Gâteau Sucèss
A successful attempt to make success cake
Welcome to Block 2! Our focus for the next 6 weeks is CAKE! Nothing but cakes, cakes, and more cakes for 6 whole weeks. Hold on to your hats, friends, we’ll be eating a LOT of cake in the coming weeks.
Today, we started by making a Gâteau Sucèss (gah-toe sook-say)1 or “success cake”. It’s a classic French patisserie that is composed of discs of dacquoise (dah-quahz) layered with praline buttercream. Sound fancy? It is! I had no idea what any of these words meant (and no idea how to pronounce them) when we started.
To start, you mix up the batter for a dacquoise which is basically a meringue with some nut flour (traditionally almond) folded in. We used a swiss meringues which involves heating egg whites and sugar over a double boiler until they reach 135˚F, then “whipping the shit out of them.”2 Once your meringue forms stiff peaks, you ever-so-gently fold in a combination of almond and coconut flour to produce a fairly stiff batter. This is then placed in a pastry bag and piped into discs by starting the center and creating a spiral outward.3 These discs are then baked, forming a light, crisp, and nutty base and top for you cake.
Then it’s time to make a buttercream! Buttercream is a surprisingly simple recipe that involves making the meringue of your choice (French, Italian, and Swiss all work) then adding a LOT of butter and continuing to whip the mixture until a delicious icing is formed.4
Making buttercream is my new favorite thing to make in pasty. There are 2 reasons for this new-found joy: first, buttercream is delicious and SO much less sugary than the trash American icing I’ve been eating for my entire life. Second, you get to fling chunks of butter into a running mixer:
It’s incredible to see your nice meringue get seemingly ruined by the addition of butter until it magically changes its mind and forms this beautiful, smooth, creamy, heavenly delight:
Now that you’ve got your basic buttercream, just mix in some praline paste (a combination of caramelized syrup, almonds, and hazelnuts), and you have praline buttercream!
To assemble, you put a thick5 layer of praline buttercream in between two discs of dacquoise and smoosh some toasted almond flakes into the side. If you’re feeling fresh, you can even dusty the top with a little powdered sugar. Voila — gâteau sucèss!
While I expected the incredible amount of buttercream to be overwhelming, the cake is surprisingly light despite its deep, nutty taste. The sweetness is nicely balanced by the strong notes of hazelnut, almond, and coconut, and I could definitely eat at least half of this cake and not hate myself.
And if you’re feeling especially cheeky, you can pipe on a few rosettes to the top of the cake to make it look extra fancy:
The review from Chef of today’s creation was very positive! Apparently the clearly visible spiral in the dacquoise is highly desirable and indicates the right texture of the dacquoise batter and excellent piping technique. In fact, my cakes were the only ones to have a clean, even spiral that was clearly visible after baking, so I got bonus points! Chef did mention that I should have dusted the dacquoise disc separately from the rest of the cake to help maintain a clean appearance.
I’ll leave you, dear readers, with a full 360 view of today’s success:
Enjoy!
Apparently it’s very important to pronounce the 2nd word as “sook-say” rather than “sue-say” otherwise your “success cake” becomes a “suck cake” as I learned when telling a French-speaking friend of mine about this cake!
This is a direct quote
Apologies, I have no pictures of this process.
Meringues really deserve their own blog post, but for now I wanted to note that buttercream contains only 3 ingredients: egg whites, sugar, and butter in a 1:2:2 ratio. So if you have 100g of whites, you’d first make a meringue with 200g of sugar, then whip in 200g of butter to produce a glorious 500g of delicious buttercream.