Cake Baker’s Apprentice (Chocolate Pretzel Crunch Cake and Pavlovas)

It’s really not that unusual for someone to leave a panicked comment saying they have offered to make the cake for their best friend’s wedding. I salute them and hope their BFF knows exactly what a loving gesture it is.

My friend Molly asked me to help her come up with a dessert for her best friend’s big day. Molly is a gifted writer, a brilliant adventurer and has the wit and wisdom to keep Andrew Zimmern in line on their shared podcast, Go Fork Yourself, but she is NOT a baker. So, this request was done in a tone of slight trepidation.

Besides working with Andrew she also has a blog called Hey Eleanor, where she chronicles overcoming her greatest fears. She’s jumped out of a plane, bungeed off a bridge, she did stand up comedy (that’s what my nightmares are made of), quit her job and got married (her husband is awesome, so not much risk there).

We’d always talked about baking together for her blog, but why not up the ante by trying to create something extra special for her friend’s most important day. No pressure there. We settled on a rather ambitious menu of individual chocolate pretzel crunch cakes and a rose scented pavlova with lemon curd and berries. She did an absolutely fantastic job, as she does with everything.

Our journey in the kitchen was captured by Matt Lien. I spotted his photos on Facebook after he photographed Sameh Wadi’s cookbook, The New Mediterranean Table. I immediately contacted Matt to gush over his gorgeous work and figure out a way to work together on something, anything. That was just weeks ago and he was game to come over and play in the kitchen with Molly and me. These images perfectly capture how much fun we had and how easily Molly conquered her fear of baking. (Matt had to leave before we were finished, so the pictures of the final desserts are mine, which will be painfully obvious.)

Follow her adventure and maybe you’ll offer to make your friend’s wedding desserts, or a birthday cake.

The hardest part of putting together desserts like this is figuring out the prep list and timing.

We’d set aside three days to get it all done.

We gathered all of our recipes, set up a prep schedule and then spent the next three days chopping, baking, drizzling and assembling. You can find links to all the recipes within this post.

Recipes for Pavlova:

Meringue and Strawberry Sauce

Lavender Lemon Curd – this post also has a meringue recipe, but it isn’t the one we used.

Fresh Berries and edible flowers as the garnish

Molly had never made meringue before, but you can see she didn’t let that intimidate her.

Perfection!

Scooping the meringue can be sticky business.

She did a great job getting them all the same size.

Here is the pavlova all dolled up with the lemon curd and garnishes. Up next the decadent chocolate cakes.

Chocolate Pretzel Crunch Cakes:

Devil’s Food Cake

Ganache

Toffee and Pretzel Crunch

Caramel Sauce

We baked the cake in thin sheets.

Molly cut the chocolate into tiny pieces to insure it would melt in the hot cream for a super smooth ganache.

To make double sure it would be smooth we strained the ganache through a Chinois.

The ganache was a wee bit thick, so we thinned it out with more cream. The key to successful baking is to staying calm when something doesn’t quite work out the way you thought, there is almost always a fix.

Perfect for pouring.

We put a thin layer of ganache over the devil’s food. This acted as glue for the toffee pretzel crunch.

We just crushed the toffee and the pretzels together in a mortar and pestle. We just added it until we liked the taste, no rules on how much of each.

As Molly smoothed out the ganache, I sprinkled.

We gently pressed the crunchy bits into the ganache and then chilled the layers so they would come out of the pan easily.

Once the pans were chilled, we inverted them onto another sheet and peeled the cake out. I got to share my favorite kitchen tool with Molly, since the cake was stuck to the bottom we used the blowtorch to loosen it.

Using a small round cutter she stamped out the layers.

Of course, I got caught snacking on the scraps.

We let some of the ganache cool off enough that we could spread it on the cakes.

This was the part I thought might take some getting used to,

but Molly went at it like a pro, with confidence and grace.

The final touch was to pour the ganache over the cakes to make them perfectly smooth.

Well, imperfectly smooth. But, that makes them even more charming.

Here are Molly’s desserts and I hear the bride was thrilled, so everyone wins.

Thanks to Matt Lien for the wonderful photos and to Molly for bringing such great joy into my kitchen.

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