Double-Decker Salted Caramel Cake | Baking with Dorie

Dorie quoted his friend in the saying: “anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” The reference to overdoing is about the caramel flavor which is front and center of the double-decker salted caramel cake. If you like caramel, you’d probably go along with the notion of overdoing it. If you’re like me, who tries to moderate my sweet intake, overdoing may not be such a good idea!

A double-decker cake is a fancy way of referring to a layer cake. There are two layers to the salted caramel cake, with a caramel frosting on the top and the side, as well as between the layers. To add a touch of crunch, Dorie recommends folding toasted nuts, toffee bits, chopped chocolate and cocoa nibs in the batter. I skipped that when it became clear I needed to bake the cake again. I reserved the crunchy ingredients for the top only.

In the first round, I under-baked the cake; the center of the cake cratered and it’s raw. The cake was in the oven for 42 minutes, according to the recipe. Unwittingly, I did not carefully double-check the doneness of the cake. My bad!

In the second round, I made half of the recipe for a smaller cake. The batter was split in two 5-inch springform pans. Even with a quarter of the original batter amount in each pan, the cakes took 40 minutes to fully bake — much longer than expected. That’s my experience with the cake component.

Fortunately, making the caramel from scratch did not present any issue. I made the frosting using confectioners’ sugar and caramel sauce in roughly a 1:1 ratio, by weight. Then I added a few tablespoons of heavy cream to get the frosting to a smooth and spreadable consistency. For that matter, I spent quite a long time applying frosting on the cake. My inexperience clearly shows; the messy kitchen is the proof.

After I finished this cake project, I started looking over the remaining cake recipes in Baking with Dorie. It looks like we have a few more of these layer cakes to tackle. Oh well, I can barely get through this one without numerous fits and starts! I won’t be making one anytime soon. However, the picture came out great!