Thai Mocha Honey Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache
This was a cake I made last year for my friend Katherine’s birthday. She’s also a great fan of Thai coffee, so I thought it would be fun to incorporate some into this cake recipe, which I adapted from a recipe found in another of Nigella Lawson’s books. I love making cakes, and especially love the way people’s faces light up when they see a particularly nice confectionery creation that they’re about to eat. But one thing I can’t countenance in any way, shape, or form is when things don’t taste good. To a slightly lesser degree, I also dislike the idea of putting something that can’t be eaten onto a cake. Obviously, there are some exceptions; I understand most wedding cake toppers are not made to be eaten, and that doesn’t bother me. But I’ll take a stand right here, right now against the sort of store-bought fondant that tastes like your elderly grandmother’s lavender-and-powder-scented bathroom. You may love your grandmother, which is lovely. Even so, you are probably still cringing with the sense-memory of that bathroom because you know exactly what I’m talking about, and you don’t want to eat it.
Some fondant can be OK, and even quite tasty. And I love making things look nice, but I just can’t get myself to sacrifice good looks over taste. I want a happy medium, as much as possible. So on this cake, everything is edible—even down to the organic orchids I used as a centerpiece on the top of the cake. The bees were made of marzipan, their wings were made of toasted almond slices, and their stripes and eyes were painted on with some of the ganache.
It turned out quite well; the original recipe was mainly for chocolate, but because I’ve had success with making an Earl Grey chocolate mousse cake before, my mind quite naturally tends to drift toward the possibilities of both tea and coffee and their peculiarly addictive and delicious possibilities when combined with some good-quality chocolate. This was an early experiment in Thai coffee, and it paid off handsomely. I served it with the aforementioned Thai coffee trifle, of which there are unfortunately no photos because it disappeared far too quickly.
Janaki
