An Untraditional D(o)B(os) Torte

Before I say anything else, I have to give a shout out to two ladies. One is my good friend and partner in crime, as you'll see, Meeta K. of What's For Lunch Honey? and the other is the woman who regularly saves the day, the sweetest Frenchie (both literally and figuratively) on the Eastern seaboard, Helene of Tartelette. This challenge would not have seen completion without either one of these two ladies.

So why does my Dobos Torte not look like most of the other Daring Bakers' this month? Well, never one to conform, and sometimes for the worse, I used white chocolate.
We haven't been feeling very chocolatey at all here since it's been quite hot and sometimes very humid (for London that is, we're wimps we know), so I thought I'd try this Dobos Torte with a fruity spin. I halved the recipe to make two mini-cakes and used white chocolate, mascarpone and lemon for the frosting and fresh blueberries between the layers of sponge. If you've visited me before you know I have a fetish for this combination, and it seemed like if I was going to try something different than the stated recipe for yet another layer cake, I might as well be able to compare it to a previous DB challenge: Dorie Greenspan's perfect party cake.

I didn't take pictures of the process and, really, you should thank me for that because it wasn't pretty. Oh the sponge went ok enough, as I said to Meeta on twitter I didn't have time to bake each layer for one big cake, particularly with Baby Saffron, but I did have time to use a cookie cutter! She and I baked the sponges separately and then met up over chat to do the rest of the cake. We'd done this once before for the Daring Bakers' 2007 Yule Log, and just like last time, the conversation was a hoot and really helped to ease the process. Between her and her chocolate quark mousse for Soeren's birthday cake (7 years old!) and me with my lemon mascarpone mousse because we both didn't really want to use butter for the buttercream, exclamations of all colors flew and at one point she proposed, and I agreed, that we needed a stiff drink, so dry martinis with extra olives were poured and enjoyed, virtually that is.
My lemon mascarpone mousse didn't set properly which is when I resorted to a twitter plea for help from Tartelette and, as always, she came to the rescue. She is, as I have been quite fond of saying since I first saw her blog in early 2007, a Baking Fairy. If you haven't seen her blog which just got a beautiful new makeover, get thee over there now!
As for Meeta, she is a dear friend, a rockin' blogger with a beautiful blog, and an awesome person all around and I am better for her friendship. We have to do this more often!

The cake turned out to be meh taste-wise (and yes that is about as elaborate and articulate as I am going to be about that) so I think it's probably the kind of cake for which you want to actually use dark chocolate and stick to the recipe. And Dorie, well, she's keeping my heart for now.
Oh one more thing: About the caramel layer, I'm not sure I get the purpose of it other than as decorative, but I actually didn't make it with lemon juice as prescribed in the recipe as it seemed a bit odd to me to mix caramel and lemon, and it turned out just fine by adding a little bit of butter to enable it to pour out onto the sponge layer before it set.

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. You can find the recipe on our hostesses' blogs.