Mocha cake with coffee–white chocolate ganache from The Fearless Baker: Simple Secrets for Baking Like a Pro (page 137) by Erin Jeanne McDowell

Where’s the full recipe - why can I only see the ingredients?

Always check the publication for a full list of ingredients. An Eat Your Books index lists the main ingredients and does not include 'store-cupboard ingredients' (salt, pepper, oil, flour, etc.) - unless called for in significant quantity.

Notes about this recipe

  • Eat Your Books

    See recipe for variation.

  • Melsmom on February 26, 2021

    Like pie4u, this is the second recipe in this book that has errors. McDowell lists ingredients in both grams and volume, but the two don't always correspond. I started weighing espresso powder and realized it was way more than the 1/4 cup called for. I agree with Zosia that the ganache frosting is like plastic at room temperature. I was suspicious of 1/4 cream with 1 lb. 11 ounces white chocolate and the consistency just doesn't work. I had to add hot water to the mixture and re-whip it every few minutes to get it to a spreadable consistency. Also, there was barely enough to frost the cake. Then no one in my house even liked the frosting. I had a similar issue with the Caramel Cake recipe in the book. The cake is good but the frosting was a disaster - 6 cups of powdered sugar?? I ended up changing amounts in that recipe to get a good frosting. I've made the devil's food cake which is really good and the high ratio chocolate cake which lacked a robust chocolate flavor.

  • pie4u on January 25, 2020

    This is the first cake I have made from this book. It's the second recipe where I found editing issues which has me a bit concerned. Zosia mentioned the issue with the espresso powder. (1 .5 tablespoons of espresso powder is nowhere near 43g). The instructions say grease and flour 2 9in cake pans. When I got to pouring the cakes in the pan, I was glad she gave approx. proportions per pan, but 652g per pan!? If you add up the weights of all the cake ingredients, you get over 2000g. If you look at the upper right corner of the recipe where it gives quantity it say "Makes one 9-inch 3-layer cake" If you did make 3 cakes it would 652g/cake. However, back to the assembly the instructions say split the cakes in two for a total of 4 layers. I should have followed Zosia suggestion to add more cream to the ganache frosting it was far too thick to spread nicely, and I didn't really have enough to fully cover the 4 tier cake

  • Zosia on December 06, 2019

    The flavours of this cake were fabulous! The cake was a deep, dark mocha and its bittersweet notes were balanced by the sweet coffee ganache....like a really good cappuccino in cake form. The textures could have been better but that was on me. I forgot to rotate my pans part way through baking and the cakes were already pulling away from the sides of the pans when I checked for the first time at 50 minutes. The cakes weren't dry but would have been a little more moist had I pulled them out just a few minutes earlier. Reviewers commented on how sweet the ganache was so I increased the cream to half the weight of the white chocolate; it was still sweet but worked with the cake. It was a little plastic at cool room temperature so I would add even more cream next time. Note that there's a typo regarding espresso powder quantity: both ganache and cake call for 43g but the volume required is listed as 1.5tbsp and .25 cup respectively. I used the volume measurements for the espresso powder.

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