Triple-Chocolate Mousse Cake

Triple-Chocolate Mousse Cake
 
Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, November & December 2009
Notes: For a friend's 40th birthday party, I was asked to make a cake. As chocolate was one of his favourite flavours, I thought this recipe from a recent CI issue would fit the bill. I used an 8 3/4" cake ring to bake the cake. Everything was going fine until we took the cake out of the oven: it shrunk away from the edges of the ring! Since this was going to be a layered mousse cake, this was going to be a problem. What we decided to do was to make 50% more of the middle layer, then just pour extra mousse to fill the gap on the bottom. After the final refrigeration, I used a hairdryer to warm the cake ring to make it easier to unmold. As a fun decoration, we tempered some milk chocolate and piped it freeform onto a transfer sheet. So that the decoration would stand up, I made a thick foot that could be inserted into the top layer of the cake. Unfortunately, the decoration was too thin and broke while I was trying to stand it up. Oh well. In any case, the cake was served in thin wedges to a huge crowd of people who all raved about it. The layers are visually attractive, with each one featuring a different level of chocolate complexity. This is a definite winner and one I would make again, despite being time-consuming.

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