Oh, I’ve been looking forward to someone picking this recipe for a while. I’m so glad Amy chose it for TWD this week. Alternating layers of rich dark chocolate and creamy tart raspberry ice cream sounds like a winning combination to me.
It was also great timing, because it was chosen shortly after I got The Perfect Scoop, so instead of trying to squeeze in an ice cream recipe between all the TWD and Daring Baker desserts plus my insatiable craving for chocolate chip cookies (dough, actually), I was able to make a David Lebovitz recipe for TWD. The book has so many recipes that I’m interested in trying, but of course I was limited by what would go with the chocolate. I decided that Blackberry Swirl Ice Cream was at least somewhat fun and new, and it was similar but not identical to the raspberry ice cream Dorie suggests.
The torte may look fancy, but the recipe isn’t much work to put together. The chocolate mixture was easy to make, so it was just an issue of waiting around for each layer to freeze solid enough before adding the next layer. I worked on it while I slow-roasted some cherry tomatoes.
One thing I thought was odd about this recipe was that Dorie keeps referring to the chocolate portion as “ganache.” I’ve always thought ganache was just chocolate and cream mixed together, but the recipe included only chocolate, butter, sugar, and eggs – basically brownie batter without the flour. I did some scouting around the internet, and all I came up with was ganache = chocolate + cream. So ganache doesn’t seem like to right word to use, but maybe someone who knows more about pastry can enlighten me.
Dictation aside, I liked the torte even more than I thought I would. Unfortunately, the ice cream didn’t have enough blackberry flavor to stand up to the chocolate. Dave didn’t even know I had used the blackberry ice cream until I told him, after he’d eaten his slice. The only other thing about this torte that I wasn’t really thrilled about was the texture of the chocolate portion. It seemed a little gummy. I wonder if reducing the number of eggs would help? I know some people had problems with their torte being too hard to slice, but my freezer is apparently weak. If the eggs are there to keep the chocolate soft enough to slice, I could stand to lose a few.
Regardless, yum. This is an impressive, easy, and creative dessert. The recipe is posted on Amy’s site.
This looks really beautiful. I hate it that your blackberry flavor wasn’t as strong as you wanted, but your torte definitely has beauty on its side. 😉
Yours looks great! We did vanilla ice cream and it wasn’t very good with that super rich ganache!
What a fun book to have around. You’ll just have to make that ice cream again and eat it solo. 🙂
This looks beautiful! Sorry you couldn’t taste the blackberry flavor as much as you would have liked, but at least it was still delicious! I think I’m going to order that book this week.
I think that ice cream sounds fantastic and would be great by itself. Really pretty dessert!
Well, there was plenty of extra ice cream, so we did get to eat a lot of it by itself. Fortunately!
It looks beautiful. What great photos!
gorgeous torte & photos! the blackberry ice cream sounds yum, sorry you couldn’t tase it that much, though!
This looks gorgeous and delicious. Nice work!
I hate to sound like everyone else, but this really is very pretty. The first pic is almost like an art piece, if framed right.
this does look great! i bet if you left out 2 eggs, you wouldn’t do any damage.
Wow, I love the pictures – it looks perfect and perfectly delicious. Awesome.
Your torte looks just lovely! I love that blackberry swirl ice cream. I made it a few weeks ago and I’ll bet it was great in the torte. Well done!
It looks great. Blackberry sounds wonderful.
Blackberry and chocolate is a wonderful combo…even if the blackberry was a little on the weak side! Great idea! Like you said…very impressive!
The blackberry swirl ice cream sounds so good! It’s a shame the flavor didn’t stand out more, but the chocolate in this recipe was a pretty strong flavor! Gorgeous torte!
Gosh, your torte looks GORGEOUS! I’m sorry your ice cream wasn’t blackberry-ish enough, next time add a tablespoon or two creme de mure to enhance the flavor of the blackberries.
Your torte looks delicious. I hate it when I expect something a certain way and it doesn’t. I bet it tasted fantastic anyway