The chocolate-orange cake with bourbon caught my eye when I was looking for a chocolate dessert for a dinner party. Dark chocolate paired with orange zest and a generous amount of bourbon, what can go wrong...
I was a litle nervous about burning the alcohol off a full cup of bourbon. I just used an old pot and hoped for the best. It took more than 10 minutes. The key was to resist the temptation of giggling the pot as it just resulted in a microspray of vaporized bourbon. Without pot giggling, things were quite uneventful. My pot did not look too great at the end though so I was just glad I had not used a nicer one!
This dessert has no cream or milk. A syrup is made with the reduced bourbon, simple syrup and orange zest. I used what I thought was a cara cara orange for the zest, later realizing it was a pink grapefruit (!). But I thought that since grapefruit and bourbon work wonderfully well in one of my favorite cocktails the Brown Derby, everything should still be fine, and indeed it was.
The chocolate (she insists on 70% so I used Valrhona guanaja) melted with the butter in a bain marie was mixed with the bourbon syrup, and then added to the eggs beaten in the stand mixer.
Sliced it is dense and dark and reminded me of a marquise cake, which is essentially a dense chocolate terrine that is served cold. Unlike the marquise which is not cooked, this cake is cooked in a bain-marie, which did not seem to alter the texture very much. When sliced, it remained creamy and melted easily on the tongue. It was a good use of high-quality chocolate and bourbon. Using pink grapefruit zest ended up being fine (I compensated by grating madarin zest on top since I was out of oranges) but orange would be slightly brighter. This inspired me to make a Brown Derby cocktail with the appetizers so we started and ended the meal with bourbon and grapefruit.
Edited by FrogPrincesse, 12 March 2013 - 03:37 PM.
