Baking Bouchon - Recipe 75: Oh Ohs

I love a homemade version of a classic store-bought treat and this cookbook has a couple of good ones.  The TKO (Oreo) and the Better Nutter (Nutter Butter) are both really delicious.  This is the Oh Oh which is a rift on the Hostess Ho Ho.

We start with the cake which is a Chocolate Biscuit.  It contains regular and almond flour, cocoa powder, sugar and a lot of eggs.  Some whole eggs and egg yolks are whipped into submission with sugar.  There are also egg whites that are whipped separately and folded into the whole eggs and yolks along with the dry ingredients.  I always like this technique with cake batter because it yields a much lighter batter because of all the air that you whip into the egg whites.

The batter gets spread into a sheet pan and baked into a very thin layer of chocolate cake.  I personally think it's more brownie like than cake like but I'm not complaining.

It's been a long time since I actually ate a Ho Ho (as in, I'm not sure I've actually ever eaten a Ho Ho but that's can't possibly be true) but I was surprised that this version was filled with a very simple sweetened whipped cream - just heavy cream, powdered sugar and vanilla bean.  I really thought that real Ho Hos were filled with some complicated, chemically produced cream that definitely contained partially hydrogenated something or other.  Maybe they are and this is just Thomas Keller's way of making it not so fake and slimy.  That's probably the whole point, right?

The sweetened whipped cream gets spread all over the baked cake and all that gets rolled up.

I didn't read the directions closely enough to realize that I was supposed to roll the cake from both sides to meet in the middle and produce two skinnier rolls.  I rolled it all the way up to produce one thick roll.  Oops.  I personally think it makes for a prettier roll since you have more swirls  but that may just be me justifying my mistake. 

Once the cake is rolled up it is frozen to make it easier to slice into cute little swirly cakelets.

I was a little bit sad when I had to cover these in chocolate because afterward you couldn't see the pretty swirls.  I don't like it when all my pretty work gets covered up - especially when I'm having issues with the chocolate again and it's very thick and lumpy.  I need to get a new brand of chocolate coating.

These were really good and not as sweet as I thought they would be.  The chocolate coating is probably the sweetest part of them as the cake and cream are both really light.

I sent these to work with CA and they disappeared instantly.  Kind of like when I sent my homemade Twinkies in with him which I'll have re-make to tell you about sometime.  People love Hostess treats.  Thank God that someone bought the company and saved them because a world without shelf stable treats that will taste delicious longer than I'm alive is not a world I want to live in.

Enjoy!
Julie