledidly. The only thing I would change about it is this-if your looking for a nice rich deep chocolate color, use very dark chocolate or you will end up with a tann-ish light brown color. I was hoping for a much darker color, but its all good, it tasted good anyways.
Then I assembled it. 
Oh, I almost forgot. I made a simple syrup infused with hazelnut extract to brush each cake layer with before layering with the buttercream. yeP.
Once I got it all layered and covered nicely with buttercream, my mind floated again to the ruined caramel, which now lay sadly on my kitchen coutner, the little sponge wedges still trying to soak in more failed caramel to justify themselves a place on the much-coveted torta. Poor little wedges. Then I thought, "Aha! I have leftover caramel sauce cockaigne in my fridge from a cheesecake I made recently!" So I piped a border around the edges of the cake with the rest of the buttercream then poured on the caramel sauce. I topped the edges with chocolate bits and called it finished.
And the taste? Amazing. AH-MAZING! My family went nuts.
So anyways, my dobos torta journey ends here for now. I'm off to class. Have a splendid day, my lovelies.
~lacey
"Lacey. You don't know how long I've been praying for something that tastes this good."-Heathyrre Nickell
