Tuxedo Truffle Cake

Okay, so I have a lot of catching up to do, but I'll start with Allie's bridal shower. I threw a bridal shower for Allie that her friends in Provo could attend. I was really excited to do it, especially after I talked to her and found out that she was cool with the party being really low key. I didn't have to come up with a theme or games or decorations - Yay! I did, however, want to create a delicious dessert.

And so it began, my quest for the tuxedo truffle cake. My aunt used to buy them for special occassions from a local Idaho store, which is how I came to love them (I don't usually get excited about cake, so this was a big deal). When I came to Provo, I found that they sold single pieces at Smith's - perfect, since I don't need a whole cake to myself anyway. Jake used to suprise me with a tasty square of this delicious cake once in a while, until we discovered on a very unfortunate day that they don't sell it anymore. I scoured the internet to see where I might find it, but to no avail. So I decided to make my own.

After a lot of searching, I found a recipe that someone had created to replicate the tuxedo truffle cake here. This is the picture that she used as her guide:

Ahh, just like I remember.

Don't get too excited, though, because this is what her cake ended up looking like:

Garb.

Obviously, there is quite a discrepancy here. One of these cakes looks delicious, and the other looks--like it has a sweet spirit? I won't say which is which. So I analyzed the sweet spirit cake to determine what went wrong:

1) I decided that the cake was too tall and toppling, which I thought I could solve by cutting my cake layers down to be very even and much thinner than the ones on this cake.

2) This cake is very messy, which equates to unappetizing in my book. I would solve this by being very careful when spreading my mousse and ganache to keep them from spilling over the edges.

3) This cake would have taken nearly week of adding and refrigerating, adding and refrigerating. I decided to cut out a layer of mousse and a layer of cake. White chocolate shouldn't even count as real chocolate anyway. Needless to say, I was not heartbroken about eliminating this layer.

I decided to make a practice cake before the event to make sure it would turn out. After all, who knew if a cake like this sweet spirit could actually taste good? It turned out really well. I only made one mistake - too much cream in the mousse. I corrected that for the real cake. The pictures below are of the practice cake because I was too busy on the day of the shower to take any pictures before the real cake was devoured. The only difference is that I garnished the real cake with fanned out strawberry slices.

Looking over the destruction.

Ta-da! My poor photography doesn't do it justice.

Two layers of marbled cake, a layer of chocolate mousse, and topped with dark chocolate ganache - delicious! I think all of the girls had a good time, and thankfully, almost all of the cake was eaten. This was a blessing considering that Jake and I had to eat the entire practice cake ourselves - oops.