Daring Bakers July – Filbert Praline Gateau

July’s Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mele Cotte, and I was thrilled to see another cake on the agenda! This month our objective was to produce a Filbert (read: hazelnut – my understanding is that a filbert is a particular variety of hazelnut, but normal hazelnuts are pretty equivalent) Gateau, with a praline buttercream. I enlisted Hamish’s help to produce this for his brother’s homecoming (he’s been living overseas for several years, so it was a bit of an event), and we churned it out in the space of about four hours (possible slightly less, although I waited until the following morning to decorate – which didn’t take long anyway).

I used Kahlua in my buttercream instead of the prescribed liqueurs, and cut back quite a bit on quantity – but I’m not a fan of liqueur with cake and it didn’t really do it for me. I followed the recipe to the letter, and was disappointed with a reasonably short cake – next time I would use a smaller tin, to achieve the grandeur of height. After all, with a cake this fussy it’s nice to make an impression!

Another change I would probably make next time round would be to increase the buttercream – I think 1.5 times the amount called for would have been a better balance. I’ve also learnt that praline buttercream isn’t the best for piping with – it seems obvious in retrospect but if I’d reserved some of the buttercream for decoration before I added the praline I would have had to unclog my piping nozzle a lot less frequently (a proper food processor may have solved this problem for me, but I think I would still err on the side of caution).

All in all it was pretty fun to make, and everyone seemed to enjoy it – Hamish thought it was delicious – but
it’s probably not a cake I would make again by choice, because I just didn’t find it that tasty. Great challenge, though! And make sure you check out the other Daring Bakers! 🙂