This is a special chocolate cake made for a dear friend who was celebrating the arrival of her pen friend of several decades who had flown over from USA to meet for the very first time. A lovely and moving occasion.
The sponge
The sponge itself is a whisked Genoise sponge, but with ground almonds replacing 1/3 of the flour. The recipe for the main sponge is on my general cakes post here. I made up 6 eggs worth of sponge for this recipe, giving two tiers, each with three layers.
Slightly sweetened rum was brushed very liberally over the cooled sponges for that adult tone!
Assembling the cake
The sponge layers are filled with Chantilly cream and fresh raspberries that had also been brushed with a little of the sweetened rum.
I made a chocolate ganache for covering the top and sides of the cake, and used swirls of tempered chocolate work around the outside: this is piped onto acetate before gently wrapping around the outside of the cake, leaving the chocolate to set and carefully peeling off the acetate.
The ganache recipe is also towards the bottom of this post.
Phil's Home Kitchen 