The green jackfruit: Happy first birthday, dear daughter!

Today is a really special day for us and baby daughter is now officially a toddler. She has been doing toddler like pranks for quite a while, though. Today (actually a month back), I decided to throw caution to the wind and bake a layer cake. This is my second trial at a celebration cake after the Red Velvet cake fiasco a long time back. Now that I have decided to move on with my cake-making life, I decided I will go the whole nine yards (I had to use the phrase since I am a Matthew Perry fan) and make a genoise filled and frosted with whipped cream.

With so many choices, I wanted a nutless cake with some, not all chocolate. I decided on the genoise classique from The Cake bible. The idea for the cake itself comes from Chocolate cake, a great and unpretentious book by Michele Urvater. We love chocolate raspberry combo in ice cream and so I filled this cake with raspberry mousse filling from Chocolate cake. The frosting is a whipped chocolate ganache from Ms. Berenbaum's book. The genoise was really finicky and required two people to do stuff. How I wish I had bought a stand mixer...

Classic genoise

The recipe for the cake can be found here. The raspberry whipped cream filling is here except that the actual recipe had gelatin to stabilize and make it stiff for piping. The whipped chocolate ganache is here.
The cake did not rise much 'coz I think I did not beat for the prescribed 10 minutes. However, the crumb is so tender and the suggested amount of sugar syrup was right on for moistening the cake. Before spreading on the filling, I also spread about 2 Tbsp of raspberry jam on the bottom layer to give an oomph to the subtle filling. The filling and frosting are delicious by themselves and taste almost unrealistically light. I piped the remaining filling to make rosettes on top and also tried my hand at some writing. Overall, a delicious and fulfilling endeavor.