Nanaimo Cake Follow Up

In an earlier post I mentioned trying to lighten up and develop height on a Nanaimo Bar. It had mixed success. The bar was higher but failed to reach cake height. Then it turned out that cutting it was rather messy. Since the dark chocolate top layer was thick and somewhat hard the new fluffy middle layer couldn't withstand the pressure of cutting the chocolate and tended to squeeze out all over the place; making for smooshed pieces when they tried to partition the thing.
I hadn't anticipated that.

Next time... thin thin chocolate top layer and another attempt to provide much more volume in the middle layer.

In the following foto, although fuzzy, you can see the thickness of the middle layer somewhat; compare to the traditional one.



Note: The bases (bottom layer) on both these photos are about the same thickness. It looks thicker on the small ones because they were extra close up.

Nanaimo Cake / Bar

This is a quick draft post to remind me what I did to change the classic Nanaimo Bar recipe to something with a little more volume in the second layer so it'll be somewhat taller; more cake-like than a thin flat bar (think... Tiramisu). And although I'm calling it a draft I'll publish it so you all can 'share the experience'.

The regular "Nanaimo" is a pretty flat little thing so I put wax paper around the sides of the pan to allow for more height. Here's a pic of the traditional ones:


Make the usual Nanaimo Bar filling (butter, icing sugar, Birds Custard Powder and cream) then add (this is the "tweaking" part; the big experiment):

• Dessert Syrup:
  
• Which is Simple Syrup (400 ml - sugar and water [equal amounts]), heated to 105C and poured slowly into 2 whipped egg yolks (probably would have been better with 3); continue whipping until cool. maybe that should have been 110C. It takes quite a while to get it up to this temperature - I ran out of patience.
  
• Add ¼ tsp of vanilla powder (which I added to the hot mixture, a mistake. One doesn't add flavour to something boiling hot because it burns off the aromatics; wait until it's cool).
• Mix dessert syrup with filling.
• Whip 400 ml heavy cream;
  
• fold into above mixture.
• Pour onto chilled Nanaimo Bar base (which is graham crackers, coconut, toasted walnuts, butter and cocoa - and
  
• spread evenly.
• Chill really well (into the freezer if it doesn't "take" in the fridge)
  

Volume-wise it seems to have worked. The cake/bar is certainly taller than the regular Nanaimo Bar. Still, not a really tall result - I would have preferred about 50% more height.

Hopefully this will "set" sufficiently to stand alone and be able to take a chocolate topping.

Later, I'll top it with the chocolate layer (melted dark unsweetened chocolate with sugar and butter); which I better pour on when it's pretty cool to avoid melting the whipped cream in the filling.

This is a lot like doing a mascarpone filling but with a butter/powdered-sugar mix to start instead of the mascarpone cheese. Hey! Why not just make a regular mascarpone filling and flavour it with Birds? Wish I'd thought of that yesterday. Maybe next time (which might be tomorrow if this concoction doesn't work).