Chocolatines & Mokatines

 These are not for the faint hearted! Of all the recipes that I have made, these have been the most effort, and while they were very tasty - receiving 8.0, I wanted them to be fantastic!
Although they did look pretty impressive, even if I do say so myself!
So if they were so much effort, why did I make both of them at the same time? Well, when I looked at the recipe for the chocolatines, I realised that I did not have the right size tin, and also that they only made 9 cakes. I noticed that the mokatines had the same basic sponge mixture, so thought I would make enough for both in a larger tin, and get two difficult bakes out of the way at the same time. Thankfully, I did this stage of the baking on Friday, and left the icing until Saturday morning.
The icing, now there's a story! You may think that this is just ordinary butter icing - wrong, this is "creme au beurre chocolate", translated, "very complicated chocolate icing that tastes just a bit better than ordinary butter icing, and is a nightmare to make"!
Firstly, I had to make a syrup mixture from sugar and water. Unfortunately on my first attempt, I heated it for too long, and when I added it to the egg yolks, it went completely hard, like a lump of brittle toffee. I had to abandon this and start all over again. The second time was much better, and I remembered to get the mixer going before slowly adding the syrup. Butter and chocolate were then added after that.
The decorating of the chocolatines was quite fun, although by this time I was feeling a bit stressed, especially knowing that I still had more sponge to make the mokatines with.
What I had failed to notice was that the mokatines required not one type of icing, but two. For the inside of the cakes - the bit that no one was going to see, I needed to make a ridiculously small amount of "creme au beurre moka" Help! This was to be followed by soft coffee icing which would cover the cakes.
I took a momentous decision to disobey Mary, and only make the soft coffee icing. I just couldn't face making syrup again, and decided that no one would have the first clue, or even care about what I had done! Adam says that I have "crossed the Rubicon" now!
Now, I don't tend to look at the other baking bible blog (rising to the Berry) very often, unless I am not sure how things should look, but thankfully this time I did, and learned that the recipe needed more soft icing than Mary suggested, (and especially if I was going to use it as filling as well) and also needed to be left until it went a little bit firm.
Cutting a long story short, I managed to ice them, and although they were not quite as pretty the chocolatines, the coffee ones were more popular.
The verdict was, very pretty, pretty tasty, but never again!