If you’ve been following this blog you know that I like making entremets (for all you newbies, entremets are multi-layered mousse-based cakes). Well, I made another one.

This is a raspberry and white chocolate entremet with almond dacquoise, white chocolate mousse, raspberry gel, raspberry mousse, whipped white chocolate and coconut ganache, fresh raspberries, and edible flowers.

While this cake looks difficult to make, it’s really not. It does take some time and a special tool (a pastry/mousse ring), however. I’ve made more difficult entremets in the past. This cake only has three layers, but the Ambroisie I made, for example, had six.

At the bottom of this cake is a layer of warm, nutty almond dacquoise. The ingredients for dacquoise are similar to the ones for macarons (it uses all the same ingredients and adds flour), but it’s nowhere near as tricky to make. All you have to do is mix everything together, pretty much. You end up with a pillowy, soft layer of almond goodness. Great return on investment (wow, business school is getting to me).

On top of the dacquoise there’s a layer of white chocolate mousse. This was my first time making a white chocolate mousse, so I wasn’t really sure how much gelatin I needed. I put in a touch too much gelatin, so I adjusted the recipe here so it wouldn’t taste too jello-y. Still, it was quite good. The trick here is to use a really good white chocolate so that you can taste vanilla notes instead of just sugar.

I added the tart raspberry gel layer to bring down the sweetness—there’s no sugar at all in the raspberry layer, but lots of lemon juice.

Decorating the entremet was lots of fun. I used fresh raspberries along with dollops of fresh raspberry mousse and whipped white chocolate and coconut ganache. Originally, I wanted to make a raspberry, white chocolate, and coconut entremet, but I only ended up adding a hint of coconut flavour to the ganache. I couldn’t really taste it, so I’m not sure if there was a point.

My favourite part of this cake is the edible flowers. I’ve been looking for edible flowers in Toronto for a while now. A couple of years ago I wanted to make rose macarons from rose petals (instead of rose water/extract), so I searched everywhere for the petals. The trouble with using rose petals from a florist is that they are coated with a thick layer of pesticides that are definitely not safe to eat. Naturally, I visited a grocery store (Canadian readers may be familiar with Longos) and asked a lady who worked there whether they had edible flowers.

“Hi, do you have any edible rose petals?”

“What?”

“Edible rose petals.”

“No.”

You know, in hindsight, that conversation was not interesting enough to rewrite here. Oh well.

Anyway, she looked at me like I was crazy. I am crazy, but my question should not have been enough to come to that conclusion. Frankly, I’m surprised she isn’t asked that question daily.

I finally found some this week at Harvest Wagon, this classy organic store in downtown Toronto. They were expensive, but they were so pretty on top of this cake. Hey Harvest Wagon folks, if you ever see this post and want to send some edible flowers my way, I’m up for it! :)