A proper ganache is basically melted chocolate and double cream – not difficult to make but you might well not actually have cream to hand when you decide your cake needs jazzing up with a rich chocolate glaze.
This ganache is cobbled together from store cupboard ingredients and is pretty imprecise and very hard to make badly.
The Ingredients
Cocoa or drinking chocolate
Sugar (if using cocoa)
Butter
Milk
The Method
Melt some butter in a suitably heavy-bottomed pan. I assume about 75g for a large loaf cake, so adjust accordingly. I would probably use a whole packet for a cake made in a 23” diameter pan.
Keep a lowish heat so the butter doesn’t burn, and add the cocoa and sugar or drinking chocolate (which will already have sugar in, so doesn’t really need more unless you like it – experiment at will). I would use around two level tablespoons of chocolatey stuff for every 75g of butter, plus a level tablespoon of sugar if you’re using cocoa. Stir constantly.
Start dripping in milk and keep stirring until you have a consistency that coats the spoon and drips off without being too runny. Turn off the heat.
The icing starts to set pretty quickly once it cools, so you want to pour it on fairly swiftly. It is running and not really designed for precise icing – although if you work quickly with a flat knife, scooping the running glaze up repeatedly, you can get quite a smooth effect.
Once cooled it takes on a shiny smoothness and has a fudgy texture; if you touch the glaze once set it will crack.
hat can look good sometimes, and you can make it work to your advantage by doing interesting things with texture (perhaps highlighting a cracked, rippled cake top with edible gold paint?). But mainly this ganache is very good for dense cakes that tend to dip in the middle.
I’ve used it before for a dense chocolate loaf cake and then sprinkled on cracked pistachios just before the icing set for a striking green-on-brown finish and some extra salty, crunchy texture to balance out the damp sweetness.
Image via Fooey's Flickr