Okay, so tonight I assembled the chocolate with raspberry buttercream cake and the chocolate raspberry truffle cake. In the first picture, you have the two layers of chocolate sour cream cake with their tops trimmed flat, stacked together with the raspberry buttercream in-between. You can see a little of the pink buttercream showing through in the center there. At this point, I'm midway through the crumb coat. Next, the cake frosted and decorated with some piping around the edge. And check it out, the piping is almost even. It's not perfect, but it is WAY better than any of my in-class attempts. I call that progress. Next picture, the finished cake. Yeah, I kinda pulled the chocolate-chip triangles out of nowhere. In the book, this cake has shaved chocolate curls covering it's sides, and flowers on top. I'm still looking for a local source for organically grown (pesticide-free) flowers (anybody??) and my chocolate shavings were... not ideal. Lastly, d'oh! I lost control of the cake while lowering it into the box. But see the picture before that? Proof that I had it right, if only for three minutes. Man, that was not a fun occurrence.



Next row, the chocolate raspberry truffle cake. The picture on the left is the cake freshly unmolded and undecorated. Yeah, that's the cake without frosting. I can't imagine how rich that thing's going to be. Finally, on the right, the same cake with a lovely and simple bittersweet chocolate ganache, ganache bead trim, and fresh raspberries.



Okay, taste-testers, you know who you are. Let's get to the comparing and contrasting!