Devils delight!

‘Just clean up the mess boy, it’s actually pretty good though’ mustered the old man when he got out of bed to see his son of around eight or nine years old had baked a cake on a Saturday morning before the rest of the family had risen.

Not real sure why I had decided to bake a Devils food cake on my Saturday morning, yet I’m assuming it had something to do with my fascination for consuming banana cake.

Devils food cake is basically a richer version of a standard, fluffy chocolate cake, yet not as intense as the mud cake. It’s widely considered to be a counterpart to an Angel cake, which in comparison is pale and light in colour. America was printing recipes for the devils food cake as early as 1905.

In my line of work I have always considered simple, fluffy, airated cakes to be one of the most under appreciated things in restaurants. I don’t even really like icing, I just love the cake!

Any restaurant in their right mind wouldn’t dream of serving just a piece of cake, or a standard fluff cake, as I like to refer to them as. If anything they’ll be serving up rich, thick and heavy mud cakes in order to keep their standards above what the bakeries are selling for four bucks a pop, while a restaurant is trying to push a dessert for $12 to $15.

The word cake is from Norse origin and it is believed they got amongst it by adding sweet ingredients to bread doughs way back when.

There are countless different varieties of cake one can choose from. Chiffon cake, sponge cake, flourless cake, layer cake, mud cakes, yeast cakes and plenty of other cakes that are arguably just bread with sugar in them.

Any chef faces multiple dilemmas daily, yet from my own stand point as a head chef in a country pub, I had always wanted cakes on my menus. Having a bakery next door to my most recent venture made it hard, so I had to up the anti if I was going to put a cake on the menu. I couldn’t be just cake, there had to be more components, depth, flavour, balance and all the other shit that makes a good chef go mad! And I decided to base is on a banana cake, traditionally the Hummingbird cake, thanks to our American friends!

On one of my Saturday morning missions I made a banana cake, then ate half the sucker while still warm, just out of the oven. Then proceeded to spew the whole lot up all over the kitchen floor! I’ve never been able to even imagine eating warm banana cake ever since, it still makes me feel crook in the guts. Yet the fluffy and fresh decadence of a freshly baked Hummingbird cake, once cooled, is still very dear to the soul.

I had been playing about with Nougat at the time, so I decided to use banana nougat as my frosting. Banana splits were one of my stable dessert’s, yet holding desirable bananas without wastage is tricky. You’ll sell 8 banana splits on a Wednesday night, then sell 2 for the rest of the week. Customers don’t give a nuns nasty how many you sell. When a customer wants’ a banana split you need to deliver! Having multiple turnover avenues for all stock is desired practice on all menu items, yet banana I would have covered from many angles! I decided to slow dry my excess banana to use as a garnish also.

I’m an insainly big banoffi fan, so having caramel as another component, or sauce even, you could say was locked in probably the moment I committed to the dish. Over all, it was BOOM town!

Without really knowing it those early days making cakes were the foundation of my chef career. I’ll always say I never wanted to be a chef and I didn’t, yet I’ll claim those early experiences have helped set me up for knowing what’s good and tasty.

I’m surprised I got away with making cakes at such a young age in all honestly, at least until I got the boys around one day and we painted the wall’s with cake batter.