Mud layer cake with chestnut honey thyme frosting
 
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
 
Base adapted from Linda Lomelino's kladdkaka
Author:
Recipe type: Dessert
Serves: 8
Ingredients
For the base:
  • 180 g of dark chocolate
  • 180 g of butter
  • 100 ml of strong coffee
  • 3 eggs
  • 80 g of caster sugar
  • One tsp of vanilla sugar
  • A pinch of salt
For the frosting:
  • 15 g of butter
  • 40 g of chestnut honey
  • 3 thyme twigs, of about 7 cm (2.5 inches) length per each
  • 100 g of mascarpone cheese
  • 100 g cream spread
  • 40 g of icing sugar
Preparation
For the base:
  1. Melt the butter and the chocolate in a saucepan.
  2. With the help a whipper, whip the eggs, the sugar and the vanilla sugar till creamy structure.
  3. Once the butter and the chocolate will be melted, add the coffee and the salt and stir. Add the chocolate ganache to the egg cream little at a time, mixing constantly.
  4. Grease the edges of two 6.5 inches (or 17 cm) and a 4.5 inches (or 12 cm) springform pan and cover the bottom with baking paper.*
  5. Distribute the batter into the pans.
  6. Bake for 15/20 minutes at 175°C.
For the frosting:
  1. In a saucepan, warm at low heather the butter, the honey and the fresh thyme for some minutes, without letting it boil.
  2. Turn off the heather and let the sauce infuse for half an hour.
  3. Whip the cream cheese, the mascarpone cheese and the icing sugar till creamy.
  4. If you’d like the frosting to have crunchy honey crumbs, reheat just a bit the honey sauce, add it to the cheeses (passing it through a sieve so to remove the thyme twigs) and whip for some seconds. If you prefer the frosting to be homogenous, add the sauce when cold.
Assembly:
  1. Assemble the cake starting from one 6.5 inches disk, covering it completely with the frosting.
  2. Repeat the procedure with the second disk, putting the frosting only in the middle, so that it will stay all under the smaller base disk.
  3. Place the 4.5 inches disk and cover it with frosting.
  4. Decorate with icing sugar and fresh thyme twigs
Notes
* If you don’t have two 6.5 inches springforms, bake one at a time using the same stamp, but allowing the cake to cool down for at least 15 minutes before removing it from the stamp and removing it from the edges with a knife, so that the cake wouldn’t break once you open the springform pan.
Still a word about springform pans. Whether you have a 6, 6.5 or 7 inches pan, it really makes no substantial difference. My pan was supposed to be a 7 inches or 18 cm, but it really (I measured with a ruler) 6.5 inches or 16.5 cm.
Recipe by The Adagio Blog at https://adagioblog.com/mud-layer-cake-with-chestnut-honey-thyme-frosting/