Meraner Torte

Ingredients:

Dough:

150 g    butter at room temperature

150 g    sugar

7 g       vanilla sugar

3          egg yolks

100 g    flour

1 tsp     baking powder

80 g      rasped chocolate

150 g    rasped hazelnuts

3          egg whites

Creme:

250ml   milk
1          Dr. Oetker "Tortencreme"
250g     butter
170g     icing sugar
100g     melted chocolate
(1 tbsp  rum)

Decoration:

some    apricot jam

125g     hazelnuts

200g     sugar

Preheat the oven to 165 C. 

To prepare the dough, whisk the butter until foamy. One by one, whisk in sugar, vanilla sugar and egg yolks. Stir in the flour after mixing it with the baking powder and also add the chocolate and hazelnuts. Beat the egg whites until firm and then carefully add to the rest of the mixture. Add the dough to a greased baking pan and bake for ca 50-60 min.

Once the cake has cooled down, use a large serrated knife to cut the cake in half horizontally.

Prepare creme as instructed, and do not forget to add the melted chocolate. Add rum to taste.

Cover the lower half of the cake in apricot jam and then add 2/3 of the chocolate creme. Place the second half of the cake on top.

Evenly cover the surface of the cake with the rest of the chocolate creme, decorating the border as you wish. I decided to further decorate the cake with some noisettes caramélisées, which I prepared according to a recipe by Christophe Felder.

Bake the hazelnuts for ca. 10min in the over, until slightly toasted.  Carefully insert a toothpick  into the hazelnuts. Prepare a block of polysterene that you will need to dry the hazelnuts.

Prepare a bowl with cold water which is big enough to take the saucepan in which you will prepare the caramel. Add half the sugar to the saucepan and melt it over medium heat. Constantly stir with a wooden spoon to avoid the sugar to burn. Once melted, add the remaining sugar and continue to stir. Reduce the heat to low and keep stirring until the sugar has reached a fluid, medium amber caramel. Then, remove the pan from the hob and let it cool in the cold water for a bit to keep the caramel from darkening further. Be careful not to leave the pan in the water too long to prevent the caramel from hardening.

Let the caramel cool a bit and then dip the hazelnuts, one by one, into it. Check if the caramel has already reached the right consistency: As you pull the hazelnuts from the caramel, the sugar should form long drops. Insert the other end of the toothpicks into the polysterene to hang down. The caramel will drip from the hazelnuts, forming wonderful, tearlike shapes. 

Let the caramel harden and then very carefully remove from the polystyrene. Be careful not to break off the tips.

Use the hazelnuts to finish decorating the cake.

Toothless

Thanks to my cousin I was introduced to the art of sugar craft last summer. It is also her who pointed out an amazing shop to me in Vienna, called "Alles Torte" (www.allestorte.at). They sell everything needed to decorate cakes (and more). I paid a visit to this shop on Saturday to buy myself some gum paste with the aim in mind to model Toothless from "How to train your dragon". My motivation stemmed from a photo I hard recently seen on "Bored Panda" of some incredible sugar art:

(Photo Copyright: http://www.fernandaabarcacakes.com/)

Armed with some modelling tools that I got as a present from my cousin last year, I set out on my second sugar craft endeavour: 

To model Toothless, I drew inspiration from the following tutorial: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/477733472945370905/ 

First, the head had to be modelled:

Followed by the eyes:

The ears and horns were next:

To keep the gum paste from hardening too fast, one has to keep it in cling film:

 With the head ready, the body had to be shaped:

The head was attached with the help of a toothpick:

After attaching the arms...

... claws, tail and wings had to be attached:

Finished!