I’m not normally much of a dessert person, so I tend to fall back on reliable favourites for when one is called for, such as when my best friend comes to stay for the weekend. This is not a torte by the traditional meaning of the word because it’s not a cake, but it naturally has a well defined, smooth finish and does involve a little bit of layering. Also, The BBC have a recipe for this too, so I’m sticking by the name. I find that the combination of flavours work well when brought together, but individually the caramel is way too sweet and the chocolate can be too bitter for many people and it disappears quickly enough so what the heck.

Ingredients

Serves about 8 people, each portion contains about 3/4 of a bajillion calories.

150g oaty biscuits
75g butter
1 can of Carnation Caramel (397g)
1 to 1.5 tsp of good quality sea salt flakes
200g dark chocolate, 65-75% cocoa solids. Extra marks are available if you use choc with cocoa nibs or bits of chopped up roasted coffee bean
400ml double cream
Half a packet of Maltesers

I use a 7 inch cake tin with a removable base, many people prefer modern springforms.

Method

Line the base and sides of the cake tin with greaseproof paper

Bash up the biscuits inside a plastic bag with a rolling pin, frying pan or half-brick. Melt the butter and stir them together, then press into a tight layer in the bottom of the tin.

Take two tablespoons of the caramel, stir through a teaspoon of cream and set it aside for decorating later.

Heat up the cream to 50-60 degrees, then break the chocolate into it and stir a lot until it’s all dissolved. After a couple of minutes of stirring, the mixture will turn a lovely smooth brown. Keep stirring until it’s cool enough to start to hold its shape.

Whilst that’s chilling down to 30-35 degrees C, you can stir the sea salt flakes into the caramel. It’s very easy to over-mix this, it needs to be able to keep its shape so you might have to chill the caramel for 5 minutes after stirring it. Dollop it into the middle of the buttery biscuit base and make sure you leave a clear inch around the outside so that you get a good chocolate finish.

Pour the chocolate ganache evenly and gently over the top and gently shake it to get a flat surface.

If you’ve got a sharp enough knife, cut the Maltesers in half and push them just slightly into the surface so they stay in place.

Chill it in the fridge overnight to make sure it’s fully set.

To decorate the top, put the reserved caramel cream mix into the corner of a freezer bag and snip the tiniest hole in the corner with sharp scissors. Gently pipe a pattern onto the top.

Cross section of the torte

A fully swirled torte

Yeast is the source of much fun in the home kitchen. I’ve using it to make my own bread for years, but having bacteria metabolise carbohydrates into carbon dioxide is useful in more places than just making dough rise. Likewise, when you deprive them of oxygen (an anerobic environment if you want to talk science), then the clever little blighters will produce alcohol as a waste product instead. The combination of the two is even more fun. Fizzy, even.

According to the internet, the yeasts we’re likely to come across for home brewing and home baking can be loosely grouped into two sets of behaviours. Top cropping and bottom cropping. Imaginatively, the name refers to whether the yeast hangs around at the top of liquid and does its thing, or sinks to the bottom of it. I can think of a couple of reasons why you might care about the difference, the first is whether you want all the detritus already at the bottom of the brew so you don’t need to filter it before syphoning and the second is how much alcohol the yeast will tolerate before dying off and metabolic activity ceases.

Yeasts occur naturally in the environment, they’re perhaps most noticable as the pale dusting on grapes skins. Evolution being what it is, the best yeasts for your unique environment will be the ones that are already in it, but it can still be fun to trade different sourdoughs with other people. There are those bakers who jealously guard a range of sourdough mixes that make some unique breads around the world, so it’s serious business. This forum post includes some photos of how people manufacture their own yeast mixes to bulk up enough of a supply to use in batches.

A fairly extreme example of natural yeasts is the Ginger Beer “Plant”, which is a combination of natural yeasts in symbosis with a Lactobacillus. The equillibrium is reached because the two strains of bacteria have sufficiently different tolerances to alcohol, the Lactobacillus consumes enough of it to keep the Saccharomyces alive, which in turn produces more alcohol from the sugars you feed it.

