Cake "Squirrel"

A truly festive, delicious and fragrant biscuit cake with hazelnuts and chocolate cream. Such a cake can be prepared for meeting friends, and for celebrating a birthday. We suggest you cook the "Squirrel" cake according to this recipe.

Ingredients

• For test:
• Eggs - 8 pcs.
• Sugar - 400 g
• Flour - 250 g
• Baking powder - 1 teaspoon
• Hazelnuts (hazelnuts) - 100 g
• Vanilla sugar - 1 sachet (10 g)
• For cream:
• Butter - 350 g
• Powdered sugar - 140 g
• Yolks - 4 pcs.
• Chocolate bitter - 200 g
• Hazelnuts (hazelnuts) - 150 g
• For syrup:
• Sugar - 200 g
• Water - 220 g

Directions

1. 250 grams of hazelnuts are lightly roasted in the oven for 10 minutes at a temperature of 180 degrees Celsius. Let cool and, rubbing between the palms, we clean, as far as possible, from the thin skin. Grind the nuts on an electric grater, in a blender or a rolling pin.
2. Separate the whites from the yolks of 8 eggs. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and, without stopping beating, add 1 sachet of vanilla sugar. In several steps, add 400 grams of granulated sugar.
3. Add 8 yolks to the protein mass, lightly, very carefully, mix.
4. In 250 grams of white flour, add 1 teaspoon of baking powder and sift into a bowl with egg mixture. Add nuts and very carefully from top to bottom, in one direction, knead a homogeneous dough.
5. We line two forms with a diameter of 28 centimeters with baking paper and grease with oil. We spread the dough into the molds approximately evenly and slightly level it.
6. Bake the walnut biscuit in a preheated oven at 180 degrees Celsius for about 35 minutes. We check the readiness of biscuit cakes with a wooden stick.
7. You can bake a large biscuit in one pan, which will increase the baking time to approximately 50 minutes. After baking, cool the large biscuit and cut it in half, into two cakes.
8. We take out the finished cakes from the oven, let them cool slightly in the form, put them on a wire rack and let them rest for several hours.
9. Let's prepare the syrup for soaking the biscuit. Pour 200 grams of sugar into a saucepan, pour 220 grams of water. We put on fire, bring to a boil and cook over low heat until transparent, about 2 minutes. Cool the finished syrup to room temperature.
10. Prepare the topping for the cake. Cut off the top crust from the cake, grind it into large crumbs.
11. We send a baking sheet with crumbs to the oven, heated to 200 degrees Celsius, dry and brown for 6-7 minutes.
12. Let's start cooking the butter chocolate cream on the yolks. Beat white 4 yolks with 140 grams of powdered sugar.
13. In a separate bowl, beat white 350 grams of soft butter and, without stopping beating, gradually pour in the yolks whipped with powdered sugar.
14. In the resulting mixture, add 200 grams of dark chocolate melted in a water bath or in a microwave and cooled to room temperature. Continue beating until you get a smooth cream.
15. We divide the finished chocolate-butter cream into two approximately equal parts. In one of them we add 150 grams of roasted and chopped hazelnuts. We mix.
16. Let's start assembling a biscuit cake with chocolate and nut butter cream. We impregnate the cakes with syrup that has cooled to room temperature.
17. On the bottom cake lay out and level the cream with nuts.
18. We cover with the top cake and coat the entire cake with the remaining chocolate cream.
19. Sprinkle the cake with cooked crumbs or toasted and chopped hazelnuts.
20. We stand the finished nut cake for several hours in the refrigerator. We take out the cake "Squirrel" from the refrigerator one hour before serving.
21. Sponge cake with nuts and chocolate cream is served to the festive table, with tea or coffee. Enjoy your meal!