Millenium Falcon Salted Caramel Cake

May the fourth be with you!

Again another year has rolled passed. While I don’t care much about any kind of holiday and special cooking and baking for it, I like May the 4th – Star Wars Day, well I like the pun on the phrase “May the force be with you!” Fine, I liked the movies, too.

But that’s it. Ah, well, when I have the chance I bake something … and I reckon, I will go to the cinema to watch episode VIII in December.

However, I am not going to send a model of a spacecraft into space in order to get some attention. Hm …!?! Maybe I could sent a cake of a spacecraft into space …

Anyway, during the weekend I was talking to a friend and he suggested I could maybe make a Death Star cake. Nah, that would be too much work. What about some cupcakes. We arranged some batter and added green food colouring. After baking, the idea was to add some marzipan to make them look like Yoda heads. Well, the cupcakes didn’t turn out that green and the homemade marzipan not that good for modelling, although it tasted very yummy due to the addition of Amaretto.

Then I got an idea for May the 4th …

A rough sketch of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars that would help me the next day to build a Millennium Falcon cake.

We would need a sponge and some sort of filling or topping. I did some more pondering and researching …

I wanted something with caramel and cream cheese. A quick look at the basics again for achieving it and we are off to shopping. Maybe a marzipan cover would be lovely.

Shopping ready! Now, let’s go for it …

Ingredients:
Sponge:
225 g butter
225 g sugar
4 eggs
225 g (self-rising) flour
1 tsp baking powder
Vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
Salted Caramel Sauce:
200 g brown sugar
85 g butter
120 ml cream
Vanilla extract
1 tsp fleur de sel (or sea salt)
Buttercream:
225 g butter
115 g cream cheese
Vanilla extract
The salted caramel sauce
400 g icing sugar

Method:
Don’t worry, the sponge is just a standard sponge as you might use for a Victoria Sponge cake as well. So, if you don’t feel like Star Wars, have a normal round one, but …

We feel like Star Wars now. After all, John Williams is assisting us through the whole process. So turn up the volume of your speakers. Yes, it would be best this post comes with a soundtrack,but if you want to hear anything, you have to put on the music yourself.

Fine, “Bake we must!”

Take a bowl, add the butter and the sugar for the sponge and get whisking … until it’s fluffy.

Yeah, I don’t know whether that is fluffy, but that’s the way I’m gonna use it. Crack one egg into it. Beat it. Crack another egg. Beat it again. Next egg. More beating. Last egg. Finish beating. Add the vanilla extract.

Now sift in the flour and the baking powder. Don’t forget a pinch of salt. Incorporate everything to get a smooth batter.

For the baking the oven is heated up to 180 °C.

Line a baking tray with baking parchment and spread the batter on it …

Like this it goes into the oven for 25 minutes.

At this point you could be tempted to start the salted caramel sauce. Don’t do it! see where you can tidy up things while the sponge is baking.

Remove the sponge from the oven and give it time to cool down.

Now you can feel free to start the salted caramel sauce. Get yourself a saucepan and add the brown sugar and cover it all with water. Place the remaining ingredients for the sauce nearby …

Put on the heat … full power … energise!

The sauce seems a bit tricky. Obviously, you can’t see when the sugar starts to get an amber colour, for it already has such. Hear it is, where you need to use the force, you need to feel it. Well, you don’t have to close your eyes for the next step, but if you want it, go for it.

Reach out with your senses and feel the caramel getting ready as the liquid is bubbling away. You will sense a change in the bubbling or a tremor in the force …

When that happens, reduce the heat from full to medium, get a wooden spoon into your right hand … eh … or left hand, if you prefer that. Start stirring.

Throw in the butter. Stir and watch it melt away.

Pour in the cream and watch it distribute, stirring all the time.

Add the vanilla extract and the fleur de sell (sea salt), while you continue stirring.

At this point, I turned off the heat and continued stirring with the remaining heat until the caramel sauce stopped bubbling. Then set it aside for cooling.

Back to the sponge. I cut it into half and placed one piece above the other to follow my Millennium Falcon blueprint to cut it out of the sponge.

