A Passionfruit-Vanilla Opera Cake – The Daring Bakers

**Update 7/20/08 – this cake got a whole lot better in the freezer – the flavors really blended and developed! **

I can’t tell you how many times I pulled the eggs and butter out of the refrigerator, only to put them back a bit later, because life got in the way and I didn’t have time to bake May’s DB challenge, Opera Cake, brought to us by Daring Baker founders, Lis and Ivonne, and co-hosted this month with Fran of Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shea of Whiskful.

Finally, I was able to tackle the Opera Cake, a multi-tiered confection of joconde (an almond cake), syrup, buttercream, a glaze, and a mousse (optional in our challenge). I halved the recipe, and decided on two primary flavors: passionfruit and vanilla, rounded out by a bit of lemon.

I love passionfruit. If I were on a desert island (or do I mean dessert island?), and someone offered me chocolate or passionfruit, I would take the latter.

But back to my cake. Since you’re probably like me and have 700 + challenges to read, I’m going to give you the abridged notes of my baking adventure.

The joconde:
I made the almond joconde, and put a couple drops of lemon oil in the batter. Of course, in my harried state, I added the flour too early and over-developed the gluten, so the cake was slightly tough, but it was still tasty. I also had one too many layers of cake, as you can tell from the pictures! Even though I brushed on a lot of syrup, the cake was still a bit on the dry side – good lessons for next time.

The syrup: I reduced 12 oz. of frozen passionfruit pulp by half, and used that as my flavoring element throughout the cake. I made the syrup as directed, with vanilla bean, and flavored it with an additional 3 Tbsp. of the reduced passionfruit. I brushed each layer of cake with the syrup and with pure reduced passionfruit juice.

The buttercream: I am not a cake person (except for Bundt and pound cakes). I don’t remember having buttercream until 1998, when Master Chow made me a cake for my birthday, covered with orange buttercream. It was sooo good! I used the original recipe in the challenge, but I was rather nervous about making this type of buttercream, because so many people have trouble with it. I didn’t have any problems at all. To flavor it, I added 1/4 cup of the reduced passionfruit – my liquid gold!

The mousse: I melted the white chocolate over a bain marie, and was very careful not to let it get to hot. In the end, the whole thing turned into a grainy mess, and I had to toss it. I had one square of chocolate left, so I melted that and mixed it into the whipped cream, along with a couple tablespoons of the reduced passionfruit, and a drop of lemon oil. This was my hands-down, most favorite part of the cake. Please pass the whipped cream, folks, hold the cake!

The glaze: Since I was out of white chocolate, I re-read the directions and realized I could make any glaze, as long as it was light-colored. I turned to The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, 4th Edition, and adapted the recipe to make my own glaze:

1 Tbsp. powdered gelatin
1/2 cup reduced passionfruit pulp
1/2 cup passionfruit-vanilla simple syrup

In a bowl that can fit over a double boiler (bain marie), sprinkle the gelatin on the reduced passionfruit and let sit until softened. Heat gently until dissolved – do not overheat, or the gelatin will lose its ability to gel. Remove from the heat and stir in the simple syrup. Let cool, and when it starts to thicken just a bit, pour over your very cold, well-refrigerated cake. Don’t try this unless the cake has been cooled for a good three hours.

The glaze was fantastic. I learned a few things about working with it. First, it’s like a ganache coating, in that once you start to pour it on the cake, don’t stop, just keep going, or you’ll end up with the lumpy look that I have. Second, do not cover with plastic! I did that, and when I took it off, the entire glaze came off with it. I had to piece together the topping on the cake!

Putting the cake together: No problems here, but I have a construction tip to share with you. If you want to use both buttercream and jam (or curd) in between a layer of cake, this is how you do it – put the buttercream on the top of a layer, and the jam on the bottom of the layer that you will place above it. I did this with one layer of my cake, and used passionfruit jam:

In the picture, the top piece of cake is my bottom layer. I spread it with buttercream. The layer at the bottom of the picture has jam on it. I will sandwich these fillings together by laying the jam side on top of the buttercream. One more thing: refrigerate the cake as you construct each layer. That will keep the layers from sliding all over the place.

Bottom line: great challenge – I tried new techniques, learned a lot, and confirmed what I already knew (do not over beat the flour!) Thank you Ivonne and Lis, for a great challenge. Check Ivonne’s blog for the original recipe.

Check out the Daring Bakers blogroll to see what everyone else did! And along with many other DBs this month, I’d like to dedicate this to Barbara of winosandfoodies.com. Barbara is food blogger and strong supporter of LiveSTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. As part of her efforts for LiveSTRONG Day, Barbara hosts A Taste of Yellow, which is an event that unites food bloggers everywhere in the fight against cancer. Thank you, Barbara!