It’s most likely that the yeast you’ll have available at home is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is used around the world to give a reliably good result in most environments and is widely available as ‘bakers yeast’ in most shops. This is the stereotypical example of a top fermenting yeast, works best at room temperatures

Brewers traditionally used the same yeast as bakers, which is often referred to as ale yeast, but the beer and wine industrys have spent the past few centuries selectively breeding yeasts for traits they value, which is why any reputable homebrew shop will have a small selection of different yeasts that are optimised for brewing wine, cider and different beers. Of course, you don’t have to use these specialised yeasts, the basic biology will function just fine with any strain.

Since the work put in by Øjvind Winge in the 1880s, much of the world’s lager is brewed from Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. This is the stereotypical example of bottom fermenting yeast, works best when refrigerated slightly and is popular for a very good reason. This works more slowly because it’s colder, but it also has much less influence on the flavour of the drink, which makes the final product easier to sell to the mass market.

I’d love to make a claim about alcohol tolerances for the different types of yeasts, but I’ve completely lost my references and can’t find it in my books on beer or wine. I’ll edit it back in later when I find some data.

For the moment, I prefer to kepe things simple and traditional. Also, I already have a tin of bakers yeast, so I use that for everything.

Fun with yeast

The above photograph is from last weekend, featuring some home brewed ginger beer, normal bread and a sourdough cake mix named Herman.

Hello, my name is Herman and I’m a sourdough cake. I need to be looked after and not put into the fridge or I will freeze to death. However, I make a very tasty cake, so I am well worth the effort and you can share me with your friends to spread the joy! I’m not as bonkers as I sound, these people have also written about me.

Herman on day 1

To look after me properly, you need to follow these simple instructions:

Day 1 – you get a dollop of Herman, take my lid off, put me in a large bowl and leave me at room temperature, covered with a tea towel
Day 2 – stir me twice a day
Day 3 – Same as day 2
Day 4 – I am hungry! Feed me 200ml milk, 200g plain flour and 250g of sugar
Days 5, 6, 7 and 8 – Stir me twice a day
Day 9 – I am hungry! Feed me the same as day 4, then divide me into 5 equal amounts. Give some sons of Herman to your friends with a copy of how to look after me and keep the rest for tomorrow
Day 10 – It’s cake time!

Ingredients

Makes one large cake or 12 big muffins

Ready to bake!

Cake
1 portion of Herman
150ml vegetable oil
3 eggs
250g sugar
350g self-raising flour
1 tsp salt

and then any flavour combinations you like that add another 200g of solid to the mixture

I added 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon and 200g of grated baking apple, but you could also use things like nuts, chopped chocolate, rum-soaked raisins, raspberry and white chocolate, maple syrup and pecan nuts, black cherries and dark chocolate, or make lots of muffins and use all of the above!

Filling
75g very soft, room temperature butter
200g icing sugar
quarter of a teaspoon of vanilla paste, or the flavouring of your choice

Icing
100g icing sugar
3 tablespoons water
Half a teaspoon ground ginger

Method

Stir everything all together in a large bowl and decant into your cake tin or muffin trays.

A very firm mixture

This will make a very stiff mixture, but don’t worry about it not rising, it’s got both baking powder AND yeast in it, so it will comfortably double in volume when in the oven.

Baked to a golden finish

Bake at 180C for 40 minutes for muffin sized cakes or 75 minutes for a big cake. Everybody’s oven is different so always check whether the centre is cooked through with a skewer.

Leave it to cool for 10 minutes before turning out onto a rack to cool fully.

I then sliced mine in half with a breadknife and filled with buttercream filling (beat the butter with an electric whisk and gradually add in the icing sugar until it’s combined, light and fluffy, then stir in your colouring and / or flavouring).

The icing was a simple water icing with a hint of ginger, very very slowly add water to some icing sugar until it comes together into a pipable consistency, then squiggle over the top of the cake.

Share, and enjoy!

Frosted and iced up

Or baked as a loaf