I recently bought the April 2015 edition of Feast magazine. The main attraction was that I was about to go on a long journey, and there was a block of Bacci chocolate that came free with the magazine!
One of the first recipes that caught my eye in the magazine was Rachel Khoo's recipe for Pistachio and Pomegranate Cake. You can find the recipe online here.
I just happened to have all of the ingredients except the pomegranate already, so I was keen to make the cake. Isn't it a handsome one:
You will note the vast chasm in appearance between my decorated cake and the one in the article:
I have not the faintest idea how they got the cake to look like that using the icing recipe provided, and using just pomegranate juice for colour. The icing was quite wet, and did not take to more coloured wet stuff being added to it, so all the colour ran.
In addition, pomegranate juice au naturel is not very pink - it is a very diluted, only faintly pink colour. Hence, I upped the ante with pink food colouring:
Without using royal icing and pink food colouring, I do not see how the food stylists could have made the cake look like it does in the photos.
I also found that the pomegranate seeds (I only used one pomegranate, not two) did not like sticking to the sides of the cake, and even after eventually sticking them all on, they started to fall off the moment that the cake was cut:
Leaving aside my disappointment at the appearance of my cake vis a vis the one in the photos, this was a delicious cake, with the nutty pistachio flavour shining. Loved this cake and would make it again, with a different icing and skipping the pomegranate juice swirls. It got some good feedback from my work colleagues, which also gets it a double tick, because most of the time I get no feedback from my colleagues - it has to be out of the ordinary for me to hear a peep (except from my fellow baker Wayne, God bless him, who always has a chat about what's in my baking, what he's been making etc).
Oh, I do love the look of tose pomegranate cake. yummy!
ReplyDeleteLuckily I'd say the taste of a cake is more important than its appearance :-) This sounds delicious!
ReplyDeleteI always get really frustrated when you can't reproduce the look of something. I find that happens a lot with magazines and cookbooks.
ReplyDeleteReally, you did a great job on this cake and it looks very much like the one online, you are much too critical of yourself! It sounds so interesting with those flavors. I have said it before, you have a way of finding and making the most interesting cake recipes.
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