‘Tis the season to overindulge.
However, I have your waistlines in mind dear readers, with this fabulously decadent Chocolate Mousse Layer Cake recipe. You can have your cake and eat it too as you’ll see. It's all about portion control. Instead of relying on sheer will power for portion control, the recipe has been downsized to a Mini version so that there isn't any more cake to eat even if you want it. That is, unless you don't share like you're supposed to and end up eating the whole darned cake.
I have a small family of four and it’s a painful waste when I make a delicious regular-sized cake (9 or 10 inches) because there are always a few slices left over which become stale. We get a tad sick of eating so much of the same cake. I’ve been working hard to develop a recipe for a Mini Chocolate Mousse Layer cake that is simple to make, relatively quick and super chocolatey. It also looks fancy enough to bring as a gift to a small dinner party (for 4 people...6 if they're not big eaters).
I think this recipe meets my needs and is my best so far. Its sponge layers are moist but not too tender. You need some structure (like a genoise) so that it can hold up the mousse filling and not dissolve into a soggy mess. The cake layers do not need the finicky genoise technique and just require a stand mixer. This cake is chocolatey but not overly rich or cloyingly sweet. It employs quality dark chocolate and tastes somewhat like a soft truffle. It doesn’t need frosting and comes out looking pretty smooth if you remember to use a spatula to smooth the top before allowing it to set in the refrigerator. If you don’t do this, you can always cover the cake with chocolate shavings. You can save a not-so-smooth cake by heating a metal spatula in really hot water, wiping it bone-dry and pressing it across the finished cake to smooth the surface a bit. It works. I did it. Big gouges this technique won’t fix, but some little divots and bumps it will.
What is the most important thing to me about this cake is its size. It’s Mini. I used two 6-inch round pans to bake the cake layers. Then I used a ring mold that is adjustable for the mousse component of the cake. I adjusted the ring mold to about 7 inches…just enough to accommodate the cake layers with about a centimetre all around it for the mousse filling (that’s a little less than a half inch to my American friends). When the whole sponge cake recipe is made, it yields two 6-inch layers. However, I chose to only use one of the layers…split in two…to make this particular cake. I saved the other layer for a Chestnut Cream Cake using the same mousse technique. That’ll be a later post. That explains how you can have your cake…and eat it too.
Click the jump to read the full recipe.
