Biscuit avec Joconde et Noel. Or cake and cake with a side of cookies. Ouais.

Astheroshe of accro hosted this month's Daring Bakers challenge, getting us to make a biscuit joconde which is essentially those gorgeous cakes you see with the decorative outside, filled with things like creams and mouses or cake, and an amazingly perfect top which really when you look at one it looks like someone who's done pastries for years probably made and you could never do it. But as I've learned a lot of baking that looks tricky is really pretty easy, you just have to figure out the process.  This challenge was pretty neat in the fact it gave you a lot of flexibility with the final product. It mainly focused on making a joconde imprime which is a design baked into a sponge cake.

I made mine just straight vanilla and instead of using almond flour, I used walnut flour which I like the taste and nuttiness of better. Although it is winter, I wanted the flavours to be light because we just finished having Christmas and New Year's and no one in their right mind wants to eat more sweets, so I turned to fruits and mousses.

I used my mother's recipe for lemon semifreddo; a semi-frozen custard that I find holds it's shape really nicely and although it's rather decadent (think along the lines of a creme mousseline) it doesn't make you want to undo a button or two from your pants. I topped the whole thing with a raspberry mirroir which my boyfriend patiently waited for me to do the whole process before I would leave the house.

The top border is a rather lemony buttercream, giving you a zing of lemon that hits your tongue like it's almost salty juxtaposing the other fruits rather well. Because of the raspberry mirroir I made the design in the joconde a bright pink to tie all the colours in. It was really good and rather easy it just took a while to do. You would just keep cutting a piece off at a time to nibble on (maybe not the healthiest of snacks out there).

For Christmas, my family hosted dinner twice. On boxing day we had my mother's side of the family over and after a failed attempt at dessert number one I quickly changed gears and went to plan B: A snowy hill of cakey wonder avec a gingerbread house. The cake came from How to Eat a Cupcakes Triple Chocolate Fudge cake. Holy H Jesus was it good, but you got A LOT of cake. I filled the layers with vanilla buttercream and a hazelnut ganache, carved it into a shape of a hill, covered that with more buttercream and ganache then added some gingerbread trees and a cabin and some merengue snowmen and balls.

Luckily I had baked the cake on the weekend, so the rest of the cookies, baking, and decorating were finished right on time (only barely). While not pretty it tasted amazing. I will definitely be using this recipe as my go-to for chocolate cake.