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Sunday, February 14, 2010

BMW Oreo Cake: Completed

BMW Oreo Cake
Congratulations, Christoper!
(+5 skill points => 255/400)


My brother-in-law graduated from Universal Technical Institute last Friday.  He received a ton of awards and has been accepted into the school's BMW course.  In celebration, I made an Oreo chocolate cake with the BMW logo on it.

Stats:
  • 8" round
  • Duncan Hines' Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix
  • filled with Oreo Mousse
  • iced with chocolate IMBC
  • borders with Oreo chocolate IMBC
  • MMF topper
 This cake was such a learning experience.  I even had a mini disaster, but it came out ok.  Here's what happened.

A week ago I started work on the fondant BMW topper (previously posted here).  In addition, I gently painted the entire thing with a mixture of half corn syrup and half gin.  Several users of cakecentral.com claimed that it gives fondant a nice, glassy coat.  It worked ok in my case.  Unfortunately I couldn't do broad strokes on the black, so it's a little uneven.

After defrosting, my choco cake was torted with a serrated bread knife.  It took a bit of trimming before the top was nice and level.


The scraps went into the food processor and was ground up into fine crumbs.


The food processor also had the responsibility for grinding up a dozen or so Oreo cookies.  I was surprised how dry and fine it was ... almost like fresh ground coffee.


I got the idea for an Oreo cake from another foodie blog that featured Oreo cupcakes: http://heatherdrive.blogspot.com/2009/01/oreo-cupcakes.html.  Instead of regular buttercream, I used some of my chocolate IMBC.


My IMBC hasn't really pushed the envelope in terms of chocolate until now.  My regular batch of IMBC got a double dose after mixing in a couple tablespoons of cocoa into 4 oz. of melted semi-sweet baking chocolate.


Unfortunately this made the IMBC a little more on the runny side, which led to my mini disaster.  More on that later.

A few weeks ago I had purchased some Oreo instant pudding to try out the Costco Mousse recipe.  It was highly recommended to me by my co-worker.  Basically, mix a package of instant pudding with 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of heavy whipping cream.  Give that a whirl and in a few minutes you'll have smooth, creamy filling that people go ga-ga over.  My husband said it tasted like a milkshake.


This stuff is firm, but you can't trust it to stay inside a layered cake all by itself.  A filling dam was made by mixing in the cake and Oreo crumbs with some IMBC.  A stiff barrier was piped along the perimeter of the cake to hold the tide of mousse.



I used Toba's concepts for cake spackle to help support the cake in conjunction with Susan Zambito's techniques for damming.  The end result was very straight, stable, and had no bulges or blowouts.  After smoothing everything out, the cake firmed up in the fridge.  It was then stiff enough for me to place the fondant topper in the middle.  Some more spots required smoothing.

Icing the cake went well, despite how runny the IMBC felt.  It was strange for me to feel how thin it was, but still see it hold some sort of form.  With patience, I was able to build up some thickness on the sides.  There was no way I could pipe with it though.  Instead I mixed some more IMBC with the stuff that had the cake and cookie crumbs so it could be stiff enough to hold a detailed shape.  A shell border went on the bottom and a rope border on top.

Disaster strikes!  The IMBC is so thin, it couldn't fully support the rope border on top.  I had piped it right on the edge at some parts, so it starts sinking and falling off completely, sliding down the side.  With my spatula I was able to catch it before it hit and ruined the shell border on the bottom.  I removed about 1/4 of the border that had slipped off.  After re-adding some IMBC and smoothing it out, the border was re-piped farther away from the edge.  Below you can see to some sinking on the left that I decided not to risk re-doing.


Since the mousse had cream, I made sure the cake remain refrigerated.  I forgot, however, to take it out early enough to let it come to room temperature.  The cake was cold but people seemed to still like it.  There were several compliments on the taste.  I foresee more Oreo cakes in the future!


What did NOT taste good was the fondant ... I think I could taste the gin!  I wasn't upside-down crazy about the mousse, but that could be because I'm not a big pudding or Cool Whip fan (that's what the taste and texture ended up being a mash-up of).  I will do this again for the next cake this coming weekend but with Cheesecake pudding mix.


FAILs:
  • IMBC was too runny; gotta figure out a good ratio for adding chocolate
  • fondant still had slight gin taste ... I wonder if that edible varnish recipe tastes ok
FTWs:
  • Costco Mousse badge earned
  • Damming a cake badge earned
  • people loved the taste

1 comment:

  1. Maybe ganache blended w/ your imbc would work...thicker consistency with great chocolate flavor.

    ReplyDelete

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