RHC: Moist Chocolate Raspberry Génoise

Ah, a génoise that actually got some height for me! Maybe it was the chocolate, maybe I'm finally learning some of the tricks for these egg-foam leavened cakes, who knows. Maybe it was making a half-recipe and using 6" pans, when half of a 9" pan is 6.4". Whatever...my génoise were nice and tall this week.

My biggest problems with this cake were ones of timing. Yes, yes, I should read the entire recipe carefully in advance. I should probably force myself to take notes for these multi-component cakes, too. For example, I thought I could make the raspberry sauce one evening early in the week, but failed to notice that the frozen raspberries should defrost slowly at room temperature for several hours. (I put the sealed bag in the fridge overnight after hitting this obstacle, which speeded up the draining the next day.) I'm used to the ganache needing several hours to reach the correct frosting consistency (after one makes the raspberry sauce that goes into it), so I did get that one timed correctly. The cocoa syrup should be applied warm, so that can't be made too far in advance of composing the cake. And finally are those cake crumbs which can be used to decorate the cake, something I thought I'd do while the ganache was still soft enough to hold them. But the cake crust is removed just before composing the cake, and then need to air-dry for several hours before the scraps can be processed into crumbs.

But you know, it eventually all came together, and the result was a very nice cake. The cocoa syrup brushed on the torted cake layers plus the interspersed ganache kept things moist, as the cake name promised. The hint of raspberry flavor in the ganache was present but not strong--I might have gotten better flavor if I'd added the Chambord, but the liqueur flavorings haven't been well-received around here. Fresh raspberry garnish and the extra raspberry sauce gave most of the non-chocolate flavor--the raspberry in the ganache was very subtle, only noticeable on the first few bites.












Tasting results: This is probably the best-received génoise yet, with the possible exception of the one slathered in passion fruit curd--I'd have to ask younger niece for a head-to-head comparison, as chocolate automatically creates bonus points. No one complained of it being dry, the chocolate flavor was intense (though the raspberry could have been a little stronger). However, it's still a génoise, and despite all these months of baking from Rose's Heavenly Cakes with many many variations on génoise, we're still fundamentally a butter cake family. Which means next week's devil's food cake should really hit the sweet spot.