Last Sunday, with some members of my running club, we celebrated Bob's & my birthday. Bob is the Founder/Captain of the club. I turned 31 and he turned 67. So it is always an honor for me to celebrate my birthday with him. For this reason I wanted to make a very good impression with a nice cake.
So I started to think of a design 3 weeks before and made lots of drawing each time I had some spare time. I wanted to have a strong Chocolate flavor combined with a nutty touch. Also I wanted to play with the textures as much as possible, having some crunchiness, softness, melting sensation. I have always loved the powerful duet of chocolate and hazelnut, a very masculine taste, but they are so strong together that I thought I could bring a note of sourness, a hint of femininity. The passion fruit and vanilla sounded like the ideal duet. In the form of a very light mousse with no added sugar, it would bring the perfect contrast.
After hours of drawing, I finally came up with this!
As we were supposed to celebrate with my running club mates, after a 10k road race along Arakawa river (north side of Tokyo) in the premature brutal heat of pre-summer (30 deg). The cake needed to be big enough to satisfy 17 starving runners !
This was the last slice, the cake disappeared in less than 10 minutes :-) (98 is the sum of our age)