Under the Wire: Tortelicious

Well, my blog seems to have eaten the description of the sacher torte-making extravaganza that I saved yesterday, so, dear readers, you will be getting a much-abbreviated version. Thanks to Sweet & Savory for burning the heck out of her cake. Her post made me super cautious about the bake time on the epicurious recipe, which I also used. I ended up pulling the torte out of the oven at about 30 minutes, instead of the recommended 45 minutes.

Piper has stretched her feeding times to every three hours instead of every two, but that still wasn't enough time to both make the cake (using every bowl in the kitchen) and the two glazes, so I split this into a two-day process. First, we had to have photo shoot with Piper and the ingredients:

The torte itself took quite a long time to make what with all the chocolate melting, egg separating, egg-white beating, etc. And, does anyone else hate cleaning up melted chocolate? Two years of working at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory in college and I'm still grossed out by the slippery, slimy feel of cleaning out of pot of melted chocolate. But, I love beating egg whites - the finished product is so satisfying. And, I love my grandma's 1960s mixer I inherited, the MixMaster (there is a Beastie Boys joke in here somewhere, but I haven't the energy to find it-Rena, a little help?):

Of course, there is the list of things that may have gone wrong (I'm guaranteed to have such a list during every project):

I may have used seven eggs instead of six.

I don't have a candy thermometer, so had to guess on the chocolate glaze temperature (burned the hell out of my tongue, too!).

I don't have a wire cooling rack, so both apricot and chocolate glaze pooled on the serving plate.

I eschewed the use of parchment paper (too much work!) and had to pry the cake off the bottom of the pan, losing a bit in the process.

But overall, it was a fun cake to bake. We'll test it out tonight when Kelly comes for dinner.