GyanGurus

It’s a bird…It’s a plane…no it’s the GyanGurus! We’re back and we’re here to stay…until we get uninspired and depressed again, which we’re still currently, but we did something that was completely the opposite. It was utterly inspired and uplifting. What could it be?

Well you’re talking about the GyanGurus here…so it has to be one of the fs of life. In this instance it’s food. For Jasmine’s mom’s birthday we baked a birthday cake. It wasn’t just any birthday cake, it was the mother of all cakes. We’ve been into food forever…eating it, cooking it, and writing about it. We got into baking quite a while back, but recently we’ve gotten really good at it…all that free time and all that practice.

We saw the recipe on gourmet.com and we both wanted to make it, but it just seemed so daunting. But, we decided to do it last week for Jasmine’s mom’s birthday and thought it would be less daunting, if we did it together and so we did.

We baked the Twelve-Layer Mocha Cake.

First, it was the cake layers.

Second, the soufflé layers.

Third, the meringue layers.
There are toasted hazelnuts in this layer, we just didn’t get a picture.

The buttercreams – Mocha and Coffee.

The syrup.

Assembled cake.

We made the decorations ourselves too!

That piece, the last picture, turned out to be ambitious, the cake was heavy so you couldn’t eat a lot, but it was delicious and every bite was completely and utterly satisfying. And it didn’t hurt that we made it ourselves. Of course making it wasn’t like eating it. It wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be, but it was very time-consuming…even if we hadn’t messed up and had to make the meringue layers twice.

The first time we toasted the hazelnuts and when it was time to take off the loose skins, we used a towel that turned out be dirtier than it looked…ooops! So we had to throw it away, but we should’ve tried to take the wax paper off of that layer because the second layer turned out to be a pain in our necks, literally!

If you’re going to make it, please don’t butter the sheet when you bake the meringue layers…the wax paper will stick to it and you will spend the night trying to take the paper off with your hands, while breaking the layers into pieces because it’s too damn delicate. So don’t butter the sheet, for the love of god don’t butter it! It didn’t say in the directions to butter it, but we just assumed since the other two layers had to be…and when could butter be bad in baking…well it can be. Follow the directions exactly as they are and you’ll be fine.

In the end, it was a really satisfying experience, we think we should open a restaurant.