Brown Butter Cake with Dark Chocolate Buttercream and Rich Chocolate Mousse Filling
This past week I had a cake fail moment. It was one of those cakes that you think it totally going to work but upon tasting, it’s just not what you thought it was going to be.
So, I was cakeless and the bug of eating good cake stayed with me the rest of the week.
It was time to find a cake recipe that was labor intensive in order to occupy my Saturday.
I found it in February’s issue of Food & Wine magazine. They talked about Tom Douglas cakes and how easy it was to make them at home. The featured recipe was his Brown Butter Layer Cake with Rich Chocolate Buttercream and Dark Chocolate Mousse Filling.
It had me at brown butter.
I love cooking with brown butter and baking with it is one of my weaknesses.
The cake came together quite easily and baked beautifully in the oven - nice and brown and smelling all nutty like.
The dark chocolate mousse filling was another surprise – it tasted just like a dark chocolate mousse. My only complaint here would be that it did not come out as smooth as I thought it would. I don’t know if it was the gelatin that made the end product much thicker that I thought but it totally worked once it went on the cake.
The harder part of the recipe was the Rich Chocolate Buttercream. Buttercream and I have a love and hate relationship. Sometimes it gives me all love, and other times it just sends hate my way. This time around, it decided to make me work for it. And after having to stop twice during the mixing to have it chill out in the freezer for a bit, it finally came together the way it was supposed to.
My verdict: I really love the texture of the cake – it was rich and nutty and perfect. The mousse complimented it. The buttercream was not the star here. I found it way too butter based and while I totally get that is what a buttercream frosting is supposed to taste like, it did not work for me.
I plan to make it again, but this time I would change the frosting to a chocolate ganache. This cake can totally pull it off.
You can find the recipes at the Food & Wine by clicking below: