eau du gateau: lore disfrusta
a little smoky, a little fruity and a little salty
hey hi hellllooo!
Welcome back to bake chats xx Today’s a good day to be here because I’m coming at ya with another perfume cake. If you’re new here- I make cakes that taste like perfume, to see if what smells good together… tastes good together. Meaning, I take the edible notes of what makes a perfume smell good and translate them into the components of a cake.
Today, we’re exploring Lore’s Disfruta (not an ad, but was gifted to me). I love the smokey forward scent of this perfume, that slowly fades to fruity on the skin. It’s quickly become one of my go-tos.
With this series, I’m really wanting to play around with perfumes and cakes with more interesting flavor/scent profiles. For a little bit there, I was kinda bored with what I was creating, because I was finding myself in a loop of vanilla, tonka, brown sugar, etc. I needed to start having a little more fun with it- like I had with some of the more earlier “challenging” flavors. Like, creating a tobacco inspired pastry cream for the Replica Jazz Club cake.
The build of this cake includes: a mezcal + sandalwood chiffon, with an agave orange blossom soak, a passion fruit mascarpone mousse and a salty vanilla swiss meringue.
Let’s get into it shall we?
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All of my cakes follow a “formula” when it comes to bringing them to life, perfume inspired of otherwise. They typically start off with something light and airy, like sponge, genoise or chiffon. Then they get a soak- for flavor not for moisture, though that is an added bonus. A light creamy filling: bavarians, legeres, mousses, whipped creams maybe sometimes a jam/marmalade if it calls for it. Then wrapped up in buttercream, for stability and ease of decorating in the style I like :) You can read more on that here though
Right right, so when I’m looking to turn a perfume into a cake, I look to see where the notes fit within this formula and flavor from there. For Disfruta, we’re working with
A few years ago I had a custom wedding order that I made a mezcal chiffon for, which I love love looooved. But, in true Kassie fashion, it was a one of cake, that I riffed and didn’t write down <333 But, I knew I want to use it here and add a little sandalwood powder for that woody note. In my research I found that white cedarwood is non-toxic and generally safe for smoking + consumption, but it doesn’t impart much flavor. Coupled with the fact that most other cedarwood varieties can be poisonous- I didn’t want to play around with that as a flavor in this cake. Maybe in the future but for now? Sticking with sandalwood.
Anyways, back to mezcal. The thing about alcohol is that it can destabilize the egg proteins in the meringue you fold into the cake batter, which can lead to structural issues down the line. Alcohol also lowers the surface tension of the batter, leading to aggressive bubble/air expansion, making the cake rise too fast before the cake is actually ready to support it’s own weight. In the end, this can lead to collapsing chiffons- ahahahahah trust me. TRUST ME. I started off replacing a few tablespoons of water in my go to olive oil chiffon cake with mezcal, to be on the safe side. Coming out of the oven, everything appeared to look as my chiffon cakes normally do and it hit an internal temp of 205F which usually signals a perfectly baked and set cake. But as it cooled the cake absolutely slumped and released from the pans. Right right, but I remember making mezcal chiffon before, with plush internal structure.
4 attempts at a mezcal chiffon later… I switched to adding mezcal to my vanilla chiffon recipe, which is a butter based chiffon cake developed for being more structurally sound than classic chiffon recipes. Immediate success and exaaaactly what I remembered from the wedding cake order years ago.
WHAT IF I COULDN’T GET CHIFFON TO WORK?
Had I not switched to riffin’ on the other recipe and hit a 5th round of failure, I already had the back up plan to switch to an orange blossom chiffon cake and using the mezcal in the soak. While, I’m always ready and open to pivot an idea as I work through it, I really wanted the mezcal chiffon to work out. It’s a subtle smoky flavor, while the soak could easily get over powering.
Ultimately, I could have used a vanilla buttermilk cake with mezcal added as a flavor source. But, the reason I’ll always, always, always try to get a chiffon to work is because of how well it takes on soaks (more flavor), butter cakes that get soaked get a weird texture that I cannot explain and do not like.
The thing is though, most of these flavors can find their way into more than one of the components in this cake formula: mezcal chiffon, mezcal soak, mezcal custard, mezcal butter cream, orange blossom chiffon, orange blossom soak, orange blossom custard, orange blossom buttercream, passion fruit soak, passion fruit curd, passion fruit buttercream. Remember this is an exercise in playing around with flavor. There’s a lot of ways we could have paired together:
Mezcal
Passion fruit
Neroli (orange blossom)
Agave
Cedar (sandal) wood
As a little creative exercise for yourself, why don’t you try coming up with a cake option based on the notes above- leave it in the comments xx
The chiffon was definitely the piece that needed the most science, work and finesse to get to work. After that making the agave orange blossom soak is ez pz. The passion fruit mousse is built off of the back of the mixed citrus mousse from this cake, swapping out passion fruit juice for the array of citrus juices the original calls for. Then swiss is swiss is swiss buttercream, just with a hefty pinch of salt.
LORE DISFRUTA, AS CAKE
makes 1- 8” 4 layer cake
OVERALL TOOLS:
Mixing bowls
Whisk
2— 8” cake pans (2” or 3” deep)
Rubber spatula
Squeeze bottle
Small pot
Fine mesh sieve
Immersion blender optional
Piping bag(s) + tips, optional
MEZCAL SANDALWOOD CHIFFON