Hello everyone,

I have a baffling cake problem and I really don't understand it.

I am writing here to see if anybody knows what is the problem and how to solve it.

Here's what happened:

I baked a chocolate hazelnut cake - it tastes really good.

I also made a strawberry cake filling - it also tastes very good.

I also made a chocolate ganache - it also tastes very good.

I then cut the cake in half horizontally, filled with the strawberry filling and topped it off with the ganache.

When I ate the cake altogether, somehow it doesn't taste good anymore.  It's like I couldn't taste the ganache at all, and the strawberry filling wasn't as good anymore. 

Does this mean that my chocolate cake has a very strong taste that overpowers the rest?

How do I solve this problem?

This was just a trial cake, I'm planning to bake a bigger version for a friend's wedding.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Brenda

You had me at "Baffling cake problem"

I have recently been working on a Neapolitan cake and it took quite a bit of tweaking to get all three flavours choc, strawberry,vanilla to not overpower each other and have a balance of flavours. I did a rich choc cake on the bottom, strawberry mousse on top of that and whitechocolate and vanilla mousse on top of that, then drizzled the whole thing in choc ganache.

I did find I had to bump up the strawberry more than if it was a stand alone flavour as it was overwhelmed by the chocolate ie when I made the strawberry mousse at perfect eating flavour on it's own, when I put it on the choc cake the strawberry flavour disappeared.

My first thought on reading your flavours was I'm not really getting chocolate, hazelnut and strawberry as a flavour combo.  My instinct would be to go chocolate, hazelnut and raspberry.  The tart tangy raspberries would balance out against the hazelnuts.

hello 810whitechoc, Thanks so much for your suggestion, You are probably right.  I will try the raspberries, chocolate, hazelnut combo and also try strawberries & chocolate combo - without the hazelnuts.  Thanks again.

Strawberries and hazelnuts just doesn't sound appealing to me.  I agree with 810whitechoc, some flavors just don't play well together. 

I agree, there are some flavors that tend to overwhelm others, and a darker chocolate is one of them. When I do a chocolate raspberry cake, for example, I'll not put any chocolate fillings in it at all because it will just be too much for the other flavors. But ti sounds like you got to eat the experiment, so that worked out :) You might want to try a hazelnut cake with layers of chocolate ganache and strawberry. I've done one with raspberry that way and it was really good.