Weddin Cake Samples Part 1

Just in time for Mardi Gras, the lady who is going to make our wedding cake (maybe they'll be cupcakes? mini-cakes?) gave me two little samples to try out last tuesday. I was particularly psyched out of my mind about it since I'm giving up sweets for Lent.

The flavors were:

Chocolate genoise with caramel mousse filling and chocolate buttercream frosting, and

Almond butter cake with marzipan and raspberry jam filling and vanilla buttercream frosting.

Jenean and Axle F (my fiance's specially requested screen name) and I did the tough job of eating two pieces of cake each.

We started with the chocolate. Jenean and I LOVED the caramel filling, it was so delicious, as was the chocolate buttercream - very silky. Sadly, the chocolate genoise was super dry and not very... chocolatey. I think of genoise usually being soaked with some kind of simple syrup (it's the kind of batter they make ladyfingers out of, right? in turn soaked with rum and coffee for tiramisu for example?) so I think it never had a chance to be moist. Axel F hates dry cake. I mean, who likes it? But he REALLY hates it (yesterday he literally sent me a text that said "dry cake is the work of the _evil"). So that one didn't win.

Then we had the almond butter cake with the marzipan filling. Take how much Axel F hates dry cake, and multiply that amount by ten, and turn it into LOVE, and that is how I feel about marzipan, just ask Emily, she'll tell you. So I was highly inclined to love this one. I really liked the filling (obviously) and enjoyed the cake, which was dense but moist. The vanilla buttercream was a little heavy... which I didn't really notice until Axel F said it felt like he was eating straight butter. And once he said that, we had to agree, though Jenean said she enjoyed it anyway. So that one didn't really win either. However, despite Axel F's generally not liking either one, I think both have potential to be great, if certain things get tweaked (moist chocolate cake, fluffier vanilla buttercream? I hope these exist).