White Chocolate Raspberry Macadamia Cake

This is truly a special cake. When cakes come with challenges, am at my upper maxima. I love challenges. It required lot of patience, had to be slow and go step by step. But efforts paid when everyone enjoyed it. I made it for girls "dessert" evening it was perfect combo with some tea and coffee.

Raspberry with chocolate will make world's best yum couple. Macadamia brought an interesting twist in couple. Not too hard, nor too heavy but subtle and crunchy was enough to take me straight to heaven. I brought organic macadamia nut and roasted larger quantity than required for cakes, they were quite irresistible.

I can go endless singing glories about this special cake. Original recipe is form fine cooking, but used it only for preparing the cake with macadamia nut. Rest made my own raspberry rum filling and white chocolate ganache.

                                                                          Frozen Raspberries

                                                                          The Chocolate Leaves

                                                                                Raspberry fillings

                                                           Cake ingredients and cake procedures 

                                                             Baked cake and assembling cake layers

                                             Preparing chocolate ganche and coating it on cake

Ingredients

Raspberry fillling

200 gram frozen raspberry

60 gram  sugar

25 gram corn starch

1 to 2 tbsp rum

White chocolate leaves

9 to 12 organic lemon leaves, preferably different size ( I used clean Rose leaves)

180 gram white chocolate coarsely chopped

Cake

150 gram unsalted butter, softened

1 tsp butter for greasing baking pans

350 gram flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

180 gram granulated sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

4 large eggs

150 ml buttermilk

200 gram chopped white chocolate 

110 gram chopped toasted macadamia nuts

White chocolate genache

200 ml pure cream

450 gram white chocolate finely chopped.

Method

Raspberry fillings

Let 200 gram  raspberries come to room temperature. This brings out lot of water from berries. Take the raspberries with water to heavy bottom saucepan and place it on medium heat. Take care so that you don't burn the berries. Now mix sugar and corn starch together. While raspberries are just about to boil add corn starch and sugar mixture to it and keep stirring till the corn starch is cooked. It will gradually start to thicken up and slowly the mixture will get clear. Filling will be ready once the mixture gets clear. Take it off from heat and let it cool. Before coating the cake with filling, mix with 1 or 2 tbsp spoon of rum. I prepared this filling previous day and let them cool in refrigerator.

White chocolate leaves

Wash the leaves and dry them with paper towels. Heat one inch of water in a saucepan, place a steel bowl with 180 gram of white chocolate over saucepan and whisk until melted and smooth. Using a fine food brush, paint a thick coat of chocolate on the underside of each leaf. Take care not to drip chocolates over the sides of the leaves, or they will be difficult to peal off later. Place the leaves with chocolate side upwards on baking sheet and leave in a cool, dry place or refrigerate until the chocolate has set (30 minutes). Hold the leaf stem and peal the leaf carefully away from chocolate. Transfer the chocolate leaves to the other baking sheet and refrigerate until ready to use.

Preparing cake

Preheat the oven to 175 C. Butter three 18cm round cake pans. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. Beat the butter and sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes. Scrape down the bowl. Add the vanilla and the four egg yolk one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add about one-third of the flour mixture and mix until incorporated. Add half if butter milk and mix well. Continue adding the flour mixture and the buttermilk, alternating between the two and ending with flour. Beat white part of 4 eggs separately till they form medium peak. Mix it with cake batter slowly till they have mixed uniformly. The batter will be thick and glossy. Fold in white chocolate and macadamia nuts.

Divide the cake batter evenly among  the prepared cake pans. Level the batter with a spatula. Arrange the pans on the oven racks so that no pan is directly over another. Bake, swapping and rotating the pan's positions after 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of each cakes come out clean, 30 to 35 minutes total.  Cool for 10 minutes. Invert the cakes and cool the cakes completely. Basically I baked two cakes instead of three and sliced the big cake in to two halves.

Ganache
Place the chopped white chocolate into medium size bowl. Set aside while you heat the cream. Heat the cream in a small saucepan until just boiling. Pour the cream over  the chocolate and leave it to stand for two minutes. This will give the chocolate time to soften. Stir the ganache until smooth. Leave the white chocolate ganache to cool until it reaches the desired consistency. If ganache solidifies or doesn't melt well heat in microwave for 30 sec and stir again to smooth.

Assemble the cake
Place the cake on a flat serving plate or cake stand. Spread a uniform coating of raspberry filling on top of the cake. Repeat the same with second cake layer. Amount of raspberry filling is up to you, I used 3 to 4 table spoon of filling. Top with the last cake layer. Spread white chocolate ganche with clean broad (offset) spatula, over the top and side of the cake. Refrigerate the cake until the ganche firms enough for about 20 to 30 minutes. Decorate with white chocolate leaves, fresh raspberries and mint leaves.