White Gold Passion Genoise

I’ve finally baked every cake in one of the chapters in Rose’s Heavenly Cakes! The last one on my sponge cakes list is the white gold passion genoise. I was lucky enough to find frozen passion fruit puree at the little “Mi Tienda Latina” grocery store in downtown Kitchener by the bus depot. This cake has a lot of different components and a lot of steps to it, but none of those steps are anything we haven’t done before as part of this bake-through. I’m going to let the pictures do most of the talking again this time, since there are a lot of them!

To start off with, I got out and weighed/measured all of the ingredients for all of the various components of this cake. Many of them needed to either thaw or come to room temperature, so I figured getting everything set out at once was the easiest way to do things.

Whew! That’s a lot of bowls! Time to start consolidating some of those things.

Whisk together the butter, egg yolks, and sugar for the curd.

Add most of the passion fruit purée, and cook slowly over medium-low heat.

When it’s done, pour it through a strainer into a bowl waiting with the remaining passion fruit purée for the curd component, and mix together gently. Let that cool, then refrigerate for a few hours.

Now, make the génoise part, since that’s another component that has some “wait” time built into it. Heat the eggs and sugar over a double boiler.

Then beat the snot out of them, and watch them transform into a white cloud of deliciousness.

After mixing some of the egg foam into the beurre noisette mixture, fold in the wondra flour in two batches, then mix back in the egg that you mixed with the butter, then spread in the prepared pan.

While that’s baking, go load the dishwasher. You’re probably getting close to a full load by now. 😉 You can also take this time to make the passion fruit syrup, which is good timing, because it’s another thing that needs to cool before it can be used. No pictures, because it wasn’t very photogenic. Next, go melt your white chocolate and butter, for the buttercream, which will also need time to cool.

When your chocolate and butter starts separating and curdling and generally looking disastrous, don’t panic. Whisk it back together, and you’ll be fine.

Then whisk in the egg. Discover, like Jenn, that it’s already over 140 degrees, but decide to cook it just a little extra just in case.

I’m not sure this is something I’d ever want to eat on its own as a custard, but it sure works well with the cream cheese in a buttercream.

Gradually (I used about 3 additions), beat the custard into the butter and cream cheese (and a half tablespoon of sour cream — wth?).

Now, clean up everything else, and take stock of what you’ve got. You should have:

1. passion fruit curd
2. génoise
3. passion fruit syrup
4. white chocolate/cream cheese buttercream (there’s some fancy name for this in the book, but I don’t remember what it is)

Got it all? Ok, now it’s deconstruction and assembly time. Split the génoise in half, horizontally, then syrup whatever side is currently facing you. Now flip it onto a plate. Syrup the other side of that layer. Add some of the passion fruit curd, and syrup the up-side of the remaining layer.

Put the second layer on top of the curd, syruped side down, and syrup the top (which was probably originally the bottom of the cake).

Now, frost the cake, as messily as possible, if you want to be like me. 😉

Then, stash that in the fridge to firm up a bit, so you can swirl in the remaining passion fruit curd. Or, you can be like me and completely forget about it until it’s just about rock hard, and then when you go to swirl in the curd, it just sits on top like a puddle. Oh well! Hopefully, it will taste good!

Whew! Quite an afternoon in the kitchen. I plan to take this cake into work tomorrow, so we’ll find out how it tastes, then.