DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Today I made the most ridiculously complicated and fatty cake of my young life. It’s a recipe I found in a discarded copy of Bon Appetit a few years ago at the gym. (Yep, it’s pretty ironic that I came off the treadmill, picked up a magazine featuring a million-calorie dessert, and thought, “I really have to make this!”)

1. Bake a nut-cake (ground nuts, sugar, egg whites) and slice it into thin strips. This is tough to do well. Fortunately I’m an engineer — note the ruler. (The T-square is out of frame.)
2. Line a bowl with the cake strips. This is impossible to do well because the strips break easily and have to be fitted back together. As it turns out, it doesn’t really matter; the finished dome holds up even if the strips aren’t all in one piece. Even so, this was by far the hardest part of the process. The small pile of shards in the picture doesn’t really illustrate the half-hour spent cutting, picking, and fitting. Moreover, toward the end I was able to re-use about 2/3 of the previous discards, which I felt good about in the sense that I was conserving resources, until the next day when I tossed the uncut leftover cake in the trash anyway.
3. Spread the cake-bowl with chocolate ganache (bittersweet chocolate, heavy cream) made previously. The gooey ganache tends to pull the cake apart as it runs down toward the center of the bowl. Cursing might ensue.
4. Fill the cavity with hazelnut cream (heavy cream, chopped nuts, amaretto, chocolate bits). Top the assembly with more cake-strips.
5. Make a full batch of cranberry-coconut cookies in case the cake doesn’t turn out.
6. Invert cake, top with cocoa and fresh berries just for effect. Discard berries after photo — no sense spoiling a perfectly good chocolate cream cake with fresh fruit. Slice and serve!
7. (optional): have bad dreams about the four cups of heavy cream in the middle of the cake. Wake up sweating as your liver works overtime to cull the milk-fat from your bloodstream. Call the nurse line to have them talk you down.

So, was it any good? At first I was unimpressed — because after having spent 3-4 hours on this I expected something of otherworldly goodness. My initial impression was that it was just over-the-top rich, but not necessarily great.

I had a bite the next day, though, and was knocked out. The cake really is excellent. The problem the night before was that I’d already eaten my body weight in pizza, so my fat appreciation gland was blown out. Serve this after a light meal, or, what the heck, instead of a light meal, and you’ll get the effect promised by the recipe (i.e. cardiac arrest).