CHOCOLATE - RASPBERRY CAKE

I am feeling that my sugar high is coming to an end… So here is what might be the last of my sugar coated postings for a while… well, then again, you never know !
Although the weather has really not been that great recently, the fruits for this season of the year are terrific. All my favourite fruits are stacked on the shelves these days looking ripe and irresistibly seductive! The other day I bought some gorgeous raspberries, enjoyed some on their own and used the rest for a chocolate-raspberry cake with plenty of chocolate ganache and raspberry liqueur. I’m a genuine chocoholic, and I do love all sorts of cakes, but chocolate cakes are by far my favourite.

Above: beautiful raspberries. Below: coating the cake with the chocolate-raspberry ganache

Anyway, I’m going to cut this post short- but I do have to say that I’ve always enjoyed the fabrications of cakes: the layers, textures, colours, flavours… I love the process of dressing them and matching up their edible accessories. It’s almost like dressing up a doll… even though for the latter I’ve gone way past the age of doing that!

Recipe for my Chocolate-Raspberry cake:

>Chocolate Genoise ingredients:
4 eggs
125 gr sugar
125 gr flour
60 gr butter, melted
30 gr cocoa
Raspberry liqueur

Prepare a bain-marie. Place the sugar & eggs in the upper pot of the bain-marie and whisk for about 10 minutes until ribbons form and fall off the whisk beaters. Then add half of the flour and cocoa and quickly fold. Repeat with the remaining half of the flour and cocoa. Finally gently add in the butter. Transfer batter to a buttered cake mould, and bake in oven for 30 mins (checking with a sharp knife later if it needs more baking time). Remove from oven, let cool, unmould and slice horizontally in half. Brush each slice with raspberry liqueur.

>Chocolate – Raspberry ganache ingredients (sorry no measurements incl, I eyeballed the ingredients for this one) :

Raspberries, crushed
Liquid cream
Dark chocolate

Heat the liquid cream and crushed raspberries together- but do not let it boil. Then lower heat and add in the dark chocolate. The proportions are usually the cream being half the amount of the chocolate used. Allow all the chocolate to melt until ganache becomes smooth. Set aside, let cool and then with a spatula spread a layer in between the chocolate genoise and use the rest of the ganache to coat the cake at the end. Finish off by decorating cake with raspberries (optional).