White Chocolate Ganache
I don’t think there is an occasion more joyous than a wedding. Of course, once a wedding has taken place, many more joys follow, like the arrival of a long awaited baby. But it all starts with a wedding, and I find weddings to be chock-filled with hope.
If you’re lucky, you only ever need to have one wedding – although some people have more than one, if not several! So the trick to getting your fill of wedding joy is to know lots of people who are planning on getting married.
As a cake baker, I am getting to participate in weddings, baby showers, naming days and even funerals (although not too many of those, thank goodness)! I consider it a privilege to be invited to create cakes and cupcakes for these landmark occasions in people’s lives. We (my darling husband and I) always try extra hard to come up with something special that fits the occasion and the people who we’re baking for. And what we’ve discovered is trying extra hard allows us an opportunity for continuous improvement. When people want something unusual on their cake(s) we find ourselves stretching our skills and often discovering something new in the process.
This month in preparation for a wedding we’ve discovered white chocolate ganache. If you’re a regular reader, you may have heard me curse white chocolate in the past. I am proud to say I’ve reconciled with white chocolate and I’ve cracked the very difficult to make but very professional looking white ganache. Here’s how you make white chocolate ganache.
Ingredients
750g white chocolate bits – Callebaut is the best
225ml pure cream
1. Pour the white chocolate bits into a large bowl. Give yourself plenty of room to manoeuvre.
2. Heat the pure cream in a small saucepan until it boils. Be very careful as you do not want it to burn to the bottom of the pan, or rise up and boil over.
3. Pour the boiling cream evenly over the white chocolate bits, then begin stirring with a fork. The mixture will be lumpy and sticky – just keep going and watch as the white chocolate melts.
4. There will be a point where the heat is all but gone from the mixture and you feel you need a little bit more to get across the line. Place the bowl in the microwave oven for 20 seconds. Then take it out and resume mixing, but this time do so with a balloon whisk. It helps to have a buddy on hand at this point, because the mixing requires a fair bit of elbow grease. Continue mixing until all lumps of chocolate are gone and you are left with a smooth, thick, viscose mixture.
5. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and stand aside. Leave the ganache to set for 24 hours. I kid you not – if you want to avoid heartache, leave the ganache for a full day. When you return to use it, it will be thick like butter and can be used to fill a cake and cover it. Heat your palette knife under hot water and run it over the surface of the ganache to achieve a perfectly smooth look.
6. What you do next is up to you – you could flick dark chocolate across your cake, decorate it with Guylian chocolates, or drape it with fondant. I have seen one baker attach large pieces of chocolate bark to the sides so that the pieces stand about two inches about the cake. He then filled the top of the cake with spun toffee – an incredibly elaborate looking cake for a very special occasion.
posted by Petrina @ 9:50 AM
12 comments
12 Comments:
thanks for the easy recipe. You saved my butt today!! I have 80 raspberry and white chocolate cupcakes to bake today. I need an easy icing.
Good luck! There is nothing easy about white chocolate ganache!
Thanks for the recipe - I am making 48 cupcakes for a school event and I wanted something other thatn dark chocolate. BUT - you did not specify if the ganache needs to be refrigerated when it is setting for 24 hours - I HAVE TO MAKE IT TONIGHT IF I HAVE TO LET IT SIT!! PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!! It is pretty humid here today and the cream may curdle!
The ganache doesn't need to be refridgerated while it's setting. This will turn it to a rock solid mass that is simply impossible to work with. I made this in 27 degrees celcius, and it still set to the consistency of chilled butter. I have since used the microwave to soften it to a spreadable consistency - the result being a sticky mass that won't actually adhere to the cake. Be careful with the ganache - it's trecherous and will trip you up when you're not looking!
Hi petrina ..i am having some trouble with my ganache setting.. i live in a tropical country and hence leave the ganache i the fridge to set .. i have made ganache twice and both times ,the result has been an elastic semi-stiff product.. also parchment paper is not available here ,so i use wax paper .. and the result is that my ganache sticks to teh paper !! .. any ideas on how i could remedy it .. i use 300gms of dark chocolate ,200ml or cream,20gm of glucose and 20gm of butter (Sverre Saetre's standard palet d or ).. any inputs appreciated !!!
