boozy sour cherry and chocolate mousse cake

Melt some bittersweet chocolate with espresso and beat eggs with sugar over a double boiler.

Beat the egg mixture and chocolate mixture; bring some egg whites to soft peaks, add sugar and bring to stiff peaks: fold into chocolate mixture. This fabulous mousse — from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking — will form the second layer of the following cake:

One layer of chocolate chiffon (with a splash of kirsch), a layer of Julia's mousse (with kirsch in lieu of orange liqueur), another layer of chiffon, a layer of sour cherries (stewed, set with tapioca starch and finished with—you guessed it—kirsch), more chiffon. I finished this with a crumb coat (it sets the top) of mousse followed by a generous glaze of chcocolate ganache.

Serve with boozy (read: kirsch-laden) whipped cream. Add candles (and sour cherries soaked in Everclear, orange and hibiscus) and it's the cake for a fabulous friend's birthday!

the devil and the shakers

I made a Shaker lemon pie using Meyer lemons last week -- it came out quite well. I might have used a bit more sugar -- or let the lemons macerate longer than over overnight -- but I was mostly satisfied. That -- as well as my next adventure -- came from Tartine. Just lemons, sugar and eggs in a flaky crust -- I was very careful to have a low-moisture crust and almost mangled it, but the extra work paid off as the crust was wonderful.


Next, for J.'s birthday, I made a devil's food cake with ganache and caramel filling and a ganache and crumb coat. The cake was a straightforward devil's food cake, rich with butter, cocoa and buttermilk.

It's four layers, with a layer of caramel and ganache in-between, then coated in two layers (a crumb coat and a smooth coat) of ganache. Then, before it cools, it gets coated in toasted cake crumbs (from the domes of the cakes) that have been pulverized in the food processor. I wish I had taken a photo of it sliced.