Chocolate and salted caramel chiffon cake

I very much enjoyed this years Great British Bake Off and I thought Frances was definitely a worthy winner, I didn't think this years series was a patch on last years tho. In homage to last years winner I decided to make john's salted caramel and chocolate chiffon cake for my brothers girlfriends birthday!!

This is a chocolate cake with a salted caramel filling and a chocolate ganache icing. The cake is a chiffon cake so there are a lot of eggs and you use the eggs to make a meringue and keep as much air as possible in to keep the cake as light and fluffy as possible. Here is the recipe.

The cake is a little complicated as their are three components, the caramel, chocolate ganache and the cake itself so you definitely need quite a bit of time free to make this!! I started off by separating the eggs, then make the meringue, mix everything else together and get the cake into the oven. I followed the recipe exactly and the cake turned out pretty well. With hindsight, I think it could have been a little lighter so I probably could have done with doing a bit more gentle folding of the meringue into the mixture. It also says to knock the tin onto the work surface a couple of times to get rid of any air bubbles, I probably got a bit excited doing this so again, this probably knocked out quite a bit of the air. Here is a picture of my cake just before it went into the oven!

Then this is a picture of it when it came out. It rose really nicely but it did have quite a few cracks on the top.

The chocolate ganache is super easy to make. You just heat the cream and pour it over the until the chocolate melts. I mixed it all together to make a lovely smooth shiny ganache, then put it in the fridge to cool and thicken. 

The salted caramel filling is a little more difficult to make. I think I probably should have heated the mixture a little longer as it tasted a little grainy and I think this was the unmelted sugar.


The other problem I ended up having was over time.  It took ages for the cake to cool so it meant that I had to wait ages to fill it, and in the end I had to fill it when it was still slightly warm.You also have to cool both the salted caramel filling and the ganache, so you need to make sure that you have plenty of space in the fridge! As I ended up filling the cake slightly warm, this meant that by the time I had transported it some of the filling had oozed out a bit, but oh well... :) It was a lovely cake, my husband said that it was one of the nicest cakes that I had ever made and he liked the texture which is quite 'bouncy'.

As its one big cake, to fill it you have to slice it in half, which I actually managed to do fairly evenly. Here is the final cake just with the salted caramel filling.

Then here it is with the chocolate ganache decoration. This looks lovely, but it is really simple. Although you are supposed to spike up the ganache in the recipe but all my spikes seemed to fall over so I ended up with smaller little roses almost. It still looked pretty tho!

And here is a slice of the cake. As you can see the bottom part of the cake was a little denser than the top. I'm not sure if I needed to make it in two tins, or if I just knocked too much air out of the meringue but it still tasted lovely and the chocolate ganache was great.