Bedazzled, I think you don't have enough chocolate to cream ratio in your recipe and the excess fluid is to blame for your undesired results.
What is it you're trying to do with the ganache? Pour it over a cake as a cloak, smooth it over as an icing, use it as a foundation for fondant... my sense is the recipe above can be used for all those things at varying stages of setting (although cloaking might require two or three pour and set processes). What stage the ganache is at and when depends on the weather and how fast the stuff sets.
My experience of adding butter to a chocolate mix is that it prevents it from ever going hard. Sache torte uses that kind of ganache. I've never seen glucose added to a ganache recipe so I have no idea what effect it's meant to have.
Try using 750g of chocolate (dark or white) and 225ml of pure cream. Make sure you boil the cream properly to generate enough heat to commence the melting process, but don't let it burn on the bottom of the pot. Even with it good and hot, I always find I need to use the microwave two to four times to get all of the chocolate melted. I only do short bursts of 15 seconds so as to not overheat the ganache and not burn the chocolate. Also, once everything is melted, I still give the ganache a good mix with the balloon whisk to work the mix through. When you do this you can see the consistency thicken and the mix take on a shine.
Ganache is definitely a challenge. I do think environment changes the way it behaves, and trial and error is really the only way to figure out what will work where you live. For me, leaving the ganache to set for 24hours has been a revelation. That being said, it does produce a mix that is very hard to manipulate - yet does the job it's supposed to (form a base to lay fondant over).
I hope this all helps.
Petrina.
Hi Bedazzled,
I use a recipe with about the same quantities 375g white chocolate, 300mL whipping cream, 40g glucose syrup and 40g butter. Make sure that you don't add the butter until the mixture has cooled a bit as you don't want it to melt. I leave my ganache to set in the fridge overnight and it just sets to a nice firm mix (a bit stiffer then peanut butter) and needs about 20 seconds in the microwave to soften enough to spread like a butter icing. I then refidgerate the cupcakes again to make sure it doesn't go runny.
The fluffier you want your ganache the lower the chocolate to cream ratio you need. if you want it for pouring then you need a lot more chocolate.
hope this helps :)
Hi,
I'm a pretty amateur baker, tasked with making a cake for my great-aunt-in-law's 70th birthday . . . and, moer astonishing than the writer above who doesn't have access to parchment paper, *I* don't have a MICROWAVE. That's right. not enough room in my kitchen! (NYC) - so, can I do this entire thing over a double boiler?
thanks,
elizabeth
I so don't recommend making ganache if you're an amateur baker. That being said, if you're determined, you certainly can melt the chocolate over a double boiler. Be careful not to burn it and you should do fine!
Hi Petrina,
I want to make a white chocolate mud cake for my daughters 1st birthday in the shape of the number one and cover it with your white chocolate ganache will this result in a smooth result with one coat. I really don't want to use fondant to achieve a smooth coating
as the ganache would taste so much nicer.
Regards
Allison
You sure can use this without fondant. Once you've spread the ganache over the cake, use a hot palette knife to smooth the ganache out. You heat it by running it under hot water - make sure you wipe all water off before you use it though! And reheat everytime it cols down.
Hi folks - the latest on the white chocolate ganache is: I made this on the weekend with Plaistowe white chocolate instead of Calibaut. I knew the quality would be different but was completely surprised, after 12 hours of setting, to find the consistency similar to margarine (where the Calibaut version is like high quality refrigerated butter). It made spreading the ganache onto the cake very easy, but smoothing it difficult because it remained really soft. I refrigerated the cake for 15mns before running the hot knife over it, and then again for 30mins before I laid the fondant over it. I honestly think the cheaper white chocolate ganache will make for a better eating experience, but I was honestly terrified of it melting out from under the fondant on the way to the event the cake was for. Luckily that didn't happen, but when you're delivering someone's special occassion cake, you just can't have variables like that in the equation. In any case, it certainly needed the full 24 hours setting time to achieve it's best quality.
Cheers,
Petrina.
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