27/99 White Gold Passion Génoise

Ok, there are leaves on the cake and it's summertime.  What's up with that?



I am impatient- that's what's up with that. The white gold passion génoise is a pretty tedious recipe.  Don't get me wrong, it tastes great but you definitely have to work for it.

It's Friday afternoon, I was tired from the week but still excited about making the passion génoise. Once I finally got through making the actual cake and the classic passion curd and the passion fruit syrup and the white chocolate custard base for the white chocolate deluxe buttercream, I was tired.  And then I realized that I did not plan ahead. It says that you have to let the passion fruit curd sit for at least three hours before you use it. Hah. Three hours on Friday afternoon? That's just not going to happen.

So I went for it sans three hours of sitting. After I iced the cake, I happily spread the passion fruit curd into the icing to make those nice pretty swirls that Rose has in her cake.

Need I remind you that Mississippi weather is not super suitable for allowing bakers to just wing it with the whole waiting-around-for-things-to-turn-thick thing? Let's just say those nice little swirls quickly turned into drippy mush. Not acceptable.  So I went for a last minute emergency fix-it.  Enter white chocolate leaves.

People celebrate Christmas in July so I say why not add Halloween too? Happy fall everyone.

Like I mentioned before, this cake was tedious.  Yesterday, I made the génoise since my geology lab got canceled.

Then today came the other four parts of the recipe: Curd, syrup, custard base, and buttercream.

First: curd.

You basically cook some eggs with sugar, butter, and passion fruit over the stove.  Once it gets really thick (but without bringing it to a boil- trickier than you think) you push it through a fine mesh strainer.

Then you let it cool for thirty minutes.  Then you cover it and let it sit for three dang hours (theoretically that is)

Next in line: Passion fruit syrup:

This isn't too bad.  Once you cut open a vanilla bean and blend it into some sugar, you just add some passion fruit, bring it to a boil, and then let it sit there until it cools down.

Next up: white chocolate custard base and buttercream:

First you melt white chocolate and butter in a double boiler and combine the melted product with eggs. 

Once you've poured that into the buttercream base then you are set to assemble the cake- That is if everything has cooled for the proper amount of time.

And then I made the chocolate leaves even thought that is not really included in the recipe. Thankfully that didn't take long at all though- just melt the chocolate, grab some leaves from outside and then brush them down with the chocolate. Let them sit in the freezer and then they are ready to be peeled off!

As unhappy as I was with the appearance of the cake, I was really pleased with the flavor.  I've never had a passion fruit cake and it was definitely a treat!  I feel like I am totally covered in sugar with how much of it I have eaten so far.

I had some friends come over tonight to sample. Great reviews all around!

This is one of my friends, Anne. She took a bite and said "Whats up.. this is goooddd."

I took the rest of the cake to my pastor's family here in Oxford and they had a little taste testing.  They were so wonderful and even wrote down quotes for me to share with you on my blog!

Their 17 year old son said "it has levels of flavor." Love it. I thought that was very profound for a 17 year old guy.

Grace said it had great flavor and she could tell that it intended to be moist but there was too much liquid on the cake.

Someone else agreed and said that it was a little too moist.  If the cake had risen higher then it would probably be right.

When I measured the cake it was definitely a 1/4 inch shorter than it should have been (silly egg yolks again) so I see where that went wrong. Hopefully my next encounter with the génoise will be better!