Cardamom wedding cake

My second wedding gig, though technically my third wedding cake (I did two last time). This large specimen is based around the wonderful “Cardamom Coffee Cake” from The Moosewood Coobook. This venerable tome by US chef Mollie Katzen was first published in 1977, and, with its old-school vegetarian recipes, all hand-written and accompanied by sketches, is something of a quaint artefact. But it’s most decidedly not to be underestimated. The Cardamom Coffee Cake is just one of its many classic recipes. It’s a cake recipe I come back to over and over as it’s great for big celebration cakes.

Just to clarify – it doesn’t include coffee, it’s so-called as it’s good to have with a cup of coffee.

Anyways, the original recipe is all in US cup measures. These are, confusingly, 8 US fl oz, which is 237ml – compared to NZ/Australian/Canadian 250ml cup measures. Heck, cup measures can be confusing enough for those of us used to scales without such complications. Anyway, for this cake for the wedding of our friends Becky and Dave, I wanted to convert these volume measures into practical gram measures, another complication as 1 cup of flour isn’t going to weight the same as 1 cup of broken walnuts, for example. Thank heavens for the internet. After extensive research, cross-referencing and head scratching, I’ve converted Katzen’s original single quantities into metric. This amount is good for a 23cm (9″) round tin, although she says “1 large tube or bundt pan” in the original recipe.

450g soft butter
400g light brown sugar
4 eggs
2 t vanilla essence
450ml sour cream
440g plain flour
2 t baking powder
2 1/2 t baking soda
2 t powdered cardamom
1/2 t salt

Nut mix
25g light brown sugar
1 T cinnamon
50g chopped walnuts

Preheat the oven to 150C.  Grease and base line the tin.

Method: make the nut mix by simply combining the sugar, cinnamon and walnuts. Set aside.

Make the sponge by creaming together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Beat together the eggs and vanilla, then add this gradually to the creamed mixture, beating well with each addition.

Sift together all the dry ingredients, then add this to the creamed mixture a bit at a time, alternating with additions of the sour cream. Fold in gently – don’t beat or overmix. Start and end with the flour mix.

Put half of the sponge mix into the prepared tin, then sprinkle over the nut mix. Dollop the other half on top.

Bake for one and a half hours – or even two plus. It’s a big beast and needs a while. Katzen says bake “until brown on top and dry when you insert a prober all the way down.” Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes or so then turn out.

Now then, for this wedding cake I did triple quantities for a 30cm tin, and baked it for around 4 hours. I did three more tiers on top too. Oh, and I added cocoa to the nut mix, which works well.

I then painted all the cakes with melted apricot jam, which helps seal the crumbs as well as helping icing adhere. I iced the cakes with Chocolate Glaze from the Green & Blacks cookbook. This uses 100g dark choc (min 60% solids), melted in a bowl over simmering water. While still on the heat, add 75g sifted icing sugar, then 40g cubed unsalted butter. Make sure that heat is low and the bowl isn’t touching the water. It’s a wee bit touchy this one. Take the mixture off the heat, then add 3T water, a tablespoon at a time. Stir until it’s smooth and shiny, and use to ice while still warm. I also used ganache (100g of dark choc to 100ml of double cream) between the layers.

As we had to transport the cake from London to Sheffield, we kept the top and bottom two tiers separate and hid the gap with a row of Fran’s truffles. Lots of roses and laminated avatars of Becky and Dave finished it off. Phew!