Chocolate Chessboard Cake from The Official Netflix Cookbook (The Queen's Gambit)
The fourth dish I made from The Official Netflix Cookbook was a Chocolate Chessboard Cake, inspired by The Queen's Gambit.
This highly acclaimed, 7-episode miniseries was released in 2020 in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Set in the 1960s, it follows Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), a young woman from Lexington, Kentucky who rises from an orphanage to become an internationally renowned chess player while struggling with substance abuse. I started watching the show before I made this cake and finished it afterwards, and was blown away.
Even before I embarked on this cook-through, The Queen's Gambit was on my must-watch list of Netflix shows and movies. I don't do very much baking, yet the arts and crafts-loving side of me was excited to try this. It all seemed complicated at first glance: a chessboard-patterned cake with a lot of frosting, but there's actually no baking involved. You use already baked pound cakes, vanilla and chocolate, and then stitch them together using ganache frosting, then decorate the top with cocoa powder and icing sugar made to look like chess pieces.
Slight problem: vanilla pound cake can be easily bought at a store where I live, but not chocolate. Therefore, I did have to bake that from scratch. That wasn't difficult, though the issue that arose was in whether it would be the same size as the vanilla cake. I knew it wouldn't look as perfect as its photo in the book does. This wasn't going to stop me from making it. After all, imperfect food is homemade, rustic even. It encapsulates how messy Beth Harmon is in spite of her genius.
This, like some other recipes in the Netflix Cookbook, is inspired by The Queen's Gambit without being something cooked in it. The closest match there is to this cake is seen when Beth is eating a simpler chocolate cake at one of her tournaments.
I made the cake for the same dinner party as the Mediterranean Mezze Platter from the Tomb Raider Cookbook, and baked the chocolate pound cake for it the day before. I had assistance to cut the cake into three equal pieces, which would then be stacked together with ganache frosting before being cut and stacked again, gradually adding frosting around the sides as well. Given the uneven size of the storebought vanilla and homemade pound cakes, my cake was, as I expected, dilapidated. You might even think it came from Wonderland.
I made one modification ingredients wise. You're supposed to use bittersweet chocolate for the ganache. I couldn't find that, and I used dark chocolate instead. A little bit sweeter, but still mostly chocolate. I used baking chocolate and finely chopped that to the best of my ability, although some pieces were clearly larger than they should have been, hence the lumps I had when I made the ganache. I rectified that as best as I could by microwaving the bowl for 10 seconds at a time and whisking furiously. That got most of them out.
In between assemblies, you have to chill the cake in the fridge so the frosting can set. I applied the final layer of frosting on the exterior before putting it into the fridge until dessert time. When that came, I cut out a chess piece stencil using straight up 8 1/2 x 11 paper, rather than cardboard cut out with an exacto knife like the recipe recommends. My brevity worked against me, since the stencil was flimsy, the chess piece pattern didn't look nearly as good as it should have.
No matter! As long as it tasted good, that was what mattered in the end. It certainly did. It's a production, and it can look horrible or beautiful, but it went down very well with my guests, who loved it.
If you want to make this Chocolate Chessboard Cake yourself, you can get it in The Official Netflix Cookbook: 70 Recipes from Your TV to Your Table. The chocolate pound cake recipe I used was from Girl Versus Dough (without the ganache).
