Series 7, Episode 9, Savarin
I moved house recently and this was the first bake that I made using my new oven. Now that we’ve settled, I’m hoping to get back to baking regularly.
Here’s the recipe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/savarin_with_chantilly_30509
The recipe said to beat the mixture with a wooden spoon, but I was feeling lazy and that my cake mixer would do a better job so used that instead. I left it to prove while making the other ingredients.
I didn’t want to buy orange liqueur just for this cake, so used some cherry rum I already had.
The recipe said to use 100g of chocolate for the chocolate disc. That would have created a giant chocolate disc to completely cover the cake, so I made one big disc and some chocolate swirls to go with it. It is very difficult to pipe white chocolate and the “Savarin” writing wasn’t very neat. If anyone has any tips for piping chocolate into a disc and smoothing it out nicely, let me know.
When making the caramel, it looked like it was going to crystallise. I had a quick look online and saw a suggestion to add lemon juice when making caramel if it starts to crystallise. I had a tiny amount left in the bottom of the bowl from the lemon I used for the syrup so added a couple of drops to the boiling sugar and it worked! The crystallising stopped and the caramel came out perfectly.
Once the savarin dough had proved for an hour in the bowl then an hour in the tin, it looked like this:
After baking it was a beautiful golden brown colour
I left it for about 10 minutes before removing it from the tin and had that nerve-wracking moment of turning it out of the tin….
The joy and relief of sliding this cake effortlessly out of the tin without it breaking is something that is worth having a minor internal celebration for, even if I’m the only one celebrating.
After the cake had been soaked there was some syrup left. I saved that for when I had the cake later.
I decorated just before serving with the Chantilly cream, fruit, chocolate disc and caramel shards (of which there were plenty left over for snacking).
Here’s the final result:
The cream and fruit were simple decorations but are so effective. The caramel shards were a bit more of a challenge and I think I made a bit of a mess of the disc but I’m not entering any competitions here.
Overall it tasted pretty good. I have made less complicated cakes which have tasted just as good (or better) though. However, my first bake in my new kitchen was a success, so no need to move house again.
Lily
