As I was writing this column on Thursday night, I was playing the latest New Heights podcast video on the tablet next to me. I won’t go into the details of what was revealed about the upcoming era or her personal life, other than to say I feel for her obsession with baking bread after my whole bread section of Cooking Eorzea.
What really stuck with me about it though was when Taylor said, when talking about readings comments online from people who dislike her is that “[y]ou should think of your energy as a luxury item” and how “[n]ot everyone can afford it.”
It is so easy for me to give my energy to so many people who can’t afford it, and who waste my time by just defining my days in the most unpleasant ways. Even the relationship that I moved out to California for absolutely took my energy away, and re-reading some of my earliest Cooking Eorzea column entries really reflect that mind set.
I genuinely try hard to push myself into the people and activities that make me happy, and it took Taylor to directly put it in front of me to fully appreciate what I’m doing here. Those individuals and things that can afford my energy and that recognize it as the luxury item it is. For example: one of the happiest times of my week is when I am baking a recipe for a dish I’ve never made before, and then taking the two to three hours afterwards to write up the column that’s now before you. It’s a time that I am really putting myself into cooking, which has become a surprisingly large part of who I am, even if my entries have admittedly been dropping off lately due to other life obligations.
Cooking Eorzea, along with my friends and my family, is worth every drop of energy that it wrings out of me, even when I am so tired when putting the time into making it happen as often as I can with Love, Eorzean Style.
If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.
Recipe of the Week
This week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe is for Chocobo Cake! While this item does not have a in-game equivalent recipe, it is the 59th recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and it comes with a whopping ‘Hard’ difficulty out of the Thanalan Region.
I’ve never made a cake before, to tell the truth. At least, one that wasn’t an instant cake. It looks more than a little bit intimidating, to be completely honest. Cooking cake layers, stacking them, making syrup, making whipped cream frosting, and assembling it all into one cohesive package? It’s a lot to take on!
Featured Ingredient of the Week
Raspberry liqueur is a type of liqueur, which is an alcoholic beverage made of spirits and additional flavorings. In this case, those additional flavorings are raspberries. They are heavily sweetened, and this particular one had an ABV of 15%. I’ve never heard of raspberry liqueur before – or liqueur in general, to be honest. I don’t drink much (or really at all) in my personal life, and I honestly thought it was a type of syrup they might use at Starbucks or Swig or whatever at first. I was very surprised to discover I had to head to a liquor store to find this!
All of that, plus this being the only completely new ingredient besides strawberries for this week’s Cooking Eorzea Chocobo Cake dish, made raspberry liqueur the Featured Ingredient of the Week!
My Cooking Attempt
This week’s Cooking Eorzea featured the return of familiar ingredients – with the exception of one, our featured ingredient of the week:
First, I harvested the vanilla caviar out of a Mandagascar vanilla bean. I used a small measuring spoon to scoop out the caviar after slicing down the length of it with a knife.
Setting that aside, I added several cups of cake flour, a small amount of ground cardamom, the baking powder, and the salt together in a large bowl. I then hand mixed it all together before splitting it into two bowls I set aside for use later on.
I then drained the egg whites out from between my fingers and set it aside temporarily.
I added a cup-and-a-half of beet sugar and a cup of unsalted butter together in a bowl and I mixed them together by hand until it had all smoothed out.
I next added eggs, egg whites, vanilla extract, and the vanilla caviar to the butter and beet sugar mixture before I blended it all together again.
I added in the oat milk, blended it in, and then added in half of the previously mixed flour mixture before blending that in too.
Once that was blended in, I added the rest of the flour mixture and mixed it in until it was just combined and the batter was completed.
At this point, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
I grabbed two nonstick cake pans, sprayed it down with nonstick cooking spray, and then lined both cake pans with parchment paper!
I divided the batter between the two cake pans, and I banged each one against the countertop multiple times to try to burp out as much air as possible.
I then put both into the oven for 45 minutes to bake. After about 15 minutes, my entire home absolutely began to smell of delicious, wonderful cake.
When the timer went off, I pulled out both cakes and checked they were both fully baked through by sticking a toothpick down into the center. Once I verified the toothpick came out clean for each cake, I let them cool down for five minutes in the pan.
After five minutes, I pulled the cakes out of the cake pans and I let them rest on a wire rack to cool down completely for an hour.
Gently pushing the wire rack aside, I started to make the syrup. First, I added the granulated sugar, two tablespoons of water, and the raspberry liqueur all together before I mixed it all together.
I popped it into the microwave for 15 seconds and then whisked it all together again.
I then put the bowl back into the microwave for another 15 seconds, pulled it out, and finished blending the syrup ingredients together before setting it aside until I needed it.
