Triple Chocolate Cake

This is a delicious, intensely flavoured showstopper of a chocolate cake that presents the main ingredient 3 different ways: a light, moist cake (syrupped with Frangelico), a smooth, creamy whipped ganache, and a crispy, crunchy chocolate praline shell.

I hesitated to make this cake as I'd neither made a chocolate genoise nor tempered chocolate before. My first genoise failed as I made a fatal error in the first step by overcooking the chocolate mixture. Do pay more attention to the visual description for doneness than the cooking time mentioned....I imagine quite a few factors affect how quickly the mixture cooks. Tempering the chocolate and wrapping the sheets around the cake created no problems - just a few raised eyebrows when I was caught blow drying the cake!

I used chocolate with a ~55% cacao content for the cake and chocolate sheets, and ~50% (I added some milk chocolate) for the ganache in deference to my family's preference for a slightly sweeter, less bitter chocolate and it was extremely well received.

As with most of the more elaborate cakes in this book, there are a few components that need to be made before assembling the cake, but most can be made ahead; in fact the entire cake can be made ahead and frozen.