Hm … it looked … okay …

That will do. In order to be able to proceed here, we need the buttercream ready.

Another bowl, some more whisking and we are ready …

Add the butter and the cream cheese to the bowl and whisk it together. There goes another bit of vanilla extract.

The salted caramel sauce isn’t that hot anymore, so we can spoon it into the bowl as well and mix it in thoroughly.

Bit by bit we add the 400 g icing sugar. That sounds like awful a lot. No worries! Combine it all well. Ah, that looks like awful a lot of buttercream. Fine, we are going to use it all up anyway.

Spread a layer of … let’s say one third of it … on the bottom sponge …

Carefully place the top sponge … eh … on top of it. No big deal, huh?

Use some of the sponge cuttings to create a satellite dish, a round object placed on a wedge.

It’s time to use up that remaining buttercream and cover the whole cake in it. Give it your best to get the cream on. If you have any cream in undesired places, I’m afraid you have to remove it and eat it up. Well, that’s what I did.

Hm, you get an idea of the Millennium Falcon at this point, but we still can do better with some chocolate buttons and a bit chocolate from a decorating pen …

That’s it. In order for my cake decorating skills to improve, I reckon I have to do a few more cakes. Well … if I get any ideas, that is.

When I was younger … much younger … I never had a Millennium Falcon model, but now I have a Millennium Falcon cake and … the only thing can do with it, is eat it up. However, considering the over 500 g of sugar and the amount of sugar in it, I guess, I have to enlist the help of others to deal with the cake. Otherwise I’ll have a BIG problem.

So, if you are i the neighbourhood anytime soon …

Well, I had a model of a TIE-fighter once. I already thought of making some TIE-fighters with cookies and marzipan or even a marzipan X-Wing, but … that would have been a lot harder.

Speaking of marzipan, there was no room for a marzipan cover here, so I definitely have to make some more cake involving that soon.

For the time being, though, I wish you a lovely day and … if you feel like it … share some of your Star Wars Day creations in below in the comment section.

Otherwise, have a delicious Salted Caramel cake …

• nicht mit Facebook verbunden

Bookmarked Recipe: Chocolate Guinness Cake

You know and I know it as well, that you don't have as much time as you would like to have to read through all the interesting blog posts around and read also new blogs. At times I read only those catching my interest already with the title.
The next step: trying things you read on other blogs. While I wouldn't limit it to those, the recipes I tried - on the average - where mostly those that contain chocolate in some form. Tricky!
There were times I even managed to try a recipe that I have just read. So, it's like going from computer to kitchen and go for it. That's good.
Sometimes, though, things are not that easy. A recipe I would have tried right away was the Chocolate Guinness Cake, JibberJabberUK wrote about.
When I first read it, I was short of one ingredient. So the cake would have looked like that ...

Looking like that wouldn't be a problem in itself, but I wanted to go for the whole thing. 
Due to this, I first had to get some cream cheese. Obviously, without it the cake wouldn't be complete.
Some people to whom I talked about a chocolate Guinness cake shrank back at the thought of beer in a cake. However, for those experimenting regularly in the kitchen and not being afraid of trying new things, you know that it works perfectly and gives a rich intense chocolate flavour. I liked that.
Now back to the baking. As I was shopping for food one day, I remembered I need cream cheese. So I bought a pack. 
Finally I was getting ready to do the cake. Proper planning and shopping would have been better. I didn't have the yogurt mentioned in the recipe. What now? I replaced it with milk that got a splash of lemon. I thought that might do the trick. I didn't notice anything negative afterwards.
The other fact hitting me was, that while I got some cream cheese, it was just a little bit of half what I needed. Consequently the cake ended up like this ...

I got a bit of icing training, but somehow it should have been more. No matter how it looked like now, it was absolutely worth trying that recipe. So, why don't you head over to JibberJabberUK and try it, too.
As we have come nearly to the close of this post I add it to the April Bookmarked Recipes over at Tinned Tomatoes.

For sure there will be more recipes worth trying ...

