The 108th Bake: Mary’s Dobos Torte

I am nearly done with my bakes! I can’t believe it. This is the last cake from the recipe book and WOW, what a cake. But, this spectacular torte was a mare to make. I laid the ingredients out on the bench and it took me at least 36 hours to get up the courage to start. Finally one evening before dinner, I made the decision to make the sponges, all 12 of them!!! So I cut measured circles out of baking paper, and laid them on baking trays. Then, you know the drill, I beat 8 eggs with caster sugar until the ribbon stage and added the flour. I spooned the mixture evenly onto the circles of paper and baked for 8 minutes.

Now that’s a lot of sponges. Six 20cm wide and six 15 cm wide. Job done. I decided to get a head start on the next step, the caramel for the caramel butter cream, so I put 800g of sugar in a pot with 100ml of water and dissolved this over medium heat. Unfortunately, it went from a bubbly lump of sugar to a hard lump of sugar, so I called it a fail and decided to do it in the morning!

So in the morning with 12 sponges done, I set to to make the caramel butter cream again. Luckily I had bought more sugar as 800g is no small amount. Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but it happened again!!! A hard lump of white sugar instead of clear sugar syrup going to golden caramel. So I decided to

revisit the recipe. Fortunately for me, being up to my 107th Bake, I had an inkling of how to made caramel and butter cream. The amount of sugar to water in this recipe seemed a bit out, so much sugar didn’t seem to want to dissolve in so little water. I think there may be a hiccup with the recipe or a typo, or it could just be me, but I decided to google caramel butter cream and found a video on you tube by Cupcake Jemma who made salted caramel butter cream, so leaving out the salt, I made that instead.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWKHbL6km7M

To make the butter cream, I mixed softened butter into sifted icing sugar, then added the caramel. My caramel turned out quite light, (I was scared of burning it given it was my third attempt.) Luckily I had some manjar in the cupboard from Chile, so added some large dollops of that along with my pale caramel, (which tasted delicious mind you) to give the caramel butter cream a good taste and colour.

As per the recipe I made the almond praline. As I had so much crystallized sugar lying around, I took a rolling pin to the large lump and used some of that. Waste not want not. So I added water, dissolved the sugar (successfully this time!), boiled and turned it to caramel which I poured over the almonds and dipped the hazelnuts for decorations. Sadly I had run out of baking paper, so I used regular A4 stationary paper,(buttered of course) but my praline stuck!! I had a job getting the paper off the back so hence the lack on praline on the sides of the cake. Never mind. You can see how much fun I was having with this bake!!!!!!! :/

The next stage was to add caramel topping to one of the small sponges to be used for a decorating the top. That went off without a hitch. 🙂

By now I had sugar caramel everywhere, including on my white shirt and the floor. Mmmmmmmm, sticky. It was time to assemble, this agony had gone on long enough. I started by layering each sponge with butter cream and caramel, then did the same for the small sponges. It was starting to be fun, it was starting to look like a cake…yeehaa. I even did some layers of manjar, for a bit of variety.

After assembling all the layers, I iced the outside and added the praline and the hazelnuts. Wow, this is huge. Then I piped more butter cream onto the top and added the final decoration of caramel sponge topping. Delicious. It was well worth the effort, but I have to say, I am so pleased I did not attempt this at the start of the year!!! Phew, done! And YUM!!!! Caramel butter cream is The Best!!!!