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To go along with my Aubergine Tarts & French Onion Soup, I got a little crazy in designing this cake. I had lots of time to plan dinner and to do all the prep work for this cake so I designed this multi-layer mocha cake to be the cake version of a mocha-flavored napoleon!
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mocha napoleon as inspiration, from Patisserie Poupon on Food Mayhem
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I planned this cake out while taking a ten at work Monday morning,
on the back of a notecard. |
I started my cake process with inspiration from Sprinklebakes' Espresso-Biscoff Cake. And when I went to my local grocery store a jar of "hazelnutella" (offbrand) was damaged and on sale for < $2.00! SCORE
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picture from Left Over Queen,
Nutella cooking is generally a crowd pleaser. |
I also have been really digging this Tribute Blend of dark roast coffee at Starbucks the past two weeks and really finely ground some up to use multiple ways in my cake process!
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| I love this Tribute Blend & a combination of hazelnut, chocolate, and coffee seems like a beautiful mix to me! |
I started off with a basic mocha cake, everybody has their own plain cake recipes that they like; to simple things I almost always stick to my version of a Joy Of Cooking recipe. I'm just that kind of girl! I made mine with chocolate and coffee infused milk (which is a cooking trick for cooking with tea as well.)
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| I only had one pan for the size I wanted to work with, so I had to make my cake very large, because I was too impatient to cook it at two separate times, which meant I got this very large puffy cake at the end, so then I leveled it and it was delicious regardless of its awkwardness, not too dry, but firm enough to work well as a layer cake! |
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beginning layers of my cake
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To make this napoleon cake, here are my layers in order from bottom to top
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look at these layers!
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- Mocha cake
- Mocha-nutella buttercream icing**
- Puff pastry
- icing again
- puff pastry again
- brandy-cocoa pastry cream
- mocha cake
- very thin layer of coffee whipped cream
- icing
- sprinkled with cocoa powder
- chocolate layer top
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| cocoa powder sprinkled! before the chocolate layer |
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This cake was way too large for just the two of us that ended up stuck with this miraculous creation! Once our dinner guests cancelled last minute, we even tried inviting the neighbors and the bartender over (we live over a bar so that actually makes sense) to help us eat all this amazing food!
Unfortunately, the bartender gave up chocolate for Lent, & the bird can't have chocolate or coffee (although she really wanted to so we have lots of leftovers!
I'll leave you with one last picture before I retire:
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| just beautiful, right? |
**To make this cake not too incredibly rich to be edible, I made this icing a very light icing, not very sweet, with a strong coffee flavor, very slight nutella flavor, and with unsweetened cocoa powder. As a cook's note, I think this achieved a very balanced flavor for the finished product.
#nutella #joyofcooking
Read the original on:
Southern Belle's Bakery
