Pacific Opera

This cake is beautiful. Am I right? It's a hot cake. (Not temperature hot, hot looking.) I am awesome, or at least I was on Wednesday. We had a two cake day, the Pacific and the Opera. Let's begin with the Pacific.

This beauty is composed of Jaconde Biscuit (a not-as-dry cake) imprinted with multicolour cigarette paste (stupid) and layered inside with strawberry and lemon mousses, both of which were extremely delicious.

I do love fruity desserts! Then I did a magical job of piping some waves on it (it made sense being Pacific and all. Those colours on the side are supposed to be tropical by the way). I bought chocolate and practiced my piping on Monday night when I got back from the cottage. How's THAT for devotion to this cake? The chef has been telling me that my piping needs to improve, so I've been practicing. It's clearly paying off...or so I thought until the Opera cake later that afternoon.

Ah the Opera cake. I thought it was going to be disgusting and at one point during demo asked the chef if we would have to eat it with a spoon. It was SOAKED. And I'm not exagerating, SOAKED in coffee syrup. Chef says that when they make it in big slabs in pastry shops they just pour a bucket of coffee syrup over each layer of biscuit and let the excess run out the sides.

So the layers are (from bottom to top) soaked cake, coffee buttercream (french buttercream, which uses egg yolks, as opposed to Italian buttercream, which uses egg white and italian meringue) wet cake layer, chocolate ganache, we cake layer, coffee buttercream, chocolate glazing. I hate hate hate soggy cake. You can ask anyone who knows me well and they will tell you that my least favourite dessert is.....anyone? Yes, Tiramisu. Blech. Oddly enough, this cake is so over the top with the soaking and all the layers that once it spent a little time in the fridge and the chocolate outside got a bit hard and snappy I thought is was delicious. It was a tasty surprise. So I made sure to give both cakes away.

The piping on the Opera cake...certainly not my best work. But then the chef tells me that it's the best he's seen me do. The border, I will admit, for the first time doing that border, actually went all right because it's also really tiny piping, which is so hard to do. But I was offended because my writing on my Fraisier cake was CLEARLY the best I've done. But he wasn't there for that. So I had to send him a picture of it to show him what I can really do (I'm such a jackass). This Opera crap was just that. AND I put the accent the wrong way to boot! hahahahha. That actually made me laugh really hard when he pointed it out and then proceeded to give me a French lesson. Too funny. All that planning and work and I just casually put the wrong accent in there. Hyster. I'm not even that bad with French, I can understand some and I understand accents so it cracked me up that I was so blase with this one. (and yes, blase should have and accent on it, the same one the opera cake needed...I think).