80/20 cake

There's an idea (that's largely unsubstantiated, as far as I can tell) known as the Pareto Principle, that asserts that 80% of outcomes are caused by 20% of inputs. It's often abused (which is exactly what I'm about to do here) but for many of its applications, the core idea is that of diminishing returns - that the first 20% of effort/resources contribute 80% of the benefits.

"Why are you wittering on about management consulting crap? Isn't this a baking blog?" I hear you all cry! Well, I've had a jar of sour cherries at the back of my larder for quite a while (literally years... ooops!), and I decided that it's time to bake with them. I absolutely love Black Forest gateau, but by heck, making them is an enormous faff. So I figured I'd cut some corners and distract you with some ridiculous diversion in the hopes that you wouldn't notice. Did it work?

This time around, I used the same recipe as for an actual Black Forest gateau, but with half quantities for the filling (both the cherry gel and the cream). I also baked the cake in two sandwich tins (it took about 25 mins at ~175C) to save me the hassle of cutting the cake horizontally - another major faff avoided!

Last time around, I forgot to fold in the flour before the egg whites. This time around, I managed to follow the recipe more accurately, but the batter ends up very stiff before you fold in the egg whites. The batter's pretty lumpy, as you can see, but I decided to stop at this point to avoid knocking out too much of the air. Hopefully the cake itself won't be lumpy!

Ready for the oven - the quantities are just about perfect for two sandwich tins.

Straight from the oven, both cakes had enormous mounds in the centre and looked like they had far too much raising agent in them, but actually on cooling they ended up almost perfectly flat on the top. I'm pretty happy with how they look.

It came together quite nicely in the end! It turns out that there's far, far too much cherry gel - I think halving the quantities again would have been about right. But I don't think it looks half bad, especially given how many corners I'd cut. It's clearly not a Black Forest gateau, but it's certainly got hints of it.

It certainly took more than 20% of the effort of a full-blown, proper Black Forest gateau, and I don't know if it reached 80% of the quality, but it was certainly not bad at all! It was a teensy bit dry (in retrospect, I think I might have been a bit stingy with the cherry brandy), particularly at the outer perimeter of the cake - I hadn't thought about it before, but the extra layer of cream around the side of the Black Forest gateau is perfectly placed to help offset the area where the cake would be driest. The glace cherries were horrible - but that was all I had for decoration. But overall, not a bad return on effort!

A Christmas treat

We've had a fantastically gluttonous Christmas Day today, and what better way to round it off than with some cinnamon rolls. I got up at 8am to make the dough and start the process, and then we went on a ~40km bike ride before lunch, so I feel like we've at least earned the treat. I used the same recipe as usual - when they turn out this well, I'm not inclined to mess about with it!