Sometimes you read about a combination of flavours and you know it’s going to be delicious even before you’ve tasted it.
Such was the case with Honey & Co’s White chocolate and tahini cake recipe. It was published in the FT and I decided to make it for a Paris expat mums get-together. But it was all wrong. I didn’t get the baking time right and the taste wasn’t the ‘nutty and fudgy, sweet with a savoury touch’ I’d been sold on.
Two years later, watching a rerun of the Great British Bake Off, I was prompted to try a tahini bake again.
A little research revealed that a winner of GBBO (John Whaite) had published a white chocolate and tahini recipe. This sounded even better, with tahini just in the icing and the additional flavour of burnt butter in the sponge AND caramelised white chocolate.
I had never tried caramelising white chocolate before, nor had I made a beurre noisette, or burnt butter. It took a couple of attempts to master both of these. The first time around, I overcooked the white chocolate and really burnt the butter. I found the lemon zest overwhelmed the other subtle flavours and discovered that the oven temperature made for an undercooked middle and dried-out edges.
But with a few tweaks, I managed to produce this beauty:
Here’s a link to John Whaite’s recipe if you fancy making it into a celebration cake. If you’d like to try a recipe with tahini in the sponge batter, search for Honey & Co white chocolate and tahini cake on ft.com
Ingredients
Burnt butter and caramelised white chocolate cake
- 100g white chocolate (for the cake and topping)
- 150g unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
- 150g caster sugar
- 150g self-raising flour
- 3 large eggs
Sweet tahini icing
- 100g salted butter
- 50g tahini
- 150g icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
Method
Burnt butter and caramelised white chocolate cake
Start by caramelising the white chocolate: Switch the oven on to 120°C . Chop the white chocolate into small pieces and spread out on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Pop into the oven for an hour, turning it over every 15 minutes. It will turn a darker colour and go crumbly. Tip 75g of it into a bowl. Set the rest aside to sprinkle over the frosting later.
Turn the oven temperature up to 170°C and grease and line a 23cm square cake tin.
Next, ‘burn’ the butter by placing in a saucepan over a medium-high heat until you see brown deposits form on the bottom (swirl the saucepan from time to time to move the foam if you can’t see past it). As soon as you see brown speckles, take it off the heat and pour it over the caramelised crumbly white chocolate.
Mix the chocolate and butter together.
Using electric beaters, whisk the sugar and flour into the butter and chocolate. Then add the eggs and whisk until combined. Gently pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the centre of the cake springs back when you press it. Take care to not over-bake.
Leave it to cool for a few minutes in the cake tin and then tip out onto a cooling rack.
Sweet tahini icing
Beat together the butter and tahini, either with electric beaters or using the beater attachment of a freestanding mixer. Then add the icing sugar and vanilla extract and beat until the buttercream is light and creamy.
Frost the cake with the icing and sprinkle over the caramelised white chocolate you set aside earlier.
Slice into squares to serve and keep the cake in an airtight container to prevent it drying out.