Comments on: hazelnut brown butter cake

By: Katherine

Katherine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:29:23 +0000

wow- i’ve been eying this recipe both in the book and on your blog for years. i made it yesterday- i had my first slice when it was still warm and i was a tad bit disappointed but went back for another an hour later and that was when i did a double take. this morning (yes, i had it for breakfast) it was simply divine! additionally, the cake is so pretty in its simplicity that I accidentally burned the pears (the side accompaniment the book suggests) while taking pictures. woops! I can’t wait to bring it to a dinner party

the added icing was a good call!

By: Jen Best

Jen Best — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:31:02 +0000

I was lamenting that my birthday fell during Passover and debating postponing it until I could bake myself a delicious cake. I’m going to give this a try and I bet I’ll love it. Thanks!

By: Teal

Teal — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 21:14:53 +0000

I just discovered exactly how difficult it is to whip the eggwhites and sugar by hand. I broke a sweat. Seriously. But the result was beautiful and this cake better be good because that was some serious bicep-busting-eggwhite-beating moves I just pulled and I’m a little sad they’re in the oven now!! :) Really, though, the dough is fabulous and while I’m sure almond/hazelnut meal works excellently, I think toasting the nuts was quite key to the flavor/scent of the recipe in the end. I toasted for more like 20 minutes to get a really nutty strong flavor. Thanks so much — I’m a new reader and now I’m hooked!!

By: RachH

RachH — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 04:54:07 +0000

I made this yesterday for a dinner party tonight. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Rave reviews all around. I served with the ganache and whipped some cream to garnish each piece I plated. Fantastic! And we have leftovers for breakfast, which may be the best part :-)

By: Jenna

Jenna — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:11:44 +0000

Dawn, when you click the link, it goes to the proper page but then quickly takes you to another page, away from the detailed instructions. if you click the ‘X’ or stop loading button in the tab bar, right after you click on the link, it should stop on the detailed instructions page and not go to the other page it redirects you to. I hope that makes sense! I was having the same trouble.

By: deb

deb — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:39:59 +0000

What were you looking for more instructions on?

By: Dawn

Dawn — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:39:44 +0000

The link doesn’t take me to the detailed instructions! I need DETAILS as a rookie who so badly needs to make this cake!

By: deb

deb — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:50:08 +0000

Hi Jonathan -- I'm glad it still worked out. You probably ground the hazelnuts too long, so they started turning into (no doubt, delicious) hazelnut butter, like peanut butter. The difference between ground and butter is sometimes just a few seconds. If the hazelnuts were still warm, this could have happened sooner. Food52 has a great video about making almond butter (intentionally) from ground nuts and in it, shortly after the minute mark you can see the ground nuts starting to become butter -- in this recipe, of course, we want to stop before then. Hope that helps.

By: Jonathan Gilbert

Jonathan Gilbert — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:41:33 +0000

I tried this cake the other night. Ran into a bit of problem — not sure if I was doing something wrong, but after roasting the hazelnuts and removing the skins, when I put them into my blender with the icing sugar, they formed a really thick and gooey hazelnut butter at the bottom of the blender within the first 15 seconds, and it got so tough that in pretty short order, the blender didn’t have enough strength even to turn the blade! I dealt with it by disassembling the blender jug and scraped the stuff out and mashing it into smaller bits, then adding those bits a few at a time in to the flour, but it never did lose its paste-like consistency. It was certainly not something I would have been able to fold into the egg whites, not even remotely.

What I ended up doing was pouring the liquid butter into a mixing bowl with the paste and thoroughly combining the two into a soupy liquid. Then, *that* I was able to fold into the egg whites. At this point, I was thinking it was totally an academic exercise — no way this could work, right? I baked it for about 50 minutes, and what came out felt very firm around the edges and wouldn’t unstick from the bottom of the pan (confession: I did not use parchment! :-P). Fortunately, I was using a springform pan, so I just took the sides off and served it straight off the bottom.

Imagine my surprise when after all that, the cake turned out to be moist and soft and delicious! I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly the same end result (it doesn’t look much like the pictures), but it was still what I would consider pretty much a success. I am sort of wondering, though, what exactly went wrong with grinding up the hazelnuts. Do different kinds of hazelnuts have different amounts of oil in them, maybe? Or could it be because I was using an upright blender? If anyone knows I’d love to hear :-)

By: Radmila

Radmila — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 11:07:02 +0000

Here it is: http://www.coolinarika.com/preview/recept/kolac-od-lesnika-i-braon-putera/
Brown Butter really gives special aroma to this cake!
I translated this recipe and shared it with my friends, hope you don’t mind, and of course, I mentioned where I took it from!
Thank you once again!