TCB: Bittersweet Cocoa Almond Genoise

For a New Year's party at a friend's house, I offered to make a cake. Which cake, I have no idea. It took me forever to choose. Do I choose one of the 40 cakes I have left from Rose's Heavenly Cakes? That would be good, one more cake down, 39 to go. Or do I try something from The Cake Bible?

The crowd I'm serving to seem to like Genoise-type cakes, and chocolate is always a favorite. I have made both Moist Chocolate Genoise and Genoise Au Chocolat. Genoise Au Chocolat is the running favorite (lighter, fluffy, and less sweet).

I flipped through RHC, looking at the ones I have not made. Then I did the same with TCB. My hand stopped at a page... the cake is called Bittersweet Cocoa Almond Genoise.

Score! I thought. This would work perfectly with a decorating idea that I had in mind, borrowing from this blog.

I read the genoise recipe. Intrigued. Then I did a search for this cake over at Rose's forum. It yielded results. Reading on, I'm liking the cake. And so here it is.

I made the full recipe of the cake, baked in 2 7 inch pans. It is not what Rose recommended, but I wanted to achieve a good height for the chocolate decor.

I used a low fat cocoa (Ghirardelli). I took Julie's suggestion and used 75% of the cocoa and 25% of Schaffenberger unsweetened chocolate. The combo worked like a charm and the cake turned out wonderful.

For the filling, at first I was going for stabilized whipped cream all over. On baking day I changed my mind and went for light whipped ganache. I didn't do a good job when melting the chocolate with the cream, the mixture was too hot and I can see the chocolate separating. Not a big issue, I took it off the heat and started adding cream slowly until the mixture come together.

Too lazy at this point to add more chocolate, I went with it and the result is a very very light ganache, more like a chocolate flavored whipped cream. It was wonderful. Fit perfectly with the cake as it was pretty rich.

Making this cake, I figured out that I much prefer piping than torting and frosting a cake. Slicing each cake in half is no biggie except the sides of the cake started falling a part and they look more like a distorted circle. I gathered all the crumbs, combined with some light ganache, and started spackling.

The chocolate decoration is pretty easy to do. I followed Emma's instruction down to a T. The only deviation I did was that I apply the chocolate directly onto a cake, instead of forming it around the tin can, as Emma did.

The chocolate was not even tempered, and it held up throughout the 60 photos I took and through the evening.

I'm very pleased with the end result, it didn't look like the mess that I torted.

And most importantly? My friends LOVED the cake. They all think it looks awesome and it tasted awesome.