The Great New Year's Bake-off
Sun, 02/03/2019 - 10:45Both members of Fischey-Rando Industries find it hard to say no to a baked good. We’ve done some baking together before, but for the 2018 holiday season we really stepped it up a notch. Justin bought me a Kitchenaid stand mixer for Christmas. It’s beautiful and it makes me feel, well, so many feelings.
There it is.
I suspect a key influence in the arrival of this Christmas miracle was that we spent December binge-watching the new Great British Bake-off shows. Yes, the Mary-Berry-less episodes. Yes, we too were skeptical. But you know what? Worth it. Prue Leith is my ideal future self, and the two new hosts are so endearing. If you don’t know what I’m talking about: don’t worry, just keep reading for cake stories. If you too are a GBBO enthusiast and you haven’t tried the new non-BBC series on principle: I feel you, but I encourage you to give it a try. Anyway, cakes!
La Bete Noir
For New Year’s Eve, I revisited a recipe my mom shared me with ages ago for a flourless chocolate cake. But not any chocolate cake: ‘La bete noir’ or ‘the black beast.’ And it is. This cake is painfully delicious. It’s the only cake that I’ve ever struggled and then failed to finish if served in a slice much wider than an inch. Who knew defeat could taste so good?
The last time I made it just so happened to be New Year’s Eve 2013, for a house-party in Cambridge. It felt fitting to inaugurate this as a Fischey-Rando New Year’s Eve tradition: the perfect cake to have once a year to celebrate the old and ring in the new. Conveniently, it pairs well with a glass of champagne.
This cake requires 8 bars of chocolate. The recipe gives some wiggle room with what type to use. I always go with 4 bars of semi-sweet and 4 bars of bittersweet, which are split in even proportions in the cake mix and the ganache topping. Yes please.
It might not come as a surprise that I have no photos of the finished, uneaten cake. Lol. Who has time for photos when this cake is waiting to be eaten. Thankfully I did snap a few of the baking & post-New-Years carnage:
The Carrot Cake
Not only do we both like to eat cake, we both like to bake. Justin got in on the action a few weeks later (it was a dangerous, cake-filled time at Fischey-Rando HQ). He cooked up a scrumptious two-layer carrot cake, it was so good! I think all that time watching Great British Bake-off really paid off here:
Baking seems poised to be right up there with barbecue as one of our Fischey-Rando house goals. Cheers to the home-baked cake diet. Two thumbs up, would recommend.
