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Chocolate Cake

I recently acquired a copy of The Guittard Cookbook which I have greatly enjoyed. The book was written by the Guittard family, chocolatiers in San Francisco since shortly after the Gold Rush. (Has any other historical event attracted so many chocolatiers?) The recipes are delicious and inventive. The book production is also of outstanding quality.

This is their Grandma's Chocolate Cake: dense chocolate cake, chocolate ganache filling, white chocolate buttercream icing. (I actually used Rose Levy Berenbaum's recipe for the icing.) Wow, what a cake! Given the intensity of the semi-sweet ganache and the cake, I expected this to be a little more intense, but the entire effect is very subtle. The white chocolate buttercream is very rich but in a very subtle way. All the elements work together perfectly.

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