Bernachon Palet d’Or

This week, the Heavenly Cake Bakers are tackling the beautiful shiny cake on the front of Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. It’s also shown here in one of the graphics we were given access to as part of the bake along.

I had every intention of baking this cake then taking it into work to share. What happened? Well, I changed my mind, and gave it to our neighbours across the street. I think I’m going to have to try this one again some time, so I can taste it. The only pictures I managed to grab of the cake were the mise en place and of the batter in the pan. Since neither of those are terribly interesting, I’m not going to bother posting them.

This cake has 3 components, none of which are particularly difficult or time consuming on their own. First you make the cake, which is a fairly standard chocolate butter cake. I think it’s based off one of Rose’s recipes from the cake bible, but I haven’t taken the time to sit down and compare. Next, you make a creme fraiche ganache, and let it cool. I let mine sit overnight, because of the busy weekend we had. The next morning, I frosted the cake with the ganache, and stashed it in the fridge to firm up. Then I went outside to get some yard work done.

Jay had cut the cedars at the front of our house back to stumps earlier in the week, and I needed to dig them out, so that I can eventually plant something I actually want in their place. Before you go thinking we hate trees or something, these cedars were so old and poorly maintained that they really needed to be put out of their misery. While I did that, he was working on taking down the basketball net at the corner of our driveway. I periodically came around back to help him out at various stages, but for the most part, he spent much of the day swinging a sledgehammer at the concrete it was embedded in, trying to break it apart. Between the two of us, we could pull the post (which turned out to also be full of concrete) out of the hole it was in, but we wanted the concrete up, so that didn’t really get us anywhere. He did eventually get the concrete free and could get the post to rock back and forth, but there was no way it was coming out any further than that. The piece of concrete it was embedded in seemed to be about a foot and a half wide, and maybe 2 feet deep. When I finished with the roots I was digging up, I came over to help him. Apparently, our neighbour across the street saw us struggling, because all of a sudden, Albert comes walking up our driveway and says “The wife says you’re having trouble. Want me to bring my tractor over?”

So… Long story slightly shorter, Albert brings his tractor over, wraps a chain around the concrete plug, and pops it out of the hole. It turns out it was actually about 3 feet deep, and had 3 metal posts (not rebar, but similar) going another 1/2′ into the ground deeper than the concrete. I don’t know what the guy was thinking when he put it in, but I guess he really really wanted to be sure it wasn’t going anywhere when he did slam dunks and hung off of it. With that task done, we cleaned up our tools and I went inside to finish the cake. For the life of me, I couldn’t find my powdered gelatin. I still can’t find it, and I can’t find an empty container for it either. I did find some of the glaze leftover from the apricot roll in the freezer. I thawed it, and used that. It didn’t come out nearly as smooth the second time around, even though I heated it up to the required temperature. I had to do some spreading to get it to a reasonably thin layer, but I did manage to cover the whole thing. It wasn’t pretty, but I hope Carolyn and Albert enjoyed it. 🙂