Fancy making a great looking cake without spending hours in the kitchen? This is no more than a stack of pancakes sandwiched with a shop-bought caramel spread. It’s then covered with a salted chocolate ganache.
If you have the time, you can make your own pancakes but sometimes life is a little too short. I used, new to the supermarket shelves, Abra-ca-Debora pancakes from Holland.
Ingredients
2 packets of sweet Dutch Abra-ca-Debora pancakes
2 packets of original Dutch Abra-ca-Debora pancakes
450g jar of Dulce de Leche classic
For the chocolate ganache
200g dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa solids)
160g double cream
Place the chocolate in a bowl. Pour the cream into a saucepan and bring to the boil, then pour it over the chocolate, stir and gently combine. Side aside and cool.
For the sea salt caramel
25g liquid glucose (most supermarkets sell it in squeeze tubes)
150g sugar
125ml whipping cream
15g unsalted butter
1/2 tsp sea salt
Put the glucose in a heavy-based saucepan, place it over a medium heat and warm for 1-2 minutes. Gradually add the sugar and cook, stirring occasionally – make sure you cook the caramel until it’s a rich hazelnut brown. In a separate saucepan, warm the cream (do not add straight from the fridge, the caramel will react by bubbling viciously and will bubble over and could burn you. Add the diced butter and the warm cream to the mixture (it still bubbles a lot) and mix until any lumps have disappeared. Pour into a tray and allow to cool.
Once your sea salt caramel is cool, add this to the ganache to suit your taste. Put to one side.
Spread each pancake with the Dulce de Leche and layer up.
Make sure you spread the caramel thinly and make sure that it touches the pancake edges. Repeat until all your pancakes are used. Anchor with a skewer struck straight through the top to the bottom and put in the fridge.
It’s now time to ice the cake with your sea salt caramel ganache. Remove the cake from the fridge.
Make sure you have your ganache close to hand and begin to add it to the outside of the cake – either using a flexible scraper or a palate knife. Grab a mug of hot water and dip in your palate knife to give you a flawless finish. If your mix gets to stiff to handle, give it 20 seconds in the microwave to loosen up.
This is how the cake looks when it’s cut. If you want a sweeter cake, or wish to use less pancakes, whip up some double cream a large carton would work and add to that some of the dulce de leche, you can then make your layers as thin or as thick as you’d like. Here’s the ‘cake’ when cut, you can see the toffee ‘cement’ bubbling out when I cut through it.
That looks delicious. Love salted-caramel!
Thanks it is – that sea salt caramel ganache is unbelievably good …