Bits und so 300 - "Club Mate" Cake with Gelatin Fondant

My good friend Timo has a very successful German Podcast about technical gimmicks called Bits und so. Yesterday, they had a big event for Episode 300 of the podcast, which was recorded live in Munich, and I thought a matching cake for such an event shouldn't be missing!

Contrary to popular prejudices, these circles have progressed to drink Club Mate instead of Coke - that's why I found, test baked and adapted this recipe (German).

The cake doesn't taste strongly like Club Mate, but it's very tasty nevertheless and harmonizes nicely with the Ganache made with dark chocolate and the sweetness of the fondant. Matching the event logo, a pixelated 300, I could open up my green food coloring (even though pixelating a 0 was very difficult in this analog world, and with white instead of black) and make some Gelatin Fondant again, and whilst looking for the candles, I found my beloved letter stamps again! For those of you who aren't computer scientists: the candles aren't broken, but have to be read in binary format ;-)

1*256+0*128+0*64+1*32+0*16+1*8+1*4+0*2+0*1= 300 or 100101100

Ingredients for 16 servings:

2,5 cups sugar(500 g)

4 eggs

1 pinch vanilla mark

6 TSP lemon juice

1 cup Club Mate (230 ml)

1 cup oil (230 ml)

3 cups flour (400 g)

1 pck. baking powder (15 g)

For the Ganache:

400 g dark chocolate

200 g whipping cream

For the decorations:

0,5 times das recipe for Gelatin Fondant 

food coloring

powdered sugar

party candles

Energie: 545 kcal per serving

Preparation:

Line a 26 cm cake tin with baking paper, beat sugar and eggs, add lemon juice, Club Mate, oil, flour and baking powder and mix. Bake at 175°C with convection for about 60 min, test with a skewer. Let the cake cool and cut it into three discs.

For the ganache, heat the cream in a pot until it boils, remove from stove and add the chocolate in chunks. Stir the mix a bit and once most of the chocolate has melted, use a ? to puree the mix smooth.

Set the ganache into the fridge for about 30 min, until it's cold. Ganache can be used directly as a base for the fondant (whipped cream won't work under fondant!), or it can be whipped, making it ligher and more stable. I whipped the ganache and used it to fill and cover the entire cake. If the ganache gets too hard to work with, heat it for 10 seconds in the microwave!

You can let the ganache harden a bit, while you prepare the fondant decorations. Use a sheet of baking paper or a silicone baking mat to transfer the rolled out fondant onto the cake, smooth out the creases and decorate the cake as you like.

In order to depict the pixelated last Zero, I used a small part of the green fondant mixed with just as much white fondant, such that the resulting color should be in the middle between the two colors. Well, people who knew what it was supposed to be totally recognized it! :-D

Finally, add the candles and only light the ones with value 1 ...et voilà!