The Maltese Shrink

Oh Pickle, you are such a good therapist. Nothing will help a person slough off the grime and grit and grey of sad old March quite like swirling clouds of frosting onto a huge pile of cake. ...Which said person will then eat. It's better than Xanax and therefore my chocolate purchases oughta be covered by those health insurance jerks who deny my dental cleaning. With my claim, I will send in this happy portrait of March-busting bliss. It's the 'Chocolate Malted Layer Cake' from Melissa Murphy's 'Sweet Melissa Baking Book'. I have never been to the eponymous bakery in Brooklyn, but I liked her homey nouveau Americana recipes enough to buy the book.

This particular slice-of-Brooklyn recipe reminded me of my girlhood obsession with old-fashioned American drinks, especially egg creams and chocolate malteds. (The egg cream I stole from 'Harriet The Spy', and I think I got the malteds from 'Nancy Drew' or maybe even ancient copies of 'Trixie Belden'.) I've never been able to find proper malt powder in Canada, so several malt-y recipes have languished on my Want-To-Make list. Until I recently read in an online forum that Horlicks was a not-bad substitute for malt powder, so I snapped up a can. Shoved it into the overflowing tea cupboard until an opportunity for baking presented itself, cursing heartily every time I reached for orange pekoe and Horlicks fell on my head.

This cake was well worth the goose eggs. As with the cupcakes I made for Pretzel's birthday, the star here was an unusual frosting recipe, a hybrid of ganache and buttercream.

I chopped a full pound of chocolate, then scalded a full cup of cream. Then I stirred a full cup of Horlicks into the cream before pouring it over the chocolate. You're supposed to add 1/4 cup of corn syrup before you let it cool but I forgot. Once it's cooled you then beat in a full stick of butter, tablespoon by tablespoon. (Yes, those are a lot of 'fulls'. I was impressed at the ballsiness of this recipe that way!) At this point I remembered the corn syrup and beat it in with apparently no ill effects. I did notice at this point that I hadn't done the greatest job of stirring the huge quantity of malt powder into the small quantity of cream and it had seized up in a few places, making little malty lumps. But with the vast quantity of chocolate, cream and butter - and guests coming in two hours - there was no time for do-overs. (Almost predictably, Mr. Salty pronounced the accidental and unreplicatable 'crunchy bits' as his favourite part.)

The buttercream gets piled onto and in between two layers of a deep cocoa-y cake - who cares about the recipe, you are soooooo right that cake is just a frosting presentation device.

Do you do that thing where you protect your cake platter with strips of waxed paper or whatever until you're done icing, and then you pull them out like a cheap magician, thereby leaving a clean platter? I did that, but this particular cake was soooooo moist that it crumbled when I pulled one of the strips out and I ripped a big ugly chunk out. If I were an engineer, it woulda been like ripping out half of somebody's basement with one careless dropcloth removal. But as it's only cake, I just hurriedly spackled that back in with frosting and faced that part toward the wall.

It got garnished with a pile of chopped Maltesers and a few whole ones around the edge. This served three purposes. It drew the eye away from my terrible structural deficit, looked pretty, and got all the children about to eat this cake excited. (Why is it that you can bake the most impressive thing and kids will shrug - but if you garnish it garishly with coloured sugar or candy, they will suddenly be impressed? I'm going to start putting candy on broccoli gratin and seeing how they like them apples.) Anyway, it got all the kids running around the house yelling 'CHOCOLATE BALLS CHOCOLATE BALLS, I WANT CHOCOLATE BALLS'. Which was, as I'm sure you can imagine, rather amusing.

I think I'm going to have to start make layer cakes more often, at least until summer is really and truly here. Don't tell the insurance company, they'll probably up my dental premiums.