Again all the ingredients were neatly weighed and packaged in little labelled bags with a recipe card. There was also a note saying that when they had packaged the first few bags of jam they had leaked so they were double bagged, and wouldn't be sending jam through the post again!
When I made it before, I made the traditional round cake with the word Sacher written on the top. This time instead of suggesting we pipe that word (which is how I thought it was always made), we were given some gold leaf to decorate the top. I was also interested to see the recipe gave instructions for making three different sized cakes, either a larger single layer, a smaller two layer cake, or cupcakes.
Since I had made it before I thought it might be fun to try out the cupcakes. There's not a lot of point me posting the recipe here as it isn't a recipe as such - the sachets were labelled things like 'cake mix' so I couldn't tell you exactly what quantities of which ingredients you need.
The method was quite interesting in that I had to beat the egg whites - this made for a really light and fluffy cake.
Almost there...
The cupcakes before and after baking. Afterwards, I spread a little of the apricot jam as a glaze on top.
Finally I had to make a chocolate ganache to cover the top but couldn't see the amount of cream I needed to add to the chocolate that was provided. By this point I had gotten so used to all the ingredients being pre-measured that it never occurred to me to turn over the recipe card and look on the back, so I just guessed how much cream to use (I was getting impatient by this point) and my chocolate ganache ended up too runny. It still worked ok, but was a little thinner on top of the cupcakes - you can still see some of the apricot jam in places.
We were also provided with a small piece of gold leaf and instructions to use scissors or tweezers, not our fingers. So I used scissors but when the pieces stuck to the scissors and I tried to get them off with my fingers they stuck to my fingers - doh! This was the first time I had used gold leaf - I know it's normally pretty expensive - and it's not something I'd be particularly bothered about using again unless it was a really integral part of a cake decoration.
Here are the finished cupcakes, with all the gold leaf that I could get onto them (the rest ended up stuck to my fingers!) - they tasted a lot better than they looked!
