This year, however, the routine fell apart completely. Our local IKEA has reopened, but it let us down so badly last year that we've given up on going there at all. And the bakery in Princeton, even if we wanted to take our chances on it, appears to have closed down its cafe entirely during the pandemic and is now offering takeout only.
So, if we wanted to enjoy the fabulous Chocolate Raspberry Torte we had for our wedding as part of our anniversary celebration, we had only one option: make it ourselves.
Well, to be more accurate, Brian would make it, since he's the one who does the baking. My job is usually reading aloud to him while he works, so I asked him if he had a request, and he asked for The Tempest. So I read him that in its entirety, doing my best to present distinct voices for each character (Tim Curry as Sebastian, Aidan Turner as Caliban, etc.), while he worked his way through the complicated process of reproducing this cake from scratch.
Fortunately, we'd anticipated that we might have to do this some day, so we'd already made some notes on just how the cake is constructed. From top to bottom, the layers are: white sponge cake, chocolate mousse, cake, raspberry mousse, cake, chocolate mousse, cake, raspberry jam. It's finished with chocolate curls all around the outside and fresh raspberries on top. So, to recreate it, Brian would have to produce four distinct components — the cake, the jam, and two types of mousse — and then assemble them in the proper order.
At first, I tried simply Googling "chocolate raspberry torte" in hopes of finding a cake more or less the same as ours. Unfortunately, all the recipes I found were chocolate cakes layered with raspberry, rather than white cake with both chocolate and raspberry. However, one of them, from Taste of Home, did include a simple recipe for raspberry mousse that we thought we could use — basically just raspberry jam, sugar, and a touch of raspberry liqueur (which we skipped) folded into whipped cream. This would mean breaking our abstention from dairy products, but we figured for such a special occasion, we could make an exception. And since we needed raspberry jam for the cake anyway, using it to make the mousse would simplify the process.
In fact, as luck would have it, we already had some homemade raspberry jam. After our success putting up our first batch of plum jam last summer, Brian tried preserving some of our raspberries the same way, so he had a couple of small jars of the stuff set aside. And he found a recipe for Genoise sponge cake in The Joy of Cooking and an "easy two-ingredient chocolate mousse" recipe at Kitchn. This recipe starts with a chocolate ganache, which gets folded into whipped cream, so he figured he could make a little extra ganache and use that to stick the chocolate shavings to the side of the cake.
Since the weather has been beastly hot lately, Brian opted to do the actual baking part of the process the night before, when it was cooler. Instead of actual cake pans, he used two of his small deep-dish pizza pans to make two sponge cakes that he thought would be small enough for him to hold upright while slicing them, which would be much easier than trying to torte them horizontally. He lined the bottoms of the pans with circles of baking parchment to make it easier to turn the cooled cakes out in the morning.
Since the sides of these pans are not quite vertical, he had to trim around the the edges of both cakes to make them cylindrical, as well as shaving pieces off the top to make them roughly flat. But eventually he got two layers that he was indeed able to slice in half vertically — kind of like slicing a bagel. This gave him four thin layers to work with.
But before actually making the mousse, he turned his attention to the raspberry jam. The batch he'd made hadn't been strained to remove the seeds, and he feared they'd interfere with the silky texture of the mousse, so he put the whole contents of the jar through a small sieve, muddling it with a spoon to get it through. The seedy parts went back into the jar, along with all the leftover strained jam that didn't get used in the cake, and he mixed it together to make a slightly more seed-heavy jam for later consumption.
Next, he whipped the cream and folded ganache into one batch to make the chocolate mousse and jam into the other to make the raspberry mousse. He used 1/4 cup of ganache to 1/3 cup of heavy whipping cream for the first batch, and 2 tablespoons of the strained preserves plus 1 teaspoon of powdered sugar to 1/4 cup of whipping cream for the second. Since he'd made the preserves using a low-sugar recipe, the raspberry mousse tasted somewhat tarter than the filling in our actual wedding cake, but we decided that wasn't a problem; since all the other components were so sweet, the brightness would set them off nicely.
And finally, he got out our smallest grater and started shaving off pieces of chocolate from a Trader Joe's chocolate truffle bar to decorate the outside of the cake. He grated off approximately one ounce of it to make a pile of shavings that looked like roughly the right amount. They weren't so much chocolate curls as chocolate fragments, but they'd have the flavor and texture we were going for.
With all the components now ready to go, it was time to begin assembling the cake. He started with one of the sponge layers, then spread on a fairly thick layer of chocolate mousse, followed by another cake layer and an equally thick layer of raspberry...
...and continued with cake, mousse, and cake until he had the entire stack assembled and ready for decorating. Since he just eyeballed the layers, he ended up not using quite all of the mousse he'd made; there was maybe a third of a cup left of each type. But he probably could have used all of it without hurting the flavor balance any.
Next, he applied the remaining chocolate ganache to the outside of the cake with a rubber spatula. He had just enough of it left to coat the entire cake.
He then applied the chocolate shavings by the simplest method he could think of: tilting the entire plate and sprinkling the chocolate bits over the ganache. He just kept going round and round the cake until he'd used the entire pile of shavings.
And finally, he took the remaining strained jam and spread a thin layer over the top of the cake. And there it was — an approximate reproduction of our wedding cake, made at home. The only component missing was the fresh raspberries on the top, but our raspberry canes aren't producing at the moment (we're in between the summer and fall crops), and we didn't want to buy a whole pint of pricey fresh berries just to get six of them for a cake decoration.
He did all this in the morning, and the cake spent the rest of the day chilling out in the fridge. In the evening, after a dinner of our favorite Pasta a la Caprese (the first of the summer, made with homegrown tomatoes, basil, and garlic, and our homemade vegan mozzarella) and an after-dinner walk, we cut into the cake...
...and found that it had just the same neat, layered structure as the original. And the flavor, while not identical, was pretty darn close. The raspberry mousse was indeed a little more tart than the original, and possibly the chocolate mousse was a little more bitter, but with the sweetness of the sponge layers in between, the overall flavor seemed perfectly balanced. The cake was also a little bit drier than the bakery's version, possibly because the layers were thicker, or possibly because they used a different type of sponge. But again, that was no problem; I always felt the original, if it had a fault, was a little too moist, inclined to become slightly soggy when left over. This version, we hope, will hold up fine, since we still have two-thirds of it left to enjoy.
Brian has written out the full recipe for what he did to create this cake and saved a copy, so on future anniversaries, we no longer need to be at the mercy of the bakery. We can celebrate right at home, with our very own homemade anniversary cake. (He might even attempt a dairy-free version next year, using Coco Whip — the stuff we used in our vegan raspberry fool — for the mousse.) And for my part, I still have 36 more Shakespeare plays to get through.
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