And for my first challenge...............

I was pretty excited about my first Daring Bakers challenge.
A hazelnut gateaux with praline buttercream and chocolate glaze.
Layers of moist hazelnut cake filled with praline buttercream, whipped cream, glazed with apricot preserves and then topped off with a rich chocolate glaze.
Sounds pretty good right?
I joined the club as a way to try new recipes and techniques as well as expand my repertoire.
At first I hadn't given the idea of "veganizing" this recipe, until I started reading the recipe and counted the number of eggs. There was something like 57 eggs total in the finished product.
That's when I decided maybe instead of using this challenge as a way to perfect my technique I would use it as a way to perfect the art of "veganizing" instead.
I followed the recipe as closely as I could following the rules and using the exceptions where applicable.

I love a good challenge. This was definitely challenging to say the least.
4 cakes (one of which turned out to be a great breakfast treat), 1 nut substitution, enough buttercream filling for 10 cakes and 1 week later I finally finished.
It took a while to find the right cake recipe. I tried a few I found on the Internet, and tried to convert a couple of my own.
And then it hit me.
I can't believe I didn't do it from the very beginning.
"Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, my saviour and cupcake bible.
It wasn't until I bought a copy of this book that I started to understand vegan baking.
Those girls really know their stuff. Thanks to them, now I do too!

Pistachio Cake with Pistachio Buttercream filling and Chocolate Ganache glaze

I decided to use Pistachios instead of Hazelnuts because they were a little lighter on my wallet (or I should say Peter's wallet).

For the cake I chose to use the Hazelnut Cupcakes with Mocha Mousse filling recipe.


I just substituted the pistachios for hazelnuts and added some lemon zest instead of almond extract because the original cake recipe from the challenge had zest in it.

The filling was touch and go for a bit there.
I made pistachio paste, which was really fun and tasty.


Then I decided to use the Peanut Buttercream recipe.

This would have been fine except I think I didn't measure the paste correctly and the buttercream came out really loose and oily.
So of course I tried everything I knew how to do to fix it. In the end, I came out with enough filling for like 10 cakes!

For the whipped cream layer, I was hoping to find some non-diary whipping cream but I didn't have any luck with that so I used the Fluffy Vegan Buttercream recipe with half of the powdered sugar and no vanilla.

Which seemed to taste fine.
I have to be honest, I really don't understand the reason for this layer.

I've never glazed a cake with apricot preserves (or nappage as the french like to call it).

Usually, I just do a light layer of buttercream over the cake to smooth it out, chill it and then glaze it.

I made two mistakes on this part.
I forgot to trim the sides of the cake to make them even and I turned the top layer cut side up and instead of cut side down. This made the sides of my cake a little lumpy.

My chocolate glaze was quite tasty but it wasn't shiny enough.

This may have been due to the quality of my chocolate. Usually I use a really good quality chocolate but I was trying to keep the cost down so I skimped there.

Overall, the cake turned out well.


I learned a few new things and remembered a couple of old things I had forgotten.

I took the finished product over to our friend's house for a tasting.

They seemed to enjoy it and said that it was better than a few of the vegan cakes they have purchased in town. This made me feel good.

I will definitely be using some of my new "discoveries" from this challenge in the future and I can't wait for next month's challenge.

enjoy!
xoxo