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Thursday, March 24, 2011

Dobos Torte

It is both, simple and complicated, world famous Dobos Torte! Simple ingredients make a delicious, elegant Hungarian cake, but the process is so complicated. You really have to be patient, organized, thorough, and did I mention patient?!

Everyone loves Dobos Torte, five layers of thin, soft, sponge cake, filled with chocolate butter cream, and finished with caramelized top! Sounds good? Yes, and enjoying a piece made me forget that I have lost my last nerve making it, and transformed my kitchen into an unbearable mess. Yummy! Kids concur! : )

There are many recipes, all pretty much come down to same ingredients, more or less, making a smaller, larger, round or square cake. Smooth or crunchy caramel, and so on, and we owe it all to a Hungarian confectioner, Jozsef C. Dobos, who made it in 1884, and gave up the real recipe in 1906.

This cake is very popular in the entire Balkans, and certainly, like with any classic cake, there are many variations, some people add vanilla or rum flavors to the chocolate buttercream, or make other slight changes, as well as decorating it with chopped chocolate or nuts, on the sides.

I am tempted to do it again, as I am not entirely pleased with the looks ( you know I must make it pleasing to the eyes, so I must perfect the caramel top), but the taste is nothing short of extraordinary!

Should you decide you want to try making this decadence, here is how I did it.
First I made the cream, so it would cool down, and be done by the time I am done with all the biscuits.

Chocolate butter cream:
4 eggs
7 oz (200 g)granulated sugar
3 ½ oz (100 g)bakers chocolate
2 sticks, and 2 Tbsp (250g) unsalted butter or margarine
No worries, it’s a recipe with eggs, but they get cooked. Prepare a double boiler.

Mix eggs with sugar for good 5 minutes, or until it’s frothy, then transfer to the inner sauce pan (duh) to cook over boiling water (reduce to medium heat). Stir almost constantly and cook until you see it starts to thicken a bit. Add chocolate, mix it in well, and cook another 2-3 minutes.
Transfer to a mixing bowl, and let it cool down, later put it in the fridge. And when completely cooled down (it will be quite sticky and thick) add pieces of butter, and mix until you get smooth, silky butter cream, mhmmmm… I use this for many cakes.

Later on, when you are ready to spread it on cake layers, you will sort of divide the cream into 6 sections, within the bowl. Math is everything, you want to make sure you have equal amounts on each cake layer.

For the sponge cake / biscuits:
6 eggs
6 Tbsp of sugar
7 Tbsp of flour
Separate the whites, and mix them with sugar for, again, good 5 minutes or longer, until they are so stiff that when you add the first yolk, it will not fall through ; )
Keep adding the yolks, one by one, and then gradually add the flour. I have then transferred this into a large measuring cup, and I have come up with a liter of mixture.

This has helped me make sure I use, as close as possible (approx 170 ml for each), equal amounts of batter to the spring pan, for each of the six layers.
So now, bake 6 separate layers, in a preheated oven @ 400 F, in a round spring form pan, aligned with parchment paper. Each time you will more than likely need to clean up the pan, and then do the next one. Oh, it's so worth it!

You will end up with nice layers like this:

As you get them out of the oven cover them with damp paper towel, so they don't dry out; they are hard to handle without having to worry about them crumbling in your hands ;)
The last one, you will cut into 16 slices, and separate the slices ( I made a mistake and didn't separate them, so my caramel cooled on top of them in one piece like that, and then everything cracked when I was ready to top my cake, and had to cut through the caramel). Live and learn! : )

For the caramel:
7 oz (200 g) granulated sugar
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
Melt the sugar (caramelize it) over high heat, when it starts browning remove from heat, stir in butter, and lemon juice. Mix well, and return to heat, to cook until it's nice and dissolved. Pour over the sliced cake layer, and let cool down.

Now, spread the chocolate buttercream (5 sections of it) over the layers, and layer the cake. Even out the sides by cutting around---now is a good chance to get a taste of it, that is, if your kids are not around! : )
On the fifth layer you will also pipe on 16 buttercream flowers in the circle, and that is where you will arrange your sliced caramelized layer, slightly angling the slices as you go. Also pipe some buttercream in the middle, where the slices meet, it will look better. Fun, fun, and you're done!