Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Tuesdays With Dorie: Chocolate-Banded Ice Cream Torte


This week's Tuesdays With Dorie selection was made by Amy at Food, Family And Fun. The recipe for the Chocolate-Banded Ice Cream Torte can be found on her site. As always, our recipes are selected each week from Dorie Greenspan's cookbook called Baking: From My Home to Yours. It's a great book!

I was so ecstatic to be making this ice cream torte. Ice cream is by far one of my all time favorite desserts. And an ice cream cake? Even better. I selected a chunky strawberry ice cream to use in mine.

It all seemed pretty easy: make the ganache, pour some in the pan, soften up the ice cream, spread on a layer, more ganache, more ice cream, and then more ganache. It was all stretched out over an entire evening until it was done. The only thing I was apprehensive about was adding the eggs into the ganache without cooking them. It's my first time making something with raw eggs, and it kind of freaked me out. But I decided to go with the flow.

The preparations for it all went really well. The only slight annoyance, and I always have trouble with this when I'm baking with layers, is that I didn't even out each layer very well. My bottom layer of ganache was too thin, as was my bottom layer of ice cream. And the lines weren't perfectly crisp - I had a little bit of waviness when I sliced into it. But that's the perfectionist in me.

As for taste, well... the chocolate was a little rich for me. I never thought I would find myself saying those words because I love rich things. But it was easy to fix, I just added more strawberry ice cream to my plate to offset all of the chocolate. So it turned out pretty well. My husband raved over it... though sometimes I can't tell if he's just being nice or if he's really sincere. In any case, it's already almost gone!

Tune in next week for cookies!


10 comments:

Rachel said...

That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! Where do I place an order?

Nancy/n.o.e said...

Your torte turned out great - love the perspective of the first picture. I ended up measuring my ganache to make sure the layers were even, and I used two different pints of ice cream so those naturally came out the same. It was very rich; I started wondering how I could achieve the same effect with less deadly ingredients!
Nancy

Prudy said...

It turned out gorgeous! I love the look of the chunky ice cream to contrast with all that smoothness. I love that chicken enchilada casserole too, I've made that one from CL and it is really good.

chocolatechic said...

My layers weren't even either.

Not because I didn't measure it out~~I actually weighed the ganache to make sure it was even~~but because my fridge isn't level.


harumph!

TeaLady said...

Looks good to me. Great Job. And the chunks of strawberry take it over the top.

Anonymous said...

your torte looks great :)

Laura said...

Your torte looks awesome! And I'm definitely going to try the chicken enchiladas - yum!

Cathy said...

I think your layers are awesome! They are so straight! The chunky strawberry looks yummy. I am so with you on the richness of the chocolate -- egads, it is almost TOO much chocolatey goodness even for a hard-core chocolaholic. I think your torte looks absolutely beautiful! Glad your hubby helped you eat it!

Anonymous said...

I think the layers look great and so does your cake! I would love to eat half of it!!!

Eleganza Strings/ The DeLadurantey Family said...

Your ice cream looks so refreshing!

Hannah