I am starting to notice a theme in my desserts. The dominant flavours are the chocolate and caramel combination. I knew I wanted to make an Ombre Cake using these flavours.
What is ombre? It the effect you get when you create a graduated colour change from light to dark. You often see the effect in women’s hairstyles, they start dark at the root and gradually fade out to a lighter colour.
I mentally played with a few Ombre recipe ideas, but I settled on making an Ombre Cake.
Not content with ombre just as a colour sequence I started to explore flavour profiles that would work together. As a child when I would see colour variations in a marble cake. I really wanted each colour to equal a unique flavour. Disappointingly the marble cake would taste the same whether you tried a pink, white or chocolate crumb.
This five layers cake has a different flavour for each colour but still uses just one batter.
My base batter was a simple melt and mix white chocolate mud cake. The bottom layer remains just white chocolate mud. The next layer up is flavoured with a small amount of caramel flavouring. The intensity of caramel is increased on the third layer as is the colour with a little extra caramel. The fourth layer is a marbling of chocolate and caramel and the final layer is chocolate.
Chocolate Caramel Ombre Cake
Ingredients
- 250 gm butter
- 150 gm white chocolate
- 2 cups caster sugar
- 1 cup milk
- 1 ½ cups plain flour
- ½ cup SR flour
- 1 t /s vanilla Essence
- 2 Eggs
- 2 TBS Dutch process chocolate
- 6 drops caramel essence
Caramel Butter Cream Frosting
- 4 1/2 cups icing sugar
- 375 gm butter
- 2 drops caramel essence
Instructions
- Oil the [easyazon_link identifier="B00M4JCHRE" locale="US" tag="gourmetgetaways1-20"]Wilton 5 cake tin set[/easyazon_link] well.
- In a large saucepan combine butter, chocolate and sugar over the heat until melted and combined.
- Remove the saucepan from the heat.
- Add the milk, stir and allow to cool for 15mins.
- Preheat the oven to 155 degrees.
- Stir through the flours, add the eggs and vanilla essence. Mix until combined.
- Use 5 small bowls to divided the mixture evenly. 1 cup of batter for each bowl.
- Allow one container of batter to remain plain white chocolate.
- Pour this layer into the Wilton tin and bake.
- Add 2 drops of caramel essence to one bowl of batter. Mix until combined and pour into another Wilton layer tin. Bake
- Add 4 drops of caramel essence to another bowl of batter. Mix until combined and pour the batter into the third Wilton layer tin.
- Take 1/2 the batter from the fourth bowl and add it to the 5th bowl.
- Add 2Tbs of Dutch process cocoa to the bowl with the most batter in it.
- Pour 2/3 of the chocolate batter into the Wilton tin and bake.
- The remaining white chocolate and dark chocolate batter gets swirled into the 5th cake tin.
- Place the tin in the oven.
- Cakes are cooked when they are springy and a skewer comes out clean.
- Leave the cakes to cool for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.
Caramel Butter Cream Frosting
- Once the cakes have cooled.
- Beat the butter until light and pale.
- Add icing sugar and continue to mix until light, fluffy and combined.
- Add the caramel essence.
- Smooth the caramel frosting between each of the cake layers starting at the lightest layer and working up to the chocolate layer.
- Place the cake in the fridge for 30 minutes so the frosting becomes hard and the layers are stable.
- Continue to frost the sides and top of the cake as desired.
- I have piped swirls on the top of the cake and added white chocolate Raffaellos to the top.
It was a spectacular birthday cake to present, but very simple to make using the Wilton pans. The Wilton 5 cake tin set requires just one standard cake batter to make this towering dessert.
