Pancake Cake with Chocolate and Caramel

Double cream, not single, appears three times for three different jobs, and swapping it for anything lighter will cost you in each case. In the ganache it's there to melt the chocolate smoothly without the mixture splitting — fat carries fat. In the caramel it stops pure sugar syrup from seizing into a brittle the moment it cools; the cream turns a hard caramel into a soft, spoonable one. In the final whip it needs enough fat (that's what "double" means here — over 48% butterfat) to hold soft peaks on its own, no gelatine, no stabiliser. Single cream won't whip at all; it just gets thicker and sad.

Heating cream to 95°C for the ganache isn't a number from a textbook — it's "just under boiling, where the surface starts to shiver and the first bubbles appear at the rim." Go past a rolling boil and you risk scorching, which tastes bitter under the chocolate forever. Some say you must boil it properly to "activate" something in the chocolate — no, you just need it hot enough to melt the chocolate completely and not a degree more; a full boil adds nothing and takes something away.

Dark chocolate: look for one you'd eat on its own, somewhere in the 60–70% range. Much higher and the ganache turns stiff and bitter against the sweet caramel; much lower (anything billed as "cooking chocolate" at the low end) and you'll need more of it to get the same set, which throws off the ratio to cream. If you only have chocolate chips, they work, but they're formulated to hold shape in baking and melt more sluggishly — give them longer off the heat, stirring, rather than more heat.

Glucose syrup in the caramel isn't decoration — it's an "interfering sugar," meaning it gets in the way of the sucrose crystals lining up and turning your caramel grainy. No glucose, no problem: a squeeze of lemon juice or a spoon of golden syrup in the pan does the same job of keeping the sugar amorphous rather than crystalline. The pinch of salt at the end isn't tradition for its own sake, either — plain caramel is one-note sweet, and salt widens that note into something you can actually taste through a whole slice of cake instead of it vanishing.

The eggs, milk, flour and ale combination is just a crêpe batter sized for a domestic hob, and the ale is doing a job glucose-stirring purists will tell you is unnecessary — it is not essential, but it's not magic either: a little carbonation and bitterness lighten a batter that's otherwise all egg and milk. If you've no ale, a splash of sparkling water does the lift without the flavour; plain milk alone just gives you a denser, flatter crêpe, still perfectly fine. Cardamom and vanilla go into the egg mixture, not the batter proper, because that's where the fat is to carry their aroma — add them to watery milk alone and most of the smell stays in the pan.

For stacking in an ordinary flat, you won't have a cake turntable or a kazan-sized griddle — a wide nonstick frying pan and a flat plate are the actual tools here, and that's fine. What you don't have is room for error on cooling: don't stack warm pancakes on a cold plate thinking the fridge later will fix it — it won't undo pancakes that have already gone soft and welded to the caramel beneath them. Lay them out on a rack or a clean tea towel, give them air, and only then build. This feeds eight, cut in the thin wedges the layers demand — any thicker and you're eating one slice as a meal, which, given the cream and chocolate involved, your Sunday roast guests will forgive you for exactly once.