Hanoi Lemongrass Cheesecake

I was thinking ... yes, for a change ... and it came to my mind ... right, I haven't lost it completely ... that there was this lovely blog hop I used to join in once in a while. It is called The Sweet Adventures Blog Hop, in short SABH.
The SABH is presented by Delicieux, The Hungry Australian, Dining With a Stud, The Capers of the Kitchen Crusader, and 84th & 3rd. I had a look and ... the theme for this month is cake and three veg.
Here I am now, somehow I have to bake a cake with veg in it. The only things that come to my mind are carrots and beetroot in a cake ... that is, a sweet cake. If you have a look at the other blogs later (as would be recommended) you see how inventive others have been.
After some research through various books and taken the ingredients I have at home I came to this: Hanoi Lemongrass Cheesecake.

Well, lemongrass is used as a herb in the Asian cuisine and you for sure wouldn't call it a veg. What about the veg then? I used carrots. In fact you could call this cake also: Lemongrass-Lime-Ginger-Carrot-Chocolate-Cheesecake.
However, that would not sound as intriguing as the name I came up with friends from the net. I try this cake exclusively for this Blog Hop. I have no experiences with it, as I never did it before. We will see, how things end up. So, let's do Hanoi Lemongrass Cheesecake. 
Ready, set, bake ...

Ingredients, here they come:
Cake base:
300 g flour
14 g baking powder
Pinch of salt 
1 tbs cocoa powder
50 g brown sugar
100 g of carrots
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
150 g yogurt
2 tbs of vegetable oil
2 eggs or 4 egg whites

Cheese topping:
400 g cream cheese
100 g sugar
2 eggs
2 tbs milk
1 stalk of lemongrass
Zest of one lime

Chocolate topping:
100 g 25 g of chocolate (I thought I needed more, but I didn't)

How the experimenting went:
First of all we like to concentrate on the cake dough.
I mixed all dry ingredients together in one bowl, that is sifted the flour with the baking powder in, added the brown sugar and cocoa powder, and, not to forget, the pinch of salt.
Then I concentrated on the other ingredients with a different bowl. I put in the yogurt and the oil. Time for grating ...
The carrots and the ginger were grated to the yogurt. The oil and the eggs (or egg whites) joined. A little bit of mixing was due then.
It's time for the contents of both bowls to join forces together. Therefore I added the yogurt mixture to the flour mixture and ... of course ... mixed everything together into a brown and sticky dough.
Already before all that, I had a spring tin form greased. This was ready now to receive the dough ... sometimes, though, I wish afterwards I had used baking paper, but ... I didn't.
With a rubber spatula I tried to level things out and once that was accomplished more or less, the cake went to the oven for 10 minutes at 200°C.

That 10 minutes is exactly the time I wanted to use to prepare the cheese topping.
No need to panic! Really?
We just have to mix all the ingredients for the cheese topping together. Well, not exactly. The lemongrass needs chopping up, as fine as possible. Of course, I didn't forget to grate in the zest of the lime.
10 minutes over. I made it!

I removed the cake from the oven and turned up the heat to 225°C.
Now the cheese topping goes onto the cake ... on top. Oh, oh, it seems quite liquidish. Will it set properly? No worries, we will see.
Back goes the cake into the oven for 15 minutes. Then the heat is reduced to 125°C and the cake stays in the oven for another 30 minutes.

After that the cake needs cooling down and somehow we have to figure out to remove it from the tin without destroying it again ... hard job.
Anyway, I couldn't even wait properly for the cake to cool down. It was getting late. I wanted to eat the cake at a proper cake time ... what nonsense am I talking ... cake time could be anytime.
Whatsoever, I grated some chocolate over the cake. Somehow it melted partways, but i wasn't bothered. After all I had to take some pictures and have cake.

What would you say? Will such a cake taste nice, delicious, wonderful, or whatever good?
It did! You will not be disappointed.
Although now, it was the first time I tried this cake, I can only say, it's worth a try ...

 Now back to the SABH ...

I hope you enjoyed the Hanoi Lemongrass Cheesecake!

For sure you will enjoy the other entries ...