Daring Bakers in January: A Late and Leaky Joconde Imprimé

It's been awfully quiet around here lately, I know.  Two reasons.  1. I went on an awesome, amazing, wonderful holiday to New Zealand for nearly a month.  2. I was starting to resent the hours and hours of time that blog posts were sucking up. From the baking to the "submit" button was more often than not taking upwards of four hours, what with the photographing and the editing and the photo-collage-making and the uploading and the writing and the reviewing...my perfectionist tendencies were in overdrive and blogging was starting to feel like a whole lot of work and not a lot of fun, so I decided to take a break.

As life would have it, those tendencies get a nice whack on the head today as I present to you my very late and very imperfect Daring Bakers Challenge for this month.



The January 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Astheroshe of the blog accro. She chose to challenge everyone to make a Biscuit Joconde Imprime to wrap around an Entremets dessert.

Biscuit joconde imprimé literally means 'printed sponge cake' and involves the technique of baking designs into a thin layer of sponge cake, which is then sliced into strips and used to line the inside of a mold.   This is done by first piping the designs onto a silpat with a thicker design paste, freezing the designs until hard, and then quickly spreading sponge cake batter over the top before baking.  When you peel off the mat after baking, the beautiful patterns have magically baked into your sponge cake!  I loved this technique and would definitely use it again - the creative possibilities are endless and it looks so elegant.

While the biscuit part of the challenge turned out quite nicely and I was pleased with my patterns, the rest of the cake assembly didn't go so well.  The mousse I made as a filling was too runny and as the cake came to room temperature for eating, it all leaked out the side.  I managed to snap a couple awful pictures with my point-and-shoot before it turned into a chocolate mousse and sponge cake puddle.  



See the random papers and plants in the background? I brought the cake to work for a colleague's birthday. Once the Great Chocolate Mousse Flood began I just snapped the pics and threw pretty backgrounds and lighting to the wind!



Ah well. We ended up scooping it into cups and eating the messy mush of mousse, cake, and ganache with a spoon.   Plenty imperfect, but plenty chocolatey and delicious nonetheless.

Happy weekend to you all!