I Did It! Challenge #2 Down

Again, I am proud of myself for rising to the challenge of this month's Daring Bakers recipe. The recipe this month was Filbert Gateau with Praline Buttercream by Carol Walter. I have to say that this thing pretty much kicked my butt. It was not particularly difficult, just time consuming. I thought I was ahead of the game by doing some of the smaller parts days ahead of time... the praline one night, the glaze another, taking the skins off the hazelnuts another. In any case it still took me another 5-6 hours on Sunday a few weeks ago. Some of that time was inactive waiting for the cake to cool and set up after layering. In any case it turned out great in the end.

This was my second attempt at a genoise and this time worked out much better than the first. I took some things I learned from that first experience and wasn't as afraid this time. My second attempt at a ganache and again with better results. Although I don't think I perfected the technique so I look forward to trying again. I did have issues with the praline paste getting stuck in my decorating tips, but I suppose I could have ground the paste a bit more in the food processor.

I also want to mention that I did not set out to make 4 cakes. I purchased 3 four inch pans thinking this would suffice being that I wanted to half the recipe. But when I filled those pans with batter I still had some left and when ahead and poured it into am 8 inch round. I also ended up torting the small cakes when I decided that stacking them on top of each other might result in too tall of a cake. So, I sliced the small ones for the three layers but the 8 inch only got split once as it was a bit flatter.

In conclusion, I stuck pretty close to the recipe. I used hazlenuts for the nuts, frangelico for my liquor, and blackberry jam for the glaze. I used a different buttercream. Once I got off the Wilton message boards. I was not familiar with the method but after reading more blogs discovered that it was a mousseline (sp?) buttercream. I liked it a lot. Not too buttery and very creamy. I'm not sure if I'd make this cake again. Maybe if I could streamline the process a bit. I did get good feedback from those who tried it. Thanks to Chris at http://melecotte.blogspot.com/ for hosting this month's challenge.

Gosh, there are a few other things I wanted to mention that just came to me while looking at other's masterpieces. I did not use clarified butter as the recipe called for but I didn't seem to have any trouble with that. And I had reserved a cup of plain buttercream (without the added praline) for piping in case I had the problems with the clogged tips (as I did). Oh, and I realize my piping skills could use some help and I did sign up for a Wilton class that starts on Monday. I figured it would help with future challenges and a good way just to learn.