Opera Cake (Day 2)

Whew, after our lady finger success we were ready to get started on next items. Mostly we prepped items for finishing later in the week. But here's one we finished and took home.

The opera cake is composed of layers of Biscuit Viennois (a thin cake) brushed with an intense coffee-flavored syrup. Between the cake layers is a layer or coffee-flavored Italian buttercream or ganache. Note the layers in the picture. The top is brushed with coffee syrup, coated lightly with buttercream, and then the whole thing is chilled.

Brian demonstrated the ganache glaze process while our cakes chilled. Then it was our turn to glaze. It looked really easy when he did it... not so easy when we did it. However, when you cut the cakes to the proper size, you can cut off all your mistakes. That's the good news. The bad news is that at the end of the day we'd all eaten far too much of the cut off parts and our cakes were a little smaller than Brian's. Oh well.