In the stand mixer, I added first the entire quart of heavy cream and then the vanilla extract.
I then added in six tablespoons of powdered sugar before I turned the stand mixer on to blend at ‘high’!
I let the stand mixer…mix…until the whipped cream frosting was somewhere between soft peaks and stiff peaks. I was super glad the Cheese Soufflé recipe needed stiff peaks, so I could find that happy medium for my Chocobo Cake attempt.
I then covered up the whipped cream frosting, and I put it into the refrigerator until I needed it for assembling the cake.
I pulled out 14 strawberries, sliced off the tops, and then split them in half down the middle.
I then got out another 10 strawberries, sliced off those tops, and set them aside too.
I then got out my serrated knife, and I cut off the rounded tops off of the two cakes. I accidentally sliced off waaaaaaay too much from one of them though, and I ended up going down at an angle into one of the cakes unfortunately. I made sure to save the extra cake pieces to share with other people.
I added one of the cake layers to the cake stand, and I brushed the top of it with the syrup. The syrup really soaked into the bread, and I found myself having to use quite a bit to make sure the cake layer would all be covered.
I then spread a layer of frosting evenly over the cake layer, keeping it to be about a fourth inch all the way around.
I then added a layer of the sliced strawberries on top of that, and I had to keep trying to gently push and add more sliced strawberries to the top. I managed to get all but one-and-a-half strawberries or so onto it! Once that was done, I covered all the sliced strawberries with more frosting until they were all covered up, too.
I then picked up the serrated side of the other cake layer, and I painted it with almost all of the remaining syrup. I then put it, syrup-and-cut-side down onto the other layers.
At this point, I used the remaining syrup to cover the very top of the cake.
At this point, I got a piping bag, slipped the drop flower top into the end, cut off part of the bag, and then filled the piping bag up with around one-fourth of the whipped cream frosting.
I then got out my icing spatulas and I used up a lot of frosting to cover up the entire cake. It was surprisingly difficult, because I kept wanting to make the cake look as smooth as possible, but it still kept getting occasionally lumpy or exposing the strawberries or whatever. I realized that I had to use as gentle of a touch as possible to cover the cake and make it as smooth as possible while rotating the cake…even though I wasn’t completely successful. It is really an art to spread frosting over a cake and smooth the sides down.
Once I finished, I grabbed the piping bag, and I squeezed out little drop flowers along the edges of the bottom of the cake and then along the top of the cake. After that, I refilled the bag with whatever frosting was left and I made another series of drop flowers in the middle of the cake.
I then added the strawberries that had just the tops cut off onto the top of the cake in a small circle. I was able to get most, but not all, of the strawberries onto there!
Finally, I put the cake into the refrigerator to cool down for an hour.
And here is how the Chocobo Cake looks once it is done!
And here is what a layered slice looks like with the Chocobo Cake cut!
Diving into the cake slice, I was surprised at both how dense the cake part was and how simply airy the whipped cream frosting was. Both of them, along with the strawberries, really made a delicious, sweet dish. I was very surprised to find out I could not taste the syrup whatsoever, even though I covered three of the four sides of the cakes with it. I also feel like I got a really solid cake-to-frosting-to-strawberries ratio, which surprised me since this was truly the first time I’ve ever made a non-instant cake.
Afterword
If I was to do this recipe again, I would have to be more careful with cutting the tops of the cake layers off. I definitely cut off way too much, and I ended up digging deep into the cake. You can see that there is a bit missing in the final photograph on the lefthand side, and frosting simply isn’t a be-all-patch-all solution to something like that. Otherwise, I don’t have a lot to say. The Chocobo Cake was an amazing dessert, and it was one that I would absolutely love to bake again for a party or an event!
So let’s talk ‘thank you’s’! First up: Victoria Rosenthal deserves so much praise for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look, and for being patient with me as my ingredient hunting and other journalism obligations sometimes forces me to not write as often as I would like. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a very real ‘thank you’ for creating the logo for Cooking Eorzea on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I have yet to play Patch 7.3 due to everything going on in my life, but this MMORPG is never far from my thoughts or my heart, and it is due to the efforts of both of them that this column is possible.
Next Week
Next week’s Cooking Eorzea, which is happening (despite my journalistic obligations this coming weekend) since I already have all the ingredients, is the recipe I am the most excited for: Coffee Biscuit. This recipe is from Norvrandt, and well..
If you know, you know.
Come back next week for this coming Cooking Eorzea recipe. Trust me.
Have you ever made a layered cake before?
How do you see your own personal energy?
Let us know in the comments below!
