I've been looking forward to baking this cake for weeks
I printed the L'OR cake recipe from the website about a month ago and planned on baking it for the holidays. I wasn't sure if it was going to be fore Christmas or NYE but it was going to be one of the sweet desserts for these days. I ordered a box of Onyx coffee cups for the occasion as normally we drink another blend. Onyx is one we like but just occasionally otherwise our body is objecting that there's just too much caffeine in one shot, lol.
Trying this new recipe
And yesterday I felt like it was the day to try this new recipe out, I thought we'd all appreciate a nice slice of cake with our coffee as that's been ages since I baked one. Whenever there's baking involved nowadays, it's banana bread to not waste any bananas, my daughter approves! It's about time for a new recipe in the house..
Missing steps and info in the recipe and instructions
When I read the instructions, I noticed two things immediately, and one of them was a missing step. They jumped from adding the eggs one by one (familiar if you bake banana bread often) to "finally, add the coffee to the mix". I wondered if they really wanted me to add it before the flour, but the step of adding the flour is nowhere to be found in the instructions. I figured this was easy to solve by following the way I bake banana bread, adding that step in between the eggs and coffee.
But there was another odd thing about the recipe, namely that they advice 80 ML of coffee 1 OR 160 ML of coffee 2. So depending on your preference you add 80 or 160 ML which sounds very odd to me because you can't just add 80 ML of extra fluid to a recipe without adjusting something else and expect the cake to come out exactly the same.
I also wondered (but I may be wrong) if there needed to be baking powder in the recipe but I figured maybe that's not the case in every cake recipe, I forgot as it's been a long time since I baked one. Thankfully, I realized in time that the number of eggs is always based on M sized eggs, as we have XL eggs at home, it usually means /2 and that seemed about correct looking at the batter later.
Mixing the batter
I will give you the perfect recipe once I discovered it and just go to the baking part right away for this first attempt. Here's how it looked before putting in the oven, I did not have a temperature guidance btw, so I had to just try something, which seems odd as well. I admit, that the batter looked ok:
I expect a cake batter to look like this or similar so I was not worried yet here. I put the oven up to 220 degrees Celcius first, simply because the banana bread will fail too if I use a lower temperature in this oven. In our old oven, this was much lower. I put the timer on 60 minutes and lowered it along the way, so no good advice here at this point either. I will figure it out though, the banana breads come out perfectly nowadays.
About one hour later, this is what came out. I already noticed during the baking time that the cake wouldn't rise and that made me realize I was probably right that there should have been baking powder inside the recipe. Should have listened to my gut feeling here!
When it was almost cooled off, I cut off a slice and noticed it was not as bad as I expected. I had cakes fail before where only 1/3 of the cake was failed miserably on the bottom usually, and the rest was ok-ish. This was was at least equally baked everywhere. At least the taste was great!
Here it was cooled off completely:
The coffee cup I used for the cake: L'OR Onyx (80ML).
Mochi was very interested in the cake, as soon as I sat on the couch to test a slice, he sat down in front of me to see if he could get a piece, or at least check if it was for him or not.
He does that with everything as soon as he hears or see us eating, it's pretty funny as this is when he really checks us out, as well when we are playing with him. Of course, I didn't give it to him, no worries..
Conclusion
It was not a complete waste of ingredients as the cake is still ok to eat but missing good texture. Thankfully, the taste is awesome and dipping it in the coffee is even better, yum! I will now head over to the website where this recipe comes from and tell them they have an incomplete recipe there. The picture they use looks awesome but no way it came out like that without the baking powder and with a possible extra 80 ML of liquid without adjusting the dry ingredients a bit as well. I'm glad at least it's not a complete waste of ingredients and time. I hope to figure out the perfect recipe and will share it once I do.
For now, I will enjoy the partially failed slice of coffee cake with another cup of coffee :)
Have a great NYE and 2023!
