Mr Shuck and I were invited to a Superbowl party and the host suggested that I bring “baked goods”. I tried to go with a football theme…
I started with a Chocolate Stout Cake recipe that just happened to be in the February issue of PCC Natural Markets’ Taste magazine. I had to make a couple of substitutions. Instead of 1 cup butter, I used 1 stick of butter and 1/2 cup coconut oil (because I forgot to get butter when I went to the grocery store.) I also didn’t have any instant coffee, so I used 2 Starbucks Via packets. Also, lately I’ve been adding some cornstarch to my Bob’s Red Mill Whole Wheat Pastry flour to make it a little lighter. I found the ratio at Joy the Baker. Instead of 2 cups of all purpose flour, I used 1 & 3/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour and 1/4 cup cornstarch, sifted together. This has got to be the best chocolate cake recipe I’ve used. It’s light but has a very rich chocolate flavor. You can’t taste the beer at all. I made one rectangular cake (to turn into “footballs”) which baked for around 35 minutes, some regular sized cupcakes that baked for 20 minutes, and some mini’s, which baked for 13 minutes.
For the icing, I used Aida Mollenkamp’s Whipped Cream Cheese frosting that I found at Chow.com. I used 1/2 cream cheese and 1/2 mascarpone cheese to lighten the flavor up a bit. I like this recipe because it does not have very much sugar in it. I don’t normally use artificial coloring, but I needed some AstroTurf for my football, so I added a little green.
I use Cacao Barry’s Extra Brute cocoa powder and it makes the cake very dark.
For the grass effect, I colored some flaked coconut green…
And dipped the cakes into it…
I accidentally “fixed” the above photo and didn’t save the original. It looks like it would glow with the lights out.
To make the footballs, I made some ganache using 8 ounces of Callebaut 60/40 and 1/2 cup of heavy cream. While this cooled, I crumbled up the previously cooked rectangular cake. I added enough of the ganache to make the cake hold together and made football shaped cake balls. To make them uniformly sized, I scooped the “dough” with a one ounce scoop. They went into the freezer for a few hours to solidify.
Once firm, I dipped them into melted chocolate flavored Candiquik
and used Wilton Candy Melts to make the stitches
Hopefully dipping the chocolate will get more attractive with practice. I really like making the cake truffles. They are delicious and very easy. Although I made this all in a few hours, it would be easy to do each part on a different day when I have 20-30 minutes at a time.
The end result:
