Lavender Opera Cake

This month's Daring Baker's challenge was something I had never heard of before, much less ever made. When I read the challenge the first time, I was so intimidated by its sheer size (it was 10 pages long printed out) I ignored it for two weeks! I almost wimped out and was going to skip this challenge entirely. I'm SO glad I didn't!

Although traditionally Opera cake is made with a mocha filling and dark chocolate ganache, our mission was to produce a cake with only light colors and flavors. I loved this idea as chocolate is not one of my favorites (sacrilege, I know). But what flavor should I choose?

I choose lavender. I was a little apprehensive at first because I wasn't sure if it would really appeal to anyone but me, but I forged ahead. About a month or so ago, I purchased a bottle of lavender extract on a whim and this was as perfect time as ever to use it. I think it was kismet, honestly. Believe me when I say it was meant for this cake. It was pure bliss!

The cake had 5 parts - the bottom layer (joconde), a syrup (to wet the joconde), a butter cream (the lighter, yellowish filling), a mousse (the light purple layer), and the glaze on top. I made the cake exactly as the recipe said to, but added only 1/2 teaspoon of lavender extract to the syrup. I actually made two batches, using a full one tablespoon of extract as per the recipe's direction but it was way, way too much. I made the butter cream exactly as the recipe stated too, using a real vanilla bean to flavor it. For fun and because purple is my favorite color, I added another half a teaspoon of lavender extract and a few toothpick blobs-fuls of purple food coloring paste to the to the mousse. The glaze was just Guittard white chocolate that I bought in bulk and cream. And for just a little something extra, I boiled a little sugar, added some dried lavender, a little extract, and some more purple blobs, and created some pretty sugar candy for the top.

The only problem that I had with this challenge, aside from deciding on a flavor, was that my cake was short. I decided to make half the recipe and used my big 18x13 jelly roll pan because that was all I had. This created a very short joconde layer which affected the height of the cake overall. To remedy this, I just stacked one cake on top of the other and then finished the cake with the glaze and candy garnish. Considering the challenges I've had with other Daring Baker Challenges, a short cake is no biggie, right?