Making a Flourless Chocolate Bombe Base

This is actually very much like a sponge cake, though it has no flour whatsoever. It’s just the type of nifty and versatile invention Rose Levy Beranbaum is famous for. Yes it has some steps, but if you’ve made spongecake before it’ll be second nature. Start by preheating your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Then prepare your pan. Using two sheets of parchment lay one down on a sheet pan sprayed with cooking spray, but let several inches hang over the edge. Spray the top.

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On Chocolate Glazes

Chris from down under writes:

Can you elaborate on the “standard” recipe that requires precrystallized chocolate?

I certainly can, Chris! Most people who bake and/or make pastry have had the experience of looking into a glass case and seeing lustrous chocolate glazes on tortes, bombes, truffles and the like. Those coatings are nothing more than layers of poured tempered chocolate.

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Chocolate Mirror Glaze

Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a beautiful and simple alternative to the high-gloss tempered chocolate coating that so many of us envy but doubt we can pull off without an industrial tempering machine. This glaze produces a very satisfying sheen, albeit without the “snap” of a true chocolate glaze. Thanks to reader Paul for submitting his favorite version.

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Alrighty then…

The logic of making this bombe Derby-themed is simply too compelling, so that’s how I’m going to go. However if it’s any consolation I now have bombe ideas to last me ’till doomsday (assuming that doesn’t occur this December as the New Agers atop Pic de Bugarach predict). So here’s what I’m thinking: 1.) a flourless bourbon-infused cake base, 2.) a filling of chocolate mousse, 3.) a “surprise” center of white chocolate mint mousse, 4.) a dark chocolate mirror glaze coating. Sounds fun! I’ll start putting up recipes in the morning.

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Won’t chocolate mousse freeze like a rock?

No, reader Colin, no more than an ice cream will, and there are several reasons for that. Firstly because chocolate mousse contains lots of different dairy and cocoa fats, which, while they’ll firm, won’t go entirely solid. But additionally, mousse follows freezing rules that are similar to ice cream.

Consider some of the other key components of a mousse: water and sugar. Mixed together they form a syrup, and syrup does some very interesting things as it gets cold. At the freezing point, some of its water does indeed go crystalline (freeze). But as we know from other discussions on the topic of crystals, they only form with other like molecules. And that means that as some water molecules freeze out of the syrup, the sugar molecules get left behind in the solution.

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So OK, let me think…

I promised plenty of chocolate with this, so I’m thinking that under the dark chocolate glaze will be mousse..probably chocolate, probably frozen or at least darn chilly. I’ll need a cake bottom of some kind. More chocolate or is that gratuitous? Honestly the thing I’m thinking about right now is the surprise center. That’s a necessity in a bombe and it needs to be something interesting. Perhaps some sort of fruit mousse in there…I’m not sure, so I’m throwing it open to the field.

Hm. A crowd-sourced bombe. Sounds like political subversion of some kind. No wonder Joe Pastry is banned in China. I’m a dangerous man!

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