Valencia - An Orange Chocolate and Hazelnut Entremet

Wow, it's December already! And it seems like everyone is in the holiday mood :). In recent weeks, I've received requests from some of my gal pals to visit my place for a baking session, one of it from the birthday girl herself. She wanted to bake an orange-flavoured cake, hence I searched the net and my books archive to find a suitable recipe for the occasion. I've been eyeing this Sadaharu Aoki's Valencia recipe on Evan's blog for ages, but never got around to it cos of all the "new" ingredients I needed to buy - like almond paste, orange marmalade, feuilletine and cognac. In the end, I decided to leave out the liquor and plunge into this seemingly complicated 5-layer entremet anyway!

The girls' schedules are really challenging to coordinate. We finally decided on a weekday night, with around 2.5 hours to play around with. I made the almond paste from scratch (it's alot cheaper this way), as well as the hazelnut dacquoise and chocolate almond sponge layers beforehand, while the girls made the hazelnut praline feuilletine, milk chocolate mousse and orange mousse layers within 2 hours...amazing! As a result, we completed the most complicated entremet I've ever done...almost like a milestone!

Tonight, we will be celebrating Christa's (very belated) birthday. Lacking ideas, I stuck a Happy Birthday tag onto the cake so that it looks like a birthday cake! I seriously need to go for some cake decorating lessons before all my cakes start to look the same! I also trimmed the cake to a smaller 6-inch size as there's only going to be 3 of us at the cosy celebration. I cut the rest into slices and topped them with a shard of hazelnut praline each :).

If you noticed, I actually made the orange mousse thicker, 1.5 times the amount in the written recipe, for more citrus oomph. The entremet ended up really tall, which my mum wasted no time in pointing out =.=". I can't even cheat a little with my mum watching us so closely...roar. After tasting it, I find it really good! The different textures and flavours melded well together, much tastier than a recent cake I purchased of the same flavour combination.

Can't wait for tonight! We're going to this quaint cafe called The Garden Slug :). I hope the girls will like this too...excited!