A couple of weeks after Matt and I started dating, he cooked me dinner, and I spent the several days prior working on my dessert- my own version of a raspberry cream torte!
I took one small carton of heavy whipping cream, sweetened it with a bit of granulated sugar I think, and mixed in mashed up fresh raspberries and raspbery jam when I whipped it stiff. I believe it naturally turned pink, but you can dye it if it's not pink enough for you. Actually, I think I might have used two small cartons for this one, since there were so many layers.
Then I baked two chocolate cakes from mixes- they were like a $1, so it was cheap, and I"ve never been successful at making any chocolate flavored baking item like that anyway for some reason. I only had one pan, so I had to bake and cool them one at a time. Once that was done, I cut each cake in half horizontally, so I then had 4 cakes. I put each on parchment paper, and then spread a mixture of mashed fresh raspberries, and raspbery jam/preserves on the top of each one and let it sit in the fridge like that overnight.
It took me maybe 3 or 4 days to totally finish this cake because I wanted to take great care in doing it right, and making sure it was as flavorful as possible.
Plus I always bake at night, so eventually you have to go to bed too. Cake also works better when it is a bit dried out, so it doesn't crumble when you stack it.
Then I started stacking the raspberry soaked layers. I filled up a pastry bag with my raspberry cream, and made nice thick layers in between each cake. I started off with making a "dam" around the edge of each layer, just a half inch or inch in from the edge so it wouldn't squirt out. (This is why everything should be cold when you are working with it too. I actually put the cakes in the freezer for awhile before I started doing this.) then I filled up the middle with filling, making a high, high layer of cream in the middle of each. So there are a total of 7 layers in all.
I did this in layers by the way, because I could not think of a way to pour ganche straight onto the cream like the bakery cake without melting it all.
Then I stuck the cake in the freezer for awhile so it was cold and protected from melting for the next part.
Then you make the ganache. I used a big bag of hershey's semi sweet chocolate chips, and melted them in the microwave with some oil. I make a chocolate peanut butter pie (in the archives) that has a oil/chocolate top, and i've never had luck making real ganache in the past, so i did it this way, since I knew it was easy.
I dumped a bunch on top and make a crumb coat layer, essentially, just like you would with buttercream. I let that set a bit ( and i the cake is too cold then the chocolate hardens up really quick and can be hard to spread, so it's a careful balance. I just made it work how it was. It does need to be cold tho.) Once it was set, I did another layer, and covered it until it was pretty. I used the leftover cream to pipe on the top with the star tip, and lacking anything else to write, wrote "ME" since i made it. Volia! I let it sit in the fridge overnight again so the layers could really mesh and blend together, and the cake was amazing. Matty loved it! :)
And just for fun here are the pretty flowers Matt gave me that night. :) I dried them so I still have them.
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