Buckwheat Cake Tiramisu
Source: Olia Hercules 'Home Food: Recipes to Comfort and Connect'
My first ever restaurant job (at a bistro in Fulham) put me under the wing of a bunch of ex-Jamie Oliver Fifteen chefs: Aaron Craze, Richard Blackwell and Slim. The first two shared the head chef position and Slim was the sous chef. He made the best tiramisu I’d ever tried. I asked for the recipe and he gave it to me. It involved this cool technique I’d never tried before: pâté à bombe, to make the cream. It was the Fifteen restaurant tiramisu, he said. Fifteen sadly no longer exists, nor does the recipe Slim shared (I lost it), but I am attempting to recreate it here.
You can use this cream recipe and go with the more traditional savoiardi lady fingers, but I do implore you to try it with buckwheat sponge. Buckwheat and coffee is such a brilliant combination, and this cloud of a cream just makes for the most indulgent experience. It’s a very good make-ahead pudding, as the cake benefits from being a couple of days old. The cream, by the way, makes a really wonderful no-churn ice cream. Simply scoop it into a tub and stick in the freezer, then thaw a little bit, scoop and serve!
Ingredients
-
4 egg yolks
-
150g caster sugar
-
100ml water
-
500g mascarpone
-
300g double cream
-
1 Greta’s Lithuanian Buckwheat Cake, ideally a day old (see page 254)
-
300ml strong coffee (espresso), cooled down
-
4 tbsp Cognac, or other booze you like
-
cocoa powder, to dust
-
sea salt
Method
-
First you need to make pâté à bombe: egg yolks whisked into a foam with very hot sugar syrup. Trust me, I have a sugar syrup phobia, but I find this process very easy. In many recipes they say the sugar syrup must be 118°C, but I have made this plenty of times without a thermometer and it worked. So, this is what you do, it’s such a cool process.
-
Put the egg yolks into a food mixer bowl, or into a large bowl if you are using a hand mixer. Mix 125g of the sugar and the measured water in a pan and set over a low heat. Heat it slowly as it’s not just sugar. Make sure it’s not bubbling, you can give it just one very gentle stir to help it along. Make sure not to swirl it around too much though, as the sugar can crystallise on the sides of the pan and ruin your syrup. Then just leave it alone and bring to the boil. It should boil quite hard for 3–4 minutes. The bubbles will look big and the syrup will look thicker.
-
As soon as it starts boiling, start whisking those egg yolks on the highest speed. They will look paler and foamy. Once your sugar syrup has boiled for 4 minutes (or you have used a thermometer and it showed 118°C), start trickling the syrup on the wall of the mixing bowl as you whisk the egg yolks at a high speed. At first, even after all of the syrup has gone in, you might think that it will never work – the egg yolks just stay liquid – but give it a little time, just keep whisking for even up to 10 minutes and they will eventually become pale and voluminous. That’s it, you’ve made your first pâté à bombe.
-
Now put the mascarpone into a large bowl, add a good pinch of sea salt and give it a whisk. It will be firm at first but should slacken up slightly. Now add a big spoonful of the pâté à bombe and whisk it in quite energetically to further slacken the mascarpone. Keep adding the pâté à bombe spoonful after spoonful. You will end up with a billowing cream.
-
Now separately whip the double cream with the remaining 25g of sugar. You need it to be at soft peak stage, but stop before you think you should as you will whisk it further when you add it to the mascarpone cream.
-
Fold the whipped cream into the mascarpone and you are very nearly there! (For ice cream, at this stage transfer it to a 1.5-litre container, then freeze until firm.)
-
Now cut your cake in half as if you are cutting a loaf of bread in half. Then flip it on the cut side and slice it into 1cm pieces. You don’t want the cake pieces to be too thick as those won’t be so nice to eat, but you also don’t want it very thin, because then it will fall apart in the coffee mixture.
-
Have a glass bowl or pie dish at the ready (I use a 2-litre one and it just about holds it all in). Mix the cooled coffee with the alcohol in a shallow bowl in which you can easily dip your pieces of cake. Now dip your pieces of cake into the boozy coffee, but be careful not to leave them in too long otherwise the cake will break. (If some pieces do break, don’t stress, no one will notice or care.) Arrange one-third of the cake in a single layer in your chosen bowl or dish, then add one-third of the cream. Put another layer of cake in, then more cream, and finally add the rest of the cake on top and finish with the remaining cream. If some cake is left over, just eat it as a snack with a cup of tea.
-
Leave the tiramisu in the fridge to let things absorb and set (a couple of hours is OK, overnight is great), then dust with cocoa powder. Enjoy whenever.
Serves 6
Greta’s Lithuanian Buckwheat Cake
This cake was a game-changer for me. Now, I am not a person who would scrape cake batter from the bowl after finishing cake-making. My son does, my friends in the UK do, but it does not naturally entice me. I thought it was because my mum discouraged eating raw eggs, like Greta’s mum, but I do clearly remember making a small hole in a raw egg and drinking it as a kid, so it couldn’t have been that. Perhaps it was the raw flour that my mum thought was the culprit. Whatever it was, my fear of raw batter was lifted after I tasted the batter for Greta’s buckwheat cake: I couldn’t stop licking the spoon. This is called babka in Lithuania and the recipe was generously given to me by Lithuanian-born London chef Greta Zilyte. It makes the perfect base for the spiced quince trifle or the cake inspired by tiramisu on the following pages. But honestly, this cake naked and unadorned is just the best tea cake ever. And it’s gluten-free too, if you care.
Ingredients
-
150g unsalted butter, softened, plus more for the tin
-
150g Demerara sugar (or any brown sugar)
-
3 eggs, lightly beaten
-
150g buckwheat flour
-
1 tsp baking powder
-
60ml kefir
Method
-
Preheat the oven to 170°C fan.
-
If you are using the cake on its own as a tea cake, use a 15cm round cake tin with a removable base. If you’re planning to use it for the trifle or tiramisu cake (see pages 258 and 260), the cake benefits from being drier and crispier, so you can use a 20cm round cake tin. Butter the tin, then line with a circle of baking parchment, going slightly up the sides.
-
I do recommend having the butter really soft, not half-heartedly soft, which I am often guilty of too. Do leave it somewhere to become so soft that you can poke your finger into it smoothly with no effort at all. Don’t try to soften your butter in a microwave; that will just melt the outside and that’s not what you want. If you did forget to leave it out and it’s fridge-cold, slice it into thin slabs, put those between 2 pieces of baking parchment and roll over with a rolling pin to flatten. You don’t have to roll for ages, just flatten a couple of times, scrape the butter off the baking parchment into a bowl, and voilà! It should be sufficiently soft for our job here.
-
Now, we need to cream the butter with the sugar until light and fluffy. I usually use an electric mixer to do this. Whisk the butter and sugar at high speed. Then gradually add the eggs, trickling them in and watching the mixer drag its viscous threads into the vortex. When all the eggs are in, the mixture will look sloppy and worryingly split. But, please, don’t worry.
-
Mix the flour with the baking powder. Sometimes, when I am rested and I feel up to it, I sift them together through a sieve a couple of times, aerating them and mixing them together properly. And sometimes, I just sprinkle the baking powder on top of the flour, give it a quick whirl with my finger and hope for the best.
-
Fold them both gently through the wet mixture with a silicone spatula, if you have one, then brusquely fold in the kefir, making sure it is incorporated homogeneously enough. I know that mixing a wet ingredient into the cake after you added the flour may seem strange, but please, do it. Scrape the cake mixture into your prepared tin and smooth it out on top as best you can. OK… that’s it! So easy. Time to put it in the oven.
-
Bake it for 35 minutes and perform the skewer test; I use a chopstick and shove it in the thickest part of the cake, then if it comes out wet I put the cake back in the oven for another 5 minutes. Keep testing until the chopstick comes out fairly clean. I say fairly because remember, even when the cake comes out of the oven, it will still keep cooking.
-
I like this as it is, with a cup of strong coffee in the morning. Greta loves it with plum compote or apricot jam and whipped cream in the middle. I think this cake is so good that I have used it in the following 2 recipes, to make a quince trifle or the tiramisu cake of dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment