And the getting the sides cut neatly wasn’t rocket science and didn’t require a laser.
I’m thrilled these seemingly daunting cakes were finally demystified! Though there are some changes I would make to this cake next time, the process was actually much simpler than I would have guessed. Finally, I added a few small bits of edible gold leaf. I did this perhaps unnecessarily complicated maneuver so the pistachio bits would adhere only to the chocolate, not the glaze. I then carefully transferred the fragile, hardened white chocolate web onto the top of the cake. Instead of just drizzling the chocolate over the top of the glaze, I drizzled it over silpat which I topped with chopped pistachios while the chocolate was still liquid. The white chocolate swirls were a bit tricky.
I also used syrup flavored with kirsch and apricot juice to moisten the cake. For the glaze, I used agar agar dissolved in apricot juice. Sugar Chef made an amazing creation and was kind enough to post her recipe and photo on the Daring Baker’s non-public site and I basically used her mango mousse recipe to create my apricot mousse. I mixed pistachio paste into the basic buttercream at the end and it was delicious. I filled it with fresh apricot chunks, and the top is decorated with white chocolate swirls, chopped pistachios and specks of edible gold leaf.įor the buttercream recipe, I used an old standby which can be found on a previous post (with modified quantities).
This flavor combination was inspired by a class on petits gateaux that I took with Chef Chad Pagano at the ICE. I decided the light theme would be well suited for Mother’s Day, so I ultimately decided upon a combination of almond joconde flavored with apricot-kirsch syrup, pistachio buttercream, apricot mousse, apricot glaze. While the Opéra cake is typically made with joconde, dark chocolate ganache, and buttercream, the twist for this month’s challenge was to keep the colors and flavors light, i.e. This month’s Opéra cake challenge was a marriage of recipes from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets and Tish Boyle and Timothy Moriarty’s Chocolate Passion. I’ve enjoyed my share of similarly quadrilateral shaped layer cakes in Paris, always wondering how they were done (and mostly questioning how those sides were cut with such laser-like precision). I was sooo excited when I found out this month’s Daring Bakers challenge was an Opéra cake.
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