Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Genoise with Whipped Peanut Butter Ganache

 This week's Heavenly Cake was not my finest hour. Still, for an exhausted Saturday morning at Lily & Fig, it didn't come out too badly. The cake was a light chocolate genoise. I chickened out on my folding flour into batter, and wound up with plenty of flour pills in the dough. So much for my semi-pro ego.  Still, after I cut the bottom off, it was pretty clear, and frostable. The frosting was a whipped chocolate ganache with creamy peanut butter mixed in. It was very delicious, but I felt that the cake and the frosting were mis-matched, and that the ganache was yearning for a yellow three-layer birthday cake in order to really shine.  I'm thinking of doing something like that for Matt's birthday (shhh...don't tell). In addition to the peanut butter ganache, the genoise was brushed with a syrup, which was supposed to contain Chambord, a black raspberry liqueur. This flavor seemed to surprize many of my fellow bakers, but it actually sounded wonderful to me. Of course, I'd sell my sister, or at least a cousin or two, for a bucket of black raspberries.

Of course, since the sister/berry economy is in a slump with the rest of us, I didn't actually have any Chambord, so I used rum and orange oil. The flavor didn't really come through, though, and I'd like to try again with some kind of intense liqueur of the Chambord variety.

Special thanks to Matt for these pictures, which he went down to the bakery to take for me.