Editor’s note: Today we begin a new monthly column in which staff writer James Heflin indulges his sweet tooth by sampling desserts made at area restaurants.
When it comes to dessert, choices become simple for me. There are two things about which I am chiefly filled with sugary ardor: 1) chocolate, and 2) chocolate. And don’t go mucking it up with too much fancy business. Keep your raspberry coulis in the squeeze bottle, pastry chefs. And don’t even glance in the direction of a maraschino cherry, that clown nose of the dessert landscape.
I’ll admit, of course, that there’s plenty that’s delicious without chocolate. Most of it would be made better by chocolate, but what can you do? There are non-chocolate desserts that can ring with wonder — pecan pie vies for attention, and I was surprised by a maple cream pie and mild-mannered lemon bar recently. It is often such discoveries that make eating dessert the best part of the meal.
Still, beginning with chocolate seems proper for Just Dessert. And what’s more quintessential in the chocolate department than straight-up chocolate cake? Variations abound, and many are exceptionally delicious. But the best I’ve had in recent days comes from Johnny’s Roadside Diner in Hadley, the business that took over the Route 9 Diner building — on Route 9, of course.
The Johnny’s family of restaurants — there are seven more, including Johnny’s Tavern in Amherst, the Hu Ke Lau in Chicopee and the Student Prince in Springfield — has, beyond shared ownership, something major in common: pastry chef Hannah Buckley. Buckley, who’s from South Hadley, has worked at the Farm Table in Bernardston and the Haymarket Cafe in Northampton. When Johnny’s Roadside Diner opened, she was hired as the pastry chef for the restaurant group.
“I’ve loved baking since I was around 12,” Buckley told me. “It’s a life-long dream to be where I am right now.”
Buckley followed that early dream all the way to the Culinary Institute of America, where she studied baking and pastry.
A recent visit to the diner, though, brought bad news: none of the chocolate cake I was after. Instead, I was offered Buckley’s German chocolate cake. That Teutonic peak of chocolate filled with gooey, almondy, coconut-y layers was no slouch. As my Arkansas grandmother liked to say, “It’ll eat good.”
Yet, for this diner anyhow, its flagrant blast of sugar added an intense sweetness that the regular chocolate cake does better without.
So, I returned a week later, and this time found a dark slab of Buckley’s standard issue chocolate cake.
It sports a subtler balance, and the best kind: you’re drawn to eat more and more as you roll the flavors around, trying to pin down what exactly makes for the slight crunch of the outer frosting, the exceptional moistness of the cake itself. And then there’s the crowning achievement: its middle frosting layers.
When I was a kid in the far reaches of the South, there was one cake which lorded it above the rest. It was a mind-blowing, dense chocolate experience with a name no cake should have: the Tunnel of Fudge. You can still find recipes for said bundt pan tunnel online, but the real deal is only a distant memory, thanks to the unavailability of the ingredient which made the true magic: powdered frosting. Somehow the frosting and cake batter conspired to create, in mid Bundt, a “tunnel,” a supercollider of dense, goopy, fudge-like chocolate. It went straight to the brain’s pleasure center and didn’t give up its grip. The Higgs-Boson “God particle” may well have been present.
Buckley’s chocolate cake doesn’t replicate the Tunnel of Fudge, but it brings that embarrassing treat to mind in a big way. Its middle layers possess a texture that’s reminiscent. It’s dense, if not as dense, and goopy, a chocolate bomb in the middle of the cake. It’s hard to tell sometimes where the cake ends and the frosting begins. This is, in short, a triumph of a dessert.
No wonder, then, that Buckley considers it her signature dish.
“I find that chocolate cake is one of those things that people are very particular about, maybe because it’s so simple,” she said. “But everybody agrees that they want a rich chocolate cake.”
To make hers sufficiently rich, Buckley incorporates a local ingredient, Mapleline Farms buttermilk.
All those layers of flavorful interest arrive via several more ingredients. “I use Valrhona cocoa powder, which is rich and dark,” Buckley said. “And I use a malted chocolate buttercream — malted milk powder with melted chocolate and cocoa — to give it some dimension.”
And that crunch? “There’s chocolate cookie crumb between layers to give it more balance, and crunch and texture.”
Buckley says it’s been “a journey” to develop her recipe. But in the end, she says, “I think I got it done.”
Expect a slab of this cake to disappear before you know what hit your tastebuds.
Have you discovered a confection at a local eatery that makes you want to skip the main course? Email James Heflin at jheflin@gazettenet.com.