Canele's Gateaux Chocolat

My girlfriend bought me this beautiful cake today from Canele after school. Full marks for the presentation. It was so georgeous that I forgot all about not finishing the questions in my chemistry test today. The moment the cake came to our table, my girlfriend kept hurrying me to faster snap my photos so that she could start attacking the cakes :P

There was a description of this cake at the counter, "64% darl chocolate mousse, almond succes hazelnut feullitine, chocolate genouse with rum." Wow. What's 'succes'? Nonetheless, it makes the cake sound high class.

The roof of this cake was a square tile of tempered chocolate, ingenously embossed on one side with the surface texture of handbag leather. I think it was the reason why we chose this cake.

Naturally, the first thing we did was taste that shiny black droplet atop the entire cake. Unlike its attractive appearance, this thick black fluid was acrid, and thoughts of industrial tar came to my mind. My girlfriend even said out, apparently without careful thought: " Very terrible leh, not nice!" The chef who did this should be punished by making himself eat 5 whole tablespoons of that black stuff. What an introduction this posh looking cake!

Then we took off the leather patterned chocolate tile and tasted it alone. Chocolate, but with the subtle flavour of mothballs! I remember clearly what mothball vapour smells like because as a kid, they used to fill my auntie's cupboard. If I'm not wrong, the molecule that causes the characteristic smell of mothballs is napthalene, and whatever is in that chocolate could be having similar olfactory properties to the reagent. We didn't finish the whole leather chocolate roof. I think that as a luxury chocolate brand, Canele should seriously start benchmarking their chocolate aganst other good brands like Valrhona. Certain off-tasting notes are just not acceptable for the flavour profile of chocolate, a problem which has also plagued the cakes of Chocz.


Trying to forget the eyebrow twitching introduction that the cake gave us, we moved on to the body below. It was like a 3 storey flat, with 3 layers of cake alternated with 3 layers of ganache. The ganache was quite thick and dense in texture. The flourless cake too was on the dense side, such that the whole cake when eaten toghether was thick and dense, and also smooth and chocolatey. But chocolatey in a heldback sense because somehow the ganache was slow to melt, giving a percieved texture quite akin to soft candle wax. It tasted like lots of chocolate went into the cake, but the flavours of which were kept captive within the ganache and not released during the chewing process.

The leather chocolate tile did not go well with the ganache and cake layers because hard chunks of it remained in the mouth long after the ganache had melted and the cake chewed to pulp.



Despite the reserved comments on certain aspects of this cake, it was still quite chocolatey overall and will give you dopamine.

Shiokness Verdict: 6/10

$7.15 after GST ($7.55 after service charge)
Will you skip 3 meals at the school canteen to gather enough cash to buy the Gateaux Chocolat?

Canele Patisserie Chocolaterie
Shaw Centre
1 Scotts Road
Tel: 67389020
http://www.canele.com.sg/