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That Chocolate Mis-cake

Maybe I was tired.  Or maybe I was thinking about something else.  In any case, I forgot the sugar.  In any case, it ended up like this:

Stacey's altered Mis-Cake Ingredients:
1 c minus 1 tbs unbleached white flour, organic
3/4 c whole wheat flour, organic
1.5 tbs cornstarch
3/4 c unsweetened cocoa powder (Scharffen-Berger)
1 tsp sea salt
1.5 tsp baking powder
1.5 tsp baking soda
1/2 c canola oil, organic
1 c whole milk, organic
1 c boiling water

I was almost too embarrassed to post about it, but at least I got some good pictures of lining the pan with parchment paper.  This is how I cut/fold the parchment paper so that it fits nicely into the square cake pan:


 I knew something was wrong when the cake cooked in almost 1/2 the time.  After 18 minutes in the oven at 350F (which was when I had planned on rotating it), it already looked like this:
I poked it and it was done.  It was then that I realized it just didn't look quite right, so I looked at the ingredients again and with a shriek I realized what horrible atrocity I had created.  I was going to scrap the whole thing, but I figured it was a good learning experience and it would be good for the blog.  How does one fix this sort of baking error?  My experimental solution went like this...

Stacey's Chocolate Solution (solution, get it?) Ingredients:
1 1/2 c sugar
3/4 c whole milk, organic
3/4 c water
3/4 c 99% unsweetened Guittard chocolate couverture

I put it all into a pot to boil - the chocolate came out of emulsion... great. If I were smarter, I would have been more patient and started with melting the chocolate and adding the warm liquids slowly.

 But then I wouldn't have discovered that sticking your immersion (stick) blender in there would make everything all better. :)
Post-immersion blender:
 Then I poked holes in my sugar-free cake with a dipping fork.  I was trying to preserve the integrity (what little, figuratively, it had) of the cake, but really this did not allow the chocolate sauce to sink in.
Big holes are better, so I used a regular fork afterward and poured the sauce on top.  I probably should have used a chopstick to poke holes. 

People at work seemed to be okay with it, but it was not received as warmly as some other treats.  It was a decent solution.  For anyone who is interested in sugar-free baking, the texture of the cake was actually quite nice.  I think it could probably turn into a decent sugar-free recipe if you had some sort of splenda or stevia sweetened chocolate sauce to pour on it.  That is, if you can get past the taste of stevia/splenda.
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Comments

  1. Rana JuneFebruary 7, 2011 at 1:13 PM

    You're so creative and I love how you brought it to work. Such great taste-testers!!

    ReplyDelete

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