Birthday | Chocolate & Apples (Unlikely Pairing!)

Happy birthday this week to my friends Patricia and Chengos! I made this cake at the last minute for a potluck. The only guidance I had was "chocolate" and "maybe with fruit". I thought about what I was originally going to make (apple tarts), opened up my favorite cookbook, Extraordinary Cakes, and the first page I turned to was "New York, New York," a chocolate and apple cake. It was meant to be.

I don't often associate apples with chocolate, but add in a little caramelization and rum, and it all comes together.

I used the same sour cream chocolate cake that I used for my previous German Chocolate Cake, since I knew I could count on it for a flavorful and light texture. I brushed the cake with rum simple syrup and then layered it with rum-spiked chocolate ganache, chocolate chantilly (whipped chocolate cream), and caramelized Golden Delicious apples.

The assembled cake was then coated with chocolate ganache, and covered with a chocolate glaze for a smooth finish. Then I placed thinly sliced Golden Delicious apples around the sides and secured with a ribbon. I didn't have time to make additional decorations, so I arranged some fresh flowers on top.

Although you might expect this cake to be incredibly heavy, the lightness of the chocolate cake layers offsets the denseness of the ganache. I might skip the ganache filling layers in the future and save it just for the outer coating, but all in all, this was a unique and flavorful cake! Thin slices recommended for consumption ;)

Office Bytes | Maple Bacon Cream Puffs

I've been meaning to make some version of these cream puffs after a culinary friend of mine talked about making bacon profiteroles and described the magic of grinding various foods with sugar to create custom-flavored dusting sugars.

This took me a few tries, as I first tried making cream puffs with bacon fat instead of butter (I prefer the butter flavor), and then first ground up the rendered bacon with granulated sugar (I highly recommend maple sugar instead for a much better flavor pairing . . . something is a little off about bacon with regular sugar). Apologies to my friends who were guinea pigs on earlier iterations of this.
The final result used regular cream puffs, with maple flavored custard (crème légère with maple syrup), dipped in brown butter icing, with maple bacon sugar sprinkled on top. So good.