Turkish Delight Cake
Chocolate cake topped with rose water Turkish delight, covered in rose Swiss meringue buttercream frosting, fresh roses and pistachios.
Ingredients
Cake
- 2 cups (350 g) all-purpose flour
- 2 1/4 cups (450 g) superfine sugar
- 1/2 cup (100 g) cocoa powder
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
- 1 tsp fine salt
- 1 1/2 cups (350 g) unsalted butter, softened
- 4 large eggs
- 1 1/2 cups (375 ml) milk
Turkish Delight
- 6 cups (1.3 kg) granulated sugar
- 2 1/4 cups (560 ml) water
- 1/2 tsp citric acid
- 1 3/4 cups (225 g) corn starch + 1 1/2 cups - 375ml water
- 1 tsp rose water essence
- 1 drop food gel
Decorations
- 6 pink roses (see notes)
- 1 cup (220 g) chopped pistachios
Frosting
- 3 batches Swiss meringue buttercream frosing
- 6 drops pink food gel
- 2 tsp rose water essence
- 1 batch Chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream frosting
Instructions
Turkish Delight
- Prepare a loaf baking tin by dusting it with corn starch. The candy is sticky. This will help it unmold. Set aside.
- Begin by adding the sugar, water and citric acid in a large saucepan. Whisk to combine.
- Put on a medium heat and bring to a gentle boil. Do not stir. Continue letting it gently boil until it reaches 125C / 260F.
- Add the corn starch and water into a large mixing bowl and whisk together to combine. Corn starch is weird. It will feel really hard to mix in the beginning, but mix slowly and keep mixing. It'll eventually mix. Set aside
- When it reaches the right temp, turn the heat off and add the corn starch and mix continuously until it thickens. You’ll notice that it will become translucent as you mix it.
- Add the food colour and rose water and mix until well combined.
- Pour into the pre-prepared tin. Coat a small off set spatula with some cooking oil and use it to smoothen out the Turkish delight mixture. Chill overnight.
- Dust a chopping board with corn starch. Take the Turkish delight out of the tin onto the chopping board and use a sharp knife coated with oil to cut the Turkish delight into strips and then into cubes.
- Add the cubes into a bowl of corn starch to coat. Place on to a large baking tray. If the Turkish delight begins to seep and the corn starch disappears from the moisture, re-coat before using.
Frosting
- Flavor the vanilla frosting with the rose water and color it with the pink food gel. Mix until well combined. You may need todo this in two goes because it’s a lot of frosting to do all at once.
Cake
- Please note: To make the 6 layered cake you see pictured; you’ll need to double the cake recipe only. All other measurements are enough to fill, crumb coat and finish decorating the cake.Preheat a fan-forced oven to 140C (280F) or180C (320F) for a conventional oven. Spray three 8” cake tins with oil spray and line the bottom with baking paper. Set aside
- Add the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, bicarb soda and salt to a large mixing bowl and mix together using a hand mixer to combine.
- Next add the softened butter and mix on low speed until mixture reaches a crumbly sand like texture.
- Add the eggs and milk and mix on low speed until no dry ingredients are showing. Scrape down the bowl and mix for another 20 seconds.
- Fill three 8” cake tins with batter. I find using an ice cream scooper to help me do this makes it easy to distribute the batter evenly so that everything bakes at the same time.
- Bake for 50-60 min or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. If the pick comes out with wet batter, bake for a further 10 min at a time until baked fully. Allow the tins to cool for 2 minutes and then carefully flip the cake tins over on to a cooling rack to cool completely before using. Chilling your cakes overnight before decorating means they’ll be easier to trim and decorate. So I bake my cakes the day before I trim them.
- To trim your chilled cake, use a cake leveler or large serrated knife to carefully trim the first layer of cake by trimming it in half. Then trim the crust off the second layer so that you end up with two layers from each baked cake. When trimming make sure you aim to get both layers of cake the same height. Keep that in mind when trimming the first layer so the next layer will still be the same height as the first when trimming the crust off. Once you’re done trimming your three baked cakes you should end up with6 layers of cake altogether.
- To prepare crumb coat, add a dab of frosting onto an 8” cake board or serving plate. Add the first layer of cake. Pipe a ring of frosting around the first layer and fill the centre of the cake with more frosting. Use a small offset spatula to spread around a little. Add some chopped Turkish delight on top before adding the second layer of cake layer.Repeat with the remaining layers. Add more frosting around and top of the cake.Use your small spatula to smoothen out the top and bottom of the cake before using a cake scraper (otherwise known as a bench scraper) to smoothen out the frosting. Get it as neat as you can. This should just be a neat thin layer of frosting which is aimed at trapping any cake crumbs so that random bits of cake crumbs don’t show up on the outside of the cake. Chill for 2 hours or overnight.
- To prepare the second layer of striped frosting add pink frosting to one piping bag fitted with a round tip and repeat with the chocolate frosting.
- Pipe a layer of pink frosting around the bottom of the cake. Then pipe a ring of chocolate around the cake. Repeat, alternating between the two colors until you get to the top. Finish by adding pink frosting on top of the cake. Use a bench scraper to scrape away the excess frosting around the cake until the frosting is nice and smooth.
- Add crushed pistachios around the cake starting heavy at the bottom of the cake and use less as you go up the sides of the cake to achieve an Ombre effect.
- Fit the end of a piping bag with Wilton 6B piping tip and frost swirls of frosting on top of the cake. Then pile cubes ofTurkish delight in the center. Sprinkle more crushed pistachios on top before you add the roses in the cake to garnish right before serving.
Video
Notes
Storage
Store cake in the fridge in an airtight container for up to 3 days.
Pink roses
Make sure your roses are not coated in any pesticides. I used fresh ones from the garden.
Nutrition
Calories:344kcal | Carbohydrates:63g | Protein:2g | Fat:10g | Saturated Fat:6g | Polyunsaturated Fat:1g | Monounsaturated Fat:3g | Trans Fat:1g | Cholesterol:47mg | Sodium:94mg | Potassium:59mg | Fiber:1g | Sugar:56g | Vitamin A:335IU | Calcium:24mg | Iron:1mg
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