No photos for this one. Considering it doesn't look very good cosmetically, I don't think fancy pictures would have helped. Ah well.
So this is a Doboz Torte, which is a cake with six very thin layers of sponge, sandwiched together with chocolate buttercream with a caramel top. The top should have been 16 pieces, not 8, but I burnt my hand on the caramel and had trouble cutting it. Consequently I think the pieces were too heavy for the buttercream and ended up being rather flat rather than having the cool fan effect they were supposed to. All my layers were uneven too so trying to coat the outside in buttercream really didn't work, and my caramel was hardening too fast for me to get an even coat on the top. Lots of disappointments really but our guests were very nice and said they enjoyed it, one taking the remaining cake home with her so that was nice.
This cake was not easy. As I already said, I burnt myself on the caramel, which left me with an unusable left hand for the rest of the day since not having it on ice until about 3am was ridiculously painful. I now have a lovely, squishy blister for my troubles. I also lost 2 of my original cake layers, one to burning and one to being so thin that it was hard and cracked when trying to separate it from the parchment. I had to quickly redo those. Then I burnt my first batch of caramel, which was annoying. It all took a very long time and was quite frustrating. I wish it had turned out better for my troubles, at least looks wise. Taste was fine.
I would quite like to do something similar to this again one day. I might have some thicker layers though because you really lost the cake in the buttercream. I would also change the way I do some of the things in the method since I found it easier to do things a bit differently. Mostly to do with making the sponge layers in tins rather than on sheets, and arresting the caramel after cooking it. I didn't the first time and it continued cooking in the pan after it came off the heat, resulting in burnt caramel.
I too made a Doboz Torte. It was successful eventually and looked stunning, but there were a lot of hitches on the way. I had to make 2 lots of sponges as I found the method of cooking the sponge on 6 circles of parchment very unsuccessful. I I wasn't happy about doing this as I felt the sponge would spread off the edge of the paper - and sure enough it did. leaving the edges of the sponges too thin. I did sandwich them together after having a great deal of trouble getting them off the parchment (in fact this was most frustrating part - it was impossile to just peel off the parchment, but had to scrape it off and invariably broke the edge of the sponges. Anyway, I froze my first effort, half finished (ie without any caramel) I then used sandwich tins lined with parchment - these were more successful as they kept their shape and were the same thickness all over. Still the same difficulty getting them off the parchment, but I learned the lesson from my previous effort by loosening the edge all round the sponge first of all in order to keep the edges properly defined. In this way the finished effort had quite nice straight sides which were easy to spread with butter cream. So far so good. Next problem was the caramel - the first attempt went sugary and was unusuable.I was careful and dissolved the sugar properly, but it still happened. 2nd attempt was more successful but it seemed to take forever to get to the right colour. My husband kindly crushed half of it for the sides: first in a bag with a rolling pin, then as this did not seem fine enough, finished off in a liquidiser. I kept the thickest and most substantial sponge for the top, and from there on it worked OK and the final result was lovely. But... it took most of the day and a lot of frustration. I can't understand how the sponge cakes could stick so firmly on to the parchment, almost as if they had been superglued on! I don't think I would make another - the result wasn't really worth all the trouble, consisting mostly of buttercream and was very sweet and sickly.
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