Daring Bakers - Filbert Gateau with Praline Buttercream

Ring out the Filbert Gateaus it's Daring Baker time. The blogosphere will shortly be awash with hazelnuts, cake, chocolate and buttercream.

If I am perfectly honest I was a teeny bit disappointed to find another layered cake as this month's challenge. There have been quite a few lately. But I should not have doubted this month's host, Chris of Mele Cotte, because this cake is superb.



Yes it was a lot of work. But the end result was worth it. Let's go through the list:

1) hazelnut genoise - light, airy, soft and deliciously nutty
2) sugar syrup - flavoured with cointreau
3) praline buttercream - impossibly smooth, light and strewn with toffeed hazelnuts
4) whipped cream - always a good thing
5) glaze - tangy marmalade laced with cointreau
6) chocolate ganache - deep and rich and chocolatey



I had few problems in making it. The only issue was that the cake was not terribly high. I was convinced that if I tried to cut it into three layers it would crumble into crumbs. So I played it safe and stayed with two. I really need to learn how to do this better because one layer was double the size of the other.

There were no complaints though. Everbody loved it, including me.

The recipe can be found on Chris's blog. If it is not there just yet it will be in the next day or so.

To see a million other delicious versions of this cake, visit the Daring Baker